Watching Blizzcon 2018 this year was exceptionally painful. In years past, I felt excitement in awaiting the new content. This year’s opening ceremony hurt to the point where you could feel a certain lament. Pretty much I just wanted to hear the announcements but the tone from Morhaime and the lack of general mentions of content was a preview to sheer disappointment. But there’s a bigger thing that is underlying what we’re seeing: the actual death of Blizzard.
When I say the death of Blizzard, I don’t mean financially but the spirit of what made the company great in the past. Many of the original people have left and it’s a telling story when the CEO too decides to call it quits. From what I’ve heard, Morhaime felt that Blizzard no longer was the company he once ran and that Activision had too much control. Seeing Blizzcon 2018’s opening ceremony clearly demonstrated a great deal of commercialism stink emanating from the bowels of Activision.
I think what sealed the deal for me was seeing the cereal. While Lego and Blizzard make a good, natural and long overdue partnership, seeing the nonstop blatant commercialism to me makes the company depart away from the core, which is gaming, to the agendas for Activision.
Throughout the ceremony, I was just forced to mute the stream because I could hardly tolerate the garbage spewing out. It was pretty heartbreaking and the crowd too seemed to detect something being off with their less than usual enthusiasm towards every announcement.
It felt like the drive to just broaden markets by doing things like moving D3 into the Switch or more heroes/skins microtransaction crap just is disgusting to me. The focus on esports and cosplay are not gaming to me. It’s all just appealing to a mass market rather than focusing on making good games with good features.
Either way, it’s time to move on. Well, I have at least.