Author | Hu Shu Editor| Luo Lijuan
Blizzard has today, it seems that in the "farce" of the carnival in 2018, there are signs.
On that day, Blizzard's founder, Mike Morhaime, announced that he would step down as CEO.
Players also didn't wait for the long-awaited Diablo 4 or Blizzard's new online game after the launch of Overwatch in 2016. Just waiting for a Blizzard joint development, with a NetEase logo of the mobile game - "Diablo: Immortal".
For Blizzard, players once believed that "Blizzard's production must be a boutique", so they were willing to wait for that boutique for years. But for players who fall in love with Blizzard because of online games, they can't accept Blizzard's "downgrade" to mobile games.
The spokesperson at the time asked incomprehensibly: "Don't you have a mobile phone?" ”
One player stood up angrily: "Is this a season-ending April Fool's Joke?" ”
A player questions Blizzard at a carnival
And this new mobile game, but also quickly harvested a large number of points on Youtube "stepping". What players can't accept is not only Blizzard's "depravity", but also the company's arrogance towards the game and fans.
As the creator of classic games such as the Warcraft series, StarCraft, and Diablo, Blizzard's position in the gaming industry is self-evident. But under the wrapping of capital, Blizzard, who once spent 7 years to create high-quality games and commemorate cancer players in the form of game NPCs, is gradually stagnating in creativity. After 2016, Blizzard has not launched a new tour except to update the profile cards of older games.
At the same time as the ideas stagnated, the game designers, project leaders, and even the original founders of the original Blizzard team were leaving.
For Blizzard, the disaster is also the continued fermentation of the "sexual harassment" scandal that began in the second half of 2021. Over the past year, Blizzard's stock price has fallen 23 percent.
"There is no eternity in kingship, child", after the carnival "farce", a fan used this classic line from "Lich King Nu" to satirize Blizzard.
Today, Blizzard is selling out microsoft for $68.7 billion. For this merger, those players who still have expectations for Blizzard are also looking forward to the combination of strong and powerful, Blizzard can return to glory.
But will it really get the way?
01 Mergers and acquisitions, Blizzard can not get rid of the "fate"
Since its birth, Blizzard has turned the other side in the fate of being "acquired" and "acquired". Among them, I have to mention the story of Activision, which began in 1991.
This year, 3 graduates together founded a game company named Silicon & Synapse, namely: Silicon and Neural Bonds. It wasn't really a good name, and it was later renamed Blizzard, which translates to "Blizzard Entertainment."
It was also in this year that Bobby Kotick, who had been in the game circle for several years, and his friends completed the acquisition of a 25% stake in Medianic. It was the world's first third-party game publisher, and after the acquisition was completed, Kotic succeeded as CEO of Medianic.
For the next dozen years, Blizzard and Activision were two disjoint parallel lines in the gaming industry.
As a game production company, Blizzard started its journey in the field of online games with the launch of the online game "Warcraft" launched on Christmas 1994. Then acquired the "Vulture" studio, the studio's RPG game "Diablo" has also become another big IP under Blizzard after "Warcraft", "Vulture" has since been renamed "Northern Blizzard".
At the same time as the launch of Diablo, Another new game from Blizzard, StarCraft, is also creating another "myth". Its emergence kicked off the prelude to e-sports, and South Korea established a complete career system with StarCraft as early as possible, and this system has been used in various e-sports competitions until now.
Perhaps it was World of Warcraft that propelled Blizzard to the top. While Blizzard has easily generated millions of sales in previous games, the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) has 5 million paying users a year after its release and more than 10 million three years later. In terms of performance reputation, "World of Warcraft" also became the ceiling of the online game industry at that time with absolute technical advantages and design advantages.
Blizzard's production is not much, but every time it is produced, it is redefining the game. This is also the reason why players once believed that "Blizzard's production must be a boutique".
When Blizzard began to gallop the global game market, Kotic, who had just entered Medianic, was still struggling to turn the tables, and has carried out large-scale restructuring, changed its name to Activision, moved the company's address, launched bankruptcy protection procedures and so on. It was finally in 1997 that the turnaround began.
Kotic is indeed a businessman with a good eye, and in the early days of the development of the game industry, he bet on "game publishing". Over the next decade, Activision acquired 25 game studios and launched classics such as Call of Duty and Guitar Hero.
In 2006, Kotic set his sights on World of Warcraft and approached Blizzard's parent company, Vivendi, to express his desire to get the world of Warcraft distribution rights.
It's a fact that Blizzard was never an independent gaming company. Blizzard was acquired by Davidson & Associates as early as 1993, but the premise of the acquisition was to give Blizzard complete autonomy. It was also during this period that Blizzard made good works such as "Warcraft" and "StarCraft".
But then Davidson & Associates was acquired by the French game company Vivendi, and Blizzard's control also fell into Vivendi's hands.
During this period, Vivendi repeatedly interfered in Blizzard's game development, resulting in many conflicts between Blizzard and Vivendi. A famous event is that the four core members of the Diablo series producer "Northern Blizzard" have resigned to blackmail Vivendi not to interfere in specific game development. But in the end, it did not succeed, and after the four people left, the "Northern Blizzard" was officially dissolved in 2005.
In 2007, Activision formally merged with Vivendi and formed Activision Blizzard, with Kotic as CEO and president of the new company. Since Vivendi's reputation is not good, many people hope that Kotic can save Blizzard from "water and fire".
Kotic did just that, and in 2013, Activision Blizzard, which had accumulated enough money, officially redeemed itself from Vivendi for $5.83 billion and became an independent game company.
After completing the equity transfer, Activision Blizzard first launched the popular card game "Hearthstone" in 2014, and then made "Overwatch" two years later, subverting the traditional FPS gameplay, and everything seems to be developing in a good direction.
02 6 years after the fall of "kingship"
But the honeymoon period will eventually pass, and activision, which emphasizes commercial operations, and Blizzard, which is heavily crafted, finally begins to react in rejection.
Blizzard, which insists on "slow work and small work", in the past, often spent several years, regardless of cost and return, to develop a high-quality game.
Take the sci-fi game Titan, for example, which was launched in 2007 with a development team of more than 100 people, and was called "our next-generation MMO" by Blizzard, "the most ambitious thing you can imagine", and also seen as a game that has the potential to take over World of Warcraft.
But in 2014, Mike Mohan announced that the project had been canceled because in order to defend the title of creator of the Blizzard boutique game, Titan could not achieve the original vision in terms of funds, manpower and timing.
The Titans set in the early years
In the womb, how much money Blizzard paid for Titan is unknown. However, the outside world believes that the development of "Titan" has dragged down Blizzard's profitability in those years to a certain extent.
In the Activision Blizzard era led by Kotick, whether in terms of corporate earnings or market value, Kotic will not allow Blizzard to fail Titan again.
And in the absence of "meticulously crafted" heavy investment, Blizzard has not been able to produce a game that can match World of Warcraft. Whether it is "Hearthstone" or "Overwatch", it is not a "baton taker", although they once exploded in the online game market, but whether it is player reputation or game ratings, there is a clear downward trend.
What disappoints players even more is that after Overwatch, Blizzard has not launched a new online game for six years, and the only big move is to constantly update the Expansion Pack of World of Warcraft and remake its own classic IP. Six years, for the fast-changing game industry, it's been too long.
It is also in these 6 years that the era of mobile games has come. Through the development and operation of rival games, Tencent, NetEase and other game companies have quickly become the highest-yielding game companies in the world.
The continuous consumption attributes of mobile games also make online game and console game companies that do "one-time trading" very envious. As a businessman, Kotic was clearly reluctant to give up this profit.
So there was that dramatic scene at the 2018 Blizzard Carnival.
Players can't accept Blizzard as a "mobile game", believing that it has lost the reverence for the game and the care for the user. And Activision Blizzard, who wants to make money through mobile games, seems to have failed to figure out the gameplay of mobile games so far, and the mobile game adapted from the IP of "Diablo" has not set off a wave of what Activision Blizzard wants.
At present, Activision Blizzard's best-selling mobile game actually comes from the "Candy Crush Legend" developed by its acquired subsidiary KING.
According to Activision Blizzard's 2021 fiscal year semi-annual report, Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment and King contributed $1.68 billion, $870 million and $1.24 billion, respectively. Compared with 2020, Activision and King's revenue have increased, Blizzard has declined, and in 2020 and 2021, it is the lowest revenue of the company.
It's hard to say whether there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the Activision team and the Blizzard team, but it is an obvious fact that after Activision Blizzard completed the merger, Kotic placed Activision employees in Blizzard's business line.
After the departure of Blizzard co-founder Mike Mohan in 2019, Activision Blizzard laid off 8% of its workforce, most of which came from Blizzard.
In 2021, the departure of Blizzard's core personnel will be more frequent.
David King, an important participant in projects such as StarCraft 2, Diablo 4, and World of Warcraft, and Jeff Kaplan, chief designer of Overwatch, have left their posts. In August, Blizzard Entertainment's vice president and chief legal counsel also announced their departure.
To make matters worse, throughout the second half of 2021, Blizzard was embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal.
The DFEH (California Department of Fair Employment and Housing) sued Blizzard for serious gender discrimination, noting that there is a "fraternity culture" within Blizzard that discriminates against female employees in terms of employment rules. More serious prosecutions of widespread sexual harassment by corporate executives directly accuse Blizzard of a large number of disrespectful behaviors within Blizzard toward female employees.
Over the past year, Activision Blizzard shares fell 23% due to performance and the impact of the event. These disputes have also further affected the development of new products, with the Blizzard Carnival scheduled for 2022 being cancelled and Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 being significantly postponed.
Kotick said he felt overwhelmed against powerful competitors such as Tencent, NetEase, Facebook, Sony and others. In order to compete with competitors, merging into Microsoft is a good choice.
03 Will "Microsoft Blizzard" still be that Blizzard?
For Blizzard, the $68.7 billion acquisition could be a decent end.
This is not only the largest acquisition ever made by the game industry, but also a move that can affect the game market landscape.
For Microsoft, after the deal is completed, it will become the world's third-largest game company in terms of operating income after Tencent and Sony. At the same time, you will also get franchises for many game products including Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Call of Duty and many others.
"Upon completion of the acquisition, we will offer a large number of Activision Blizzard-produced games in XGP and PC Game Pass, including new titles and games from the Activision Blizzard Game Library." Microsoft Games CEO Phil Spencer said that this will also enhance the product portfolio of Microsoft Xbox Game Pass (hereinafter referred to as XGP).
After the acquisition was announced, it once affected the stock price of Microsoft's biggest competitor Sony, which also showed that the capital market was optimistic about the acquisition.
Not only that, Blizzard's incorporation into Microsoft also wore a "meta-universe" hat.
In a previous conference call, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said, "Together with Activision Blizzard, we can accelerate the integration of the digital world and the physical world, so that the metaverse can land as soon as possible." ”
He argues that in games the metacosm is a collection of communities and virtual identities. It is based on the game IP and is accessible across platforms. He also emphasized the acquisition of Activision Blizzard to combine games, new technologies, communities and business models to promote the development of the meta-universe.
Under the combination of "Microsoft + Blizzard", Microsoft may be able to take the lead in landing the metaverse.
For Blizzard, the merger with the rich Microsoft, those new game products that have been late for a long time, may be able to quickly go public under the impetus of funds. Microsoft also hopes to have more new products released on its own platform.
Players are also looking forward to the late Titans being restarted, or another Blizzard game that can take over the "World of Warcraft" game.
But that's just the best thing to expect. It is difficult to say how much support Microsoft will have for Blizzard in terms of funds in the subsequent operation, after all, the world of capital is difficult to tolerate the "fine craftsmanship" of slow motion.
By now, Blizzard's former founders, creative teams, excellent designers, and so on have left.
In 2020, Mike Mohan announced that he had founded a brand new game company, Dreamhaven, and that he had already set up two game studios. Many of the employees are also the core of Blizzard's past, such as the chief developer of StarCraft 2 and Hearthstone, the chief designer of StarCraft 2, heroes of the storm and the creative director of the former Hearthstone.
This group of veterans, in the name of "Dream", is still chasing the ideal game, and many players also hope to find the "old Blizzard" in Dreamhaven.
And what the future holds for Blizzard is something Microsoft should worry about.