I vividly remember when that last one happened, of course, since the news dropped during the 2.0 PTR, and was the talk of the D3 official forums when the news broke. I even commented on it, on those same forums, at the time:
It's very rare for people to give you a second chance to make a first impression. It's even more rare for them to give you a third. Blizzard, you need to stop expecting that customers will keep paying for whatever crap you choose to dole out. Happy, engaged players will tolerate a lot from you, but that's not what you have right now in D3, where something like 90% of your paying customers have already quit once.That was in 2013. The situation for Diablo fans has not significantly improved since then; the discontent of Diablo fans has deep, deep roots.
This is the single thing that has been most apparent in coverage of Blizzard's BlizzCon faceplant. People who know Diablo, and who have remained in touch with the community, correctly identified the Diablo Immortal debacle for what it was; not over-entitled misogynistic man-babies raging because Blizzard had dared to release a game that wasn't for "real" gamers, and that might even be played by *gasp* girls, but rather the straw the broke the camel's back. Diablo Immortal wasn't some isolated occurrence; it was merely the latest in a long line of such utterly tone-deaf and arrogant assholery, and Diablo fans have finally decided that this is a level of bullshit they simply can't forgive.
By contrast, people who have failed to stay in touch with the pulse of the Diablo fanbase, or who were never part of that community to begin with, have been too busy scolding Diablo fans for daring to have feelings about their fandom, and about the neglect/contempt with which Blizzard has been treating them for years, to pay anything more than lip-service to the idea that their emotions might well be genuine and not performative -- that this really might be a revolution, rather than a temper tantrum.
Here's the thing, games media: the people inside the Diablo fan community don't give a shit about your outsider snark and blatantly pro-Blizzard bias. They've finally just had enough, and they don't care if saying so hurts the feelings of Blizzard's admittedly hard-working devs.
This is why Red Shirt Guy has become a hero to the Diablo fan base. No, what he did wasn't exactly Emily Post, but when someone has spent years disregarding your every opinion, doing exactly what they damn well please while basically daring you to say anything at all about it... well, it's all well and good to be nice, but at some point, there comes a time to not be nice anymore. And, really, RSG was just saying what I guarantee you every single person in that room was thinking: "Are you fucking kidding me, Blizzard?" It may not have been nice to call out the Diablo devs to their face at their own convention, but it absolutely was necessary.
You know who else agrees? Diablo II's former producer, Mark Kern, who took to Twitter to say what Diablo fans have been saying for years: that Blizzard no longer understand gamers, period. As reported by WCCFTech:
Mark Kern, former Diablo II Producer as well as Team Lead on World of Warcraft before leaving the company, shared his opinion on the Diablo Immortal backlash that a large portion of the fanbase expressed after the reveal at BlizzCon 2018.
In a lengthy Twitter thread, he went on to say that Blizzard seems unable to understand gamers anymore. They should have anticipated the backlash and waited to reveal Diablo Immortal until a proper PC Diablo game could be showcased [...]
"Since I was Producer on Diablo 2, a lot of people have been asking for my thoughts on the whole “Diablo Immortal” fiasco. I hate to say it, but what you are seeing is Blizzard not understanding gamers anymore.
"There is nothing wrong with having a mobile version of Diablo. In fact, I would have wanted one as an option. But the way it was hinted at, and presented, and the failure of Blizzard management to predict the backlash caught me by surprise. Blizzard used to be really gamer driven.
"Blizzard coyly played up the Diablo hype, which is a good move, but failed to anticipate that their PC based audience was going to expect…well…a PC based announcement. And that following all that hype up with a *different* product is a huge bait-n-switch feeling moment.
"Blizzard has said now, that they are working on multiple Diablo projects. They really should have dropped a teaser for their PC based project alongside their mobile announcement if that’s the case.
"Blizzard never used to have to ask, because it was made up of hardcore gamers from top to bottom. We used to say we were our own harshest audience for our games. I would have had a line of devs outside my door telling me this was a bad move.
"The fact that Blizzard was A) unprepared for this reaction and B) had no plans to mitigate it even knowing some of it was coming, is a great disappointment to me. It smacks of “Ya well, suck it down” (sorry J. Romero, wasn’t your fault).
"This isn’t a toxic gamer issue, it’s not an entitlement issue. It’s just bad PR handling and …a bad culture on the part of Blizzard I’m sad to say. It’s a culture that says “we know better” and fits right in with “you think you do, but you don’t.”
Now, in fairness, some of the pro-Blizzard media, recognizing that the deep hurt and anger of Diablo fans might actually be both genuine and justified, have started to make an effort to understand it. They're still failing, mind you, but they're at least trying now, which is progress of a sort. And Activision-Blizzard's shareholders have finally woken up to the fact that this might matter, too, causing the company's share price to drop sharply. As reported by Bloomberg News:"Maybe you don’t know better, anymore, Blizzard. Maybe you’ve really lost touch with gamers and you are now in some billion dollar a year ivory tower. That needs some reflection on your part. Because that’s out big businesses fail. Remember Nokia? Remember Blockbuster Video?"
Activision Blizzard Inc. shares were hammered as video gamers took to social media to criticize a new mobile game that they say failed to live up to the storied franchise.
The new “Diablo Immortal” mobile offering fell short of some fan expectations for the popular desktop games. Players lashed out on Twitter and in the comments section of the YouTube trailer with the hashtag, #NotMyDiablo. There’s even a petition on change.org to cancel the launch that has over 31,000 supporters. Activision sank as much as 7.2 percent, on track for its lowest close since January.The fact that the very valuable loyalty of Blizzard fans might just have limits seems to have come as a nasty surprise to ATVI shareholders, but it shouldn't have. People have been saying for years that the Activision-Blizzard of today is more Activision than Blizzard; driven by marketing focus groups and corporate strategy, and divorced from the gaming communities that used to be the drivers of everything they did. The Diablo Immortal roll-out provided those people with all the proof they will ever need to prove their point, and people assuming that a game can succeed without its most ardent fans may well be proved very, very wrong. Star Wars Battlefront II faced similar pre-launch backlash, remember, and never did recover; this level of fanbase hostility can absolutely kill a game.
 |
| Empty demo stations, and the total lack of a line-up, are not good signs. |
Blizzard, naturally, is denying everything... which clashes weirdly with their repeated assurances that multiple Diablo properties other than Immortal are in the works, too, an obvious allusion to the D4 announcement that everybody was expecting to see at BlizzCon this year.
GG, Blizzard! That is a job thoroughly done...
No comments:
Post a Comment