LMG's sudden yet predictable downfall

Back in October, I posted an open letter to Linus Sebastian, at that time CEO of Linus Media Group, and currently their Chief Vision Officer (?), in which I laid out what I perceived as critical, and potentially crippling, flaws with his entire leadership style.

The focus of controversy in that moment was his then-recent dispute with a sponsor named Ōura, a company about which neither he nor any of his team had bothered to learn much of anything, resulting in a video sponsored by Ōura in which Linus repeatedly mispronounced the company's name. At the time, he seemed to regard their pulling of their LMG sponsorship as some sort of personal sleight, essentially blaming Ōura for the fact that his fuckup had cost LMG Ōura's business.

Oof.

There was a time when this was Blizzard's most heavily ratioed YouTube video:

But time is a relentless bitch, and a new contender for Blizzard's worst ratio has now emerged:

Ouch.

Diablo 2.0

 

Just as a quick reminder, this game received glowing critical reviews when it launched just over two months ago, and still had a 4.7 user score as of June 10th. I believe the technical term for this is a "fiasco."

To be clear, the game has not changed significantly in the intervening time. The dev team have tweaked a few things, but have not had enough bandwidth to make any significant changes, given their development-by-committee company culture. The only thing that's happened is that gamers have increasingly soured on the game as they've spent more time with it.

So, we have to ask the question: Is Diablo IV dead?