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PC Games (Games) Real Time Strategy (Games) Entertainment Games

Blizzard's Uncertain Future Probed 45

Posted by simoniker from the sold-to-someone-at-some-point dept.
Thanks to the Seattle Times for their story discussing the 'cloud of uncertainty' over Blizzard's future, following the stalled sale of Vivendi Universal's games division. Blizzard's president Mike Morhaime says that "...we don't even know if we're part of the assets being sold. We're used to having more control over our destiny, and now we're just waiting", echoing the sentiments of four key Blizzard staff who took things further by quitting the famed developer a couple of months back. But since Blizzard's "...three franchises - 96 percent of whose fans are male - have sold more than 34 million copies worldwide", there's a great deal to be gained if the right buyer can be lined up swiftly enough.
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Blizzard's Uncertain Future Probed More

Blizzard's Uncertain Future Probed

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  • Sierra (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheViciousOverWind ( 649139 ) <martin@siteloom.dk> on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @07:51AM (#6857612) Homepage
    Let's hope they don't wind up the way Sierra [sierra.com] did (Once a company with quality releases, now a crappy-publisher-house).

    What happened to them AFAIK was pretty much the same. - Key developers (Al Lowe [allowe.com], Roberta Williams [backspin.org], etc.) from Sierra left the company (or put on crappy games).

    The death of Sierra as a game-developer pretty much meant the end of adventure games as a mainstream-genre... It's hard to think of the same happening to the RTS (Real Time Strategy) genre, but then again if someone told me X years ago, that the adventuregames genre would be dead now, I would have laughed.

    • Re:Sierra (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CptChipJew ( 301983 ) * <michaelmiller@gmail . c om> on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @07:56AM (#6857624) Journal
      Well, I do believe Sierra publishes Half Life, and that is quite the best seller.

      But I agree, not having amazing releases like Liesure Suit Larry really is a shame.

      • Re:Sierra (Score:5, Insightful)

        by PainKilleR-CE ( 597083 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @08:14AM (#6857719)
        but note that he said Sierra as a developer.

        Valve is the developer of Half-Life, and they have very much been working on methods for self-publishing their titles (ie Steam).

        Furthermore, whenever Sierra has had full control over a development house, they've had a nasty tendency to run it into the ground shortly after a major release, or even push it into that release before it was ready and then run the studio into the ground. Luckily, Sierra has no control over Valve except to delay release of retail packages and patches when they fail QA.
    • They had a completed version of Half-Life for the Dreamcast - and did not release it. And a reportedly almost completed version of Half-Life for MacOS - and did not release it. I mean, frankly, if you are not going to release, don't waste money developing!

      • Re:Sierra is just stupid (Score:4, Insightful)

        by PainKilleR-CE ( 597083 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @08:20AM (#6857769)
        Sierra had no choice in either of those releases. Valve canned the Mac port because they said it wouldn't interoperate with the PC version online.

        Why they canned the DreamCast version I don't know, but the storyline was released as Blue Shift, iirc.

        Sierra's never had any control over Valve except in the QA process for titles Sierra is contracted to publish. In other words, Sierra can force Valve to fix bugs before releasing a title to retail or releasing a patch, but they can't force them to ship a title. Otherwise, we would've had Half-Life at least a year earlier and TF2 a long time ago.
        • Valve canned the Mac port because they said it wouldn't interoperate with the PC version online.

          Not to point out the obvious, but maybe they should reverse the byte order next time they share network data between PCs and Macs :)
          • I didn't say they made any sense, just said that's what they said ;p

            The only people that really know are Valve and the company that was porting it to the Mac. Either way, Sierra only knows what Valve told them, more than likely.
            • There was enormous amount of discussion about this in Mac forums and newsgroups at the time; as far as it's possible to make out, the Mac port was complete and it did network to the PC version.

              However, at the time a lot of patches were being released for the PC version, many of which broke networking compatability with each other. Naturally that means they would also break compatability with the Mac version until a patch was released for that too, but neither Valve nor Sierra wanted to take on the responsi
      • But remember that in Software Development, just because it is 95% complete, doesn't mean there is only 5% of the work left to complete...
    • There were other aspects to Sierras Death. While they made some fantastic Dos games (Kings Quest 1-4, LLS, Quest For Glory, Space Quest), their later titles didn't convert well to the point and click interface, Lucasarts and their SCUMM interface (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Indiania Jones, etc) Blew Sierras method out of the water... I think that in this case Sierras 'inovation' just plain went in the wrong direction (what was up with KQ7?!?)
    • What happened with Sierra was very sad. Too bad Tsunami didn't work out, the company with the former Sierra employees (they made Blue Force, great game, Police Quest knockoff). Maybe someday we'll get a new Space Quest, King's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry.
  • direct from yahoo... hopefully, NBC will leave Blizzard the heck alone, and they can continue to pump out quality games.

    http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid= 56 4&ncid=564&e=3&u=/nm/20030902/ts_nm/media_vivendi_ dc_21

    • Re:Vivendi (Blizzards parent co.) Merges With NBC (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      From GFraizer, web designer over at Battle.net
      "Blizzard is a part of Vivendi Universal Games which is a different group. Unless you see something that specifically mentions them, it doesn't really apply to Blizzard."

      http://www.battle.net/forums/war3/thread.aspx?FN =w ar3x-general&T=247292&P=1&ReplyCount=18#post247292
    • direct from yahoo... hopefully, NBC will leave Blizzard the heck alone, and they can continue to pump out quality games.


      You said that like you mean it...when did Blizzard put out 'quality games'?

  • Obligitory Penny-Arcade link (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rayonic ( 462789 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @09:48AM (#6858301) Homepage Journal
    "That would be awesome! [penny-arcade.com]" (art by Tycho)

  • Doesn't hurt my feelings if they disappear. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @10:30AM (#6858663) Homepage Journal
    I used to be a big Blizzard fan. I could play StarCraft and Diablo all day with the rest of them. Then one of my buddies told me about a nifty program he ran on his server called BNETd, developed by someone right here in Houston. Blizzard made no comments on the program officially, they just let it go for a couple of years. It was really cool because it was a server daemon that ran on Linux that emulated a Battle.net server. We liked it and it was good.

    Then Blizzard gets their panties bunched in a knot because someone starts making a pretty cool UT mod with StarCraft characters. They put the smack down on them, and oh while we're at it we'll put the smack down on BNETd to.

    To top it off, I had by that time pretty much stopped playing Blizzard games. You see, during the time period I migrated slowly over to Linux until finally I no longer wasted drive space on a Windows partition. I could make Blizzard games run with Wine, but it was never quite like it should be. Heck, all my other favorite games like UT, Descent, Quake 3, later on UT2K3 and quite a few others I just wont bother ratteling off ran great and NATIVELY on Linux. Blizzard was the only game publisher I gave a shit about that fully shunned Linux in all ways. I simply placed them on the not give a shit about list. They'll stay there until they start supporting Linux and offer an apology to the maker of BNETd. Giving him a job or something would make a great apology in my eyes, but just admiting they should have said something earlier or not laid the smack down so hard out of the blue would be enough for me.

    When Blizzards gone I'll miss them about as much as I'll as miss Britney Spears when she runs out of steam, which will be about the same amount as I've missed N'Sync. None.

    Die Blizzard. You haven't done what you need as a game company to keep an audiance. Sometimes kickass games isn't enough. Lay down your 2x4, your OS blinders, and your attitude and you'll be right next to Atari/Infogrames in my book again.
    • In other words, you're mad at Blizzard for not devoting tons of resources to porting their games to your OS of choice, and also for defending their intellectual property rights. When they throw away their common sense, then maybe you'll consider buying games from them again?

      I hope you're not holding your breath.

      -etone-
      • For defending their intellectual property rights? A *protocol* is their intellectual property (bnetd)? The Craft suffix is their intellectual property too (FreeCraft)?

        In neither of those cases did they really have a leg to stand on. But the small developer communities had no income from their product and therefore couldn't justify spending much money to defend it, much less the amount that would be required to take on Blizzard/Vivendi Universal. So they folded, and Blizzard wins.

        Blizzard may have been de
      • First of all, I'm not necessarily mad at them for not porting to my OS of choice. That caused me to go from fan to near indifferent. Just like many other software companies have done from my perspective. I'm not mad at the other companies. If they don't port I wont pay them any attention. If enough people do the same they'll eaither port or suffer.

        I'm not mad at them for defending their IP rights. It's theirs and they can defend them. What caused me to get mad at them was the fact they turned a blin
      • That was really just the icing on the cake...Blizzard has always been at the bottom of my list. Warcraft was fun, I never bought it playing it a friends, Warcraft 2 was more of the same...just looked better.
        Starcraft, more of the same with a different story and look (Not to mention the story sucked more then a Mark Hamilton movie in the last 15 years).

        Once Blizzard started pushing their obese, bloated weight around and suing movie studios for naming a movie about a Mexican drug lord "Diablo" things start
      • Who the hell modded that insightful? Inciteful is more like it. Hope I see this in M2.
  • Can someone make a corporation and sell the shares on ebay with the exception that the transaction is only complete when there is enough money to buy Vivendi?

    Dont look at me my ebay rating isn't THAT good to be trusted with 800 mil...

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