Blizzard shifted most of development teams to Mobile game production. Many new Mobile titles incomin

Lobotomist

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Lobotomist

Starts at 2:05

Xarko

Fucking hell.

Sovrath

in fairness he said "many" not "most."

SBFord

The title is hyperbolic. "Many of our best developers" isn't all and it's not an indicative statement that game production has shifted primarily to mobile. They of course want to release mobile games for all of their IPs...it's not like there are that many LOL. It's a demographic that they should explore, but it's not the only one and it sure as shit isn't the primary one.

Gobstopper3D

@SBFord for now...

Gdemami

Sovrath said:

in fairness he said "many" not "most."

Never let reason or facts stand in your way...they are just a nuisance.

JeffSpicoli

Octagon7711

Translation:  "We looked around and have seen others making money hand over fist with mobile gaming, it's the next big thing in the industry!  We want a part of that cash cow!  Go Blizzard!!!"

Wizardry

Well aiming all of a sudden at all in on our current portfolio says it is all about business and not much about planning one by one.

It is like 1 or 2 or the board just told everyone to go all in on mobile.Then it is very likely their team/s have little experiences in the mobile field,so again a business decision more than ...hey let's do something great for mobile.

If Blizzard wanted to make a great mobile title,they wouldn't just rehash their current IP's to sell it on name and not on merit.They would also take the time to announce one title at a time and learn from the mistakes.

Seeing a bug in Hearthtone "Warlock hero upgrade",a VERY important one has been there for 6 months,says Blizzard doesn't care much about fixing or learning from mistakes,they simply release products as fast as possible.Their Beta's are also like many devs FAKE,a simple couple months but not much gets fixed if anything,more like an advertising phase.

Geesh i just look at Hearthstone yet again,they went with a very cheap engine Unity that also to this day plays laggy with every single game i play on Unity.So what are they going to use again Unity because it is a cheap option?Yes i understand it is more about their slack coding team and networking team but still i have NEVER had a smooth running game on Unity.

Wizardry

My hunch is that they do see what is failing inside their games and likely why they decided to partner with NetEase,hoping for a better networking structure a smoother running game.How many high end games does Blizzard publish that forces them to do serious tweaking of the graphics and game?>>>NONE,so they have had it way too easy too long,so if we expect a high end mobile game that doesn't lag...good luck.

Personally i expect a low end game ,nothing like SE and Nexxon bringing out a high end FFXi on mobile but more the same old cheap moba's and HOTS's/Diablo's ARPG's,you knwo easy to make and easy run games that take little effort.

If they announced say Wow for Mobile,now THAT would be interesting news that i would follow but again i would need to see change..promising ideas..etc etc.

Mendel

Blizzard is a company making products to sell.  What is selling currently are mobile games.  Is it really that much of a surprise that they are choosing to chase that money?

News, yes.  Newsworthy, maybe not.

TheScavenger

TheScavenger

Well, now I know why its called Blizzcon

BlizzCON

CON

tawess

Also most (if not all) of Blizzards current IP´s are on auto-pilot as far as cutting edge development goes. So moving some of the prime talent to other projects makes sense. 

After all Blizzard is still a company and thus the end goal is making more money, mobile is getting big... Heck some of the new ipads rivals a basic mid-range laptop and the new pro will rival a high end one (of the specs turns out true) in pretty much everything but graphics. 

Sure we are a bit out from running the latest CoD on a phone but as a platform mobile stand to kill the console market and push the low to mid range computers to the side. 

As such, it is stupid to not invest in mobile as a market, and i´d hate to try and defend staying out to shareholders... "well you see good sir/madam... Nostalgia is keeping med from making this very important move because it impacts my engorged ego." =P 

I do not like it but.. I did not care much for the console market either, i still saw the worth in investing in to that. 

TheScavenger

I guess that explains why BFA feels so lackluster and unfinished and so many are disappointed by it, and why WoW has lost so many subs according to that one leak.

Even if it isn't "most", "many" means they took many people from other development teams to work on mobile gaming instead.

And with how poorly received BFA is, it perfectly explains why it hasn't been well received since they took "many" of the "best" devs from WoW and probably other teams too.

Panther2103

I mean honestly why wouldn't they make mobile games. Hearthstone is a cash cow for them and mobile is the one market that can generate insane profits off of a game that costs almost nothing to make. Not dipping their toes into the mobile market would honestly be stupid at this point. As long as they don't go full Konami and dump all of their normal IP's for gambling and F2P phone games than I don't mind. 

The one thing that is weird to me, if they are moving their developers to mobile games, why is Diablo Infinite being sourced out to NetEase? I'm hoping their own mobile games are actually good, I would gladly play an actual game on the mobile phone, rather than some gatcha auto playing crap. 

SpottyGekko

It's the lure of that massive Chinese mobile gaming market !

Even moderate success there will probably make WoW's entire revenue look like chump change...

cheyane

I don't get these mobile gamers why do they spend so much on these games. I really cannot get into phone games let alone pay  anything for them.

MadFrenchie

tawess said:

Also most (if not all) of Blizzards current IP´s are on auto-pilot as far as cutting edge development goes. So moving some of the prime talent to other projects makes sense. 

After all Blizzard is still a company and thus the end goal is making more money, mobile is getting big... Heck some of the new ipads rivals a basic mid-range laptop and the new pro will rival a high end one (of the specs turns out true) in pretty much everything but graphics. 

Sure we are a bit out from running the latest CoD on a phone but as a platform mobile stand to kill the console market and push the low to mid range computers to the side. 

As such, it is stupid to not invest in mobile as a market, and i´d hate to try and defend staying out to shareholders... "well you see good sir/madam... Nostalgia is keeping med from making this very important move because it impacts my engorged ego." =P 

I do not like it but.. I did not care much for the console market either, i still saw the worth in investing in to that. 

 Not until mobile finds a way to ditch the touchscreen controls.

Tactile response is completely missing, and there's likited screen space because of how both UI and controls have to take up part of it, not to mention the rest of the player's finger/thumb that isn't actually touching the screen..  I don't see that scheme destroying the PC and console markets.

AAAMEOW

Someone made a post why Blizzard isn't making mobile game.  They are I suppose.

I dont' think it matters if Blizzard make mobile or not.  People always think Dev targeting other audience hinders their current audience.  I dont' think it is related.  If there is an audience Blizzard will make PC games.  If it is not profitable, they just stop.  

Albatroes

SBFord said:

The title is hyperbolic. "Many of our best developers" isn't all and it's not an indicative statement that game production has shifted primarily to mobile. They of course want to release mobile games for all of their IPs...it's not like there are that many LOL. It's a demographic that they should explore, but it's not the only one and it sure as shit isn't the primary one.

I dont know Suzie. The fact remains that Diablo Mobile was their only Diablo news at their biggest event of the year (the same event where big announcements have historically came from Blizzcon). Pretending that mobile isn't their primary focus with all of that happening at once just shows how incompetent and out of touch they are otherwise. When you have an annual event, its not like it hits you by surprise....I am getting tired of the YouTube videos though....I wont say heelvsbabyface doesn't have points, but the guy did quit wow for a while to pursue other things then came back now kicks out videos pertaining to anything related to Blizzard (stock one was reaching given this is normally the time of year ALL stock falls). The clickbait is real on YouTube...

Rukushin

Well, I can't wait to see the next company who will fill in the shoes that Blizzard is obviously taking off. There are 3 potential other companies, but we'll see. It will be at least a few years, but Blizz is definitely making it significantly easier for the newer companies who are breaking into the PC MMO market. 

It's partially funny because for almost 10 years the MMO genre has either been asking or looking for who or what was going to take down WoW and Blizzard to knock them out from the #1 spot. I don't know if anyone really believed that Blizz would end up taking themselves out in the end, but here we are folks.

So sad to see the death of two very well fleshed out IPs with such rich lore behind them. There was so much quality money to be made in comics, movies, tv shows, and other media outlets for both IPs, but instead they went for the easy money....who can blame them. The problem is that anything that comes easily doesn't last very long. 

Mobile will be the future of gaming for me when you can plug an Oculus Rift into it like that one scene from one of the .hack anime series. The girl is in the park and she pulls out her phone and simply presses something on the side of her face and vr goggles swoosh across her eyes and she logs in to "The World". Do that and I'm all for mobile...til then no thanks.

hallucigenocide

it's possible i suppose.. but it would be idiotic.
yes we've established they don't quite understand the internet(same as most people).
i doubt that people serious about making awesome games(mobile games will never be that) would commit to just churning out what amounts to crap.

Phry

So Blizzard has moved its best developers to mobile projects, which means anyone hoping for Diablo IV on PC, sorry its just not a priority and if anyone is working on it at all then its probably Blizzards B team if we are really lucky. Whoever is driving Blizzard these days is an Idiot.

Gobstopper3D

Resources are finite for all companies.  If your putting resources into mobile games, then your pulling them from some place else.  To say that it isn't going to effect PC or even console games is putting your head in the sand.

If the quality of the other titles were still top notch, then I would not be so worried, but BFA says otherwise, Starcraft has gotten next to nothing, and I don't have to mention diablo.  I don't play any of their other games so I can't comment on those.

something will have to give and I think we are already seeing what that is...