Why not just buy it then? It reminds me of Valve’s treatment of Black Mesa, which made the community love the company even more. It’d be hilariously easy for Blizzard to spend some money on the thing and just buy the devs out, fans love you for it and it builds good will with a fanbase. Corporations can’t see past the legal aspect of things I guess.
Valve is run by one guy (so far as I know) and he's only accountable to himself. Since he's got pretty much everything he wants from the arrangement, he has no problem with spending money on what most companies would consider cost centers and turning them into something bigger.
Activision Blizzard is run as a publicly-traded company. 86% of it is held by institutional investors [0] who are never satisfied. Most are managing portfolios of assets which are, in turn, often backing retirement accounts held by individuals. There is no ceiling because of factors like inflation, "executive incentives" that the board proposes, and the ever-increasing demands of retirees. If they can get another nickel out of the business, they'll absolutely go for it.
So really, it's about the mindset of the people making the decisions.
That article on Investopedia is from 2021, before the Microsoft acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is no longer a publicly-traded company and instead a subsidiary of Microsoft. Whatever Microsoft wants under this arrangement is what they'll get from now on.
Though the ownership of most large publicly traded companies more-or-less follows the same pattern. You have:
* the people who got in on the ground floor (typically executives) who are given stock options as their compensation, who have a plurality of the shares. Maybe majority holders, maybe not.
* institutional investors who typically use shares to back retirement accounts, whether they be acting for individuals or larger clients like pension funds
Because they're arrogant, and have critical stakeholders. The fact that someone else took their assets and made a better game runs counter to the story that they're the best in the business.
Arrogant yes but don't forget greedy. Call of Duty is absolutely destroyed brand. Unplayable solely by ridiculous amount of battle passes and stupid fantasy skins.
Also don't forget that around a decade ago they also acquired King, the makers of Candy Crush Saga. They've been all-in on the "get players to pay for extra stuff" for a while now
HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake. Team Fortress Classic was based on a quake mod. Counterstrike was a HL mod they bought out. Portal was a student game they bought. Dota 2 was based on a WC3 map. Left 4 Dead was a mod made by Turtle Rock while working on CS:CZ (so, yet again a mod, although a mod based on their own engine this time and build in house). Underlords was based on a Dota 2 mod.
Deadlock is original, but based on characters and lore from the game they made from the WC3 map.
Deadlock and L4D are arguably the only true original creations.
Valve knows their bread is buttered by outside creation using tools and platforms they can provide and then fold in if it catches their attention.
> HL's engine GoldDrc was originally a mod for Quake.
GoldSrc is based on Quake 1 code with valves own modifications and a little Quake 2 added in, if I remember correctly. I wouldn’t call that a “mod”, they bought a commercial license for the engine and made a game with it.
You’re trying to use this to say that valve are unoriginal? I really don’t think that’s a criticism you can lob at the half life series.
GoldSrc is a continuation of Q1 engine but it's development is of separate lineage even from Q2 and it was a fully licensed agreement. Setting and ideas are all original for HL.
TFC is a re-imaging of TF from Q1 but it's codebase is separate from Q1 TF.
TF2 is a sequel developed in-house.
HL2 is a series of sequels developed in-house.
EDIT: Portal has the same core developers and the same game mechanics, but both the setting and script are Valve original.
Sure, Steam pivoted their path of a game developer studio to a game publishing house but that's doesn't mean they never did anything themselves.
I feel like every large public corporation inevitably turns into a rent seeking parasite. How do we build a system that has more calves and fewer blizzards? How do we incentivize that?
You gotta give capitalist first principles and ideals and policies the boot. When you can use money to buy anything and earn money without practical limits, gaining access to more and more capital at any and all costs, even at the cost of everybody else's life and freedom and rights, is the natural result.
Valve is very much a capitalist company though. Gabe Newell is a billionaire, he owns six yachts, and Valve practically invented the concept of the loot box. So if the question is "how do we get more Valves and fewer Blizzards," it doesn't seem clear to me how giving capitalism the boot helps.
It can be done if the culture is deeply deeply rooted in long tenured employees. I think of Apple, while an imperfect example, I feel like Steve jobs would be happy with where they are right now culturally. Obviously, he doesn’t deserve all the credit having had a large team of people but he largely drove a strong intentional culture as a leader and he carefully selected and fostered other leaders who would carry it forward.
Honestly I'm not sure, but I suspect it's because for Gabe, Valve is his iterated prisoners dilemma
He's got to take care of it or no more yachts
Though part of it just might be helpful knows and respects hit market, at least well enough to understand them, I vaguely recall he left Microsoft to start a game company after seeing how much people fell head over heels with games and thinking there was value there
And don't forget open source games. Before going for the indies, I'd suggest downloading and winning all the available major open source roguelikes. And after that, start creating mods/patches for those. Once you're done with that - and not too old of age - maybe think about spending some money on games again.
I am ok with billionaires that provide some multiple of billions of dollars worth of value to society. I use steam all the time, it's pretty consumer friendly, and it gives me a lot of relaxation. I'm good with him having a lot of money.
DOTA is an interesting reference here because it also was originally a modification of a Blizzard game. Maybe Valve should hire the TurtleWoW people to make a new MMO for them (maybe called TurtleWhoa"?)
In blizzards case, mmo's are a huge time sink and not many have people have time to commit to multiple titles. Acquiring a competitior and maintaining it would see subscribers leave their main offering (which has been optimised for microtransactions and engagement) and splitting the player base.
They used that argument for years to avoid doing WoW Classic, and then it was wildly successful when they finally did. Seems to me like the inability to consider how they could work this into their ecosystem is yet another indicator of how far they've fallen since the golden era.
They still hate Classic and can't stand that players prefer it, because it is less profitable per user. This is why they've done almost nothing with Classic+ despite players clamoring for it very loudly.
I really think it is ego. Blizzard is the king of MMO makers, they can’t do anything wrong in their own eyes. They have the data that shows that people want to just play alone and care about the story above everything while completely refusing to acknowledge that the game never was about either of those and that game play style only rose up later as the MMO part got lost.
If Blizzard was to hire the turtle team and add all their content into a real classic plus experience that would be admitting that Blizzard is incapable of doing that faithfully and if it got popular then that raises even more questions about Blizzard and their C suites decisions
Also with Valve. Pretty much everyone who was going to buy the game already had it. So allowing something new really didn't impact their revenue in any significant way. With subscription games this is really not true.
People played Turtle because it was a superior experience to the paid official classic offering. It had properly balanced classes, tons of new, high-quality content, real support staff instead of bots with sub-5 minute wait time for service, policing bots properly instead of ignoring them. Blizzard could offer this quality of service but chooses not to.
