Activision Blizzard CFO Fired

[MYT]

@MYT Question is, will they get out of that cycle? I'm hoping they do with a good and healthy kick in the ass.

So I did some research on this. A) regarding the cfo - word on the street is that he was going to jump ship soon to be the Netflix cfo. They got rid of him preemptively. Not sure why but a lot of companies do that when they learn you’ve leaving. I call it getting lucky because these men and women have plenty of money but rarely get time off - this gives him some.

Regarding Activision Blizzard performance it’s actually fantastic except for the hiccup the last quarter of 2018, which was due to Diablo not wow.

Their job is to return value to shareholders which means maximizing eps in the long run. Although wow has long defied the general rules applied to video games, it is still a business and investments are made only if they see long term payoff. As someone who started playing at launch I want the investments, but that’s just reality.

I personally think we’re fortunate to have what we have, especially with classic coming. Many of us will be dead before wow completely ceases to exist - and we’re much better off that people who play any other game in that sense. I hate the direction blizzard goes at times but as a business person I understand at least.

 

[Chops]

Although wow has long defied the general rules applied to video games, it is still a business and investments are made only if they see long term payoff. As someone who started playing at launch I want the investments, but that’s just reality.

I personally think we’re fortunate to have what we have, especially with classic coming. Many of us will be dead before wow completely ceases to exist - and we’re much better off that people who play any other game in that sense. I hate the direction blizzard goes at times but as a business person I understand at least.

I think alot of people lose sight of this. WoW broke alot of gaming barriers and has been incredibly successful for an incredibly long time. It's not as successful as it was BC/Wrath era but thats judging it by itself. Against other MMORPGs? Everquest peaked at half a million users. WoW has triple that at any given moment and its failing?

WoW brought in a little over a billion in the final quarter of 2018. Thats as much in a quarter as games like Overwatch and Hearthstone brought in in a year.

As a business investment, World of Warcraft is doing fiiiiiiiiiiiine. Sure, its design philosophy broke and it suffers from some unbelievable feature bloat, but its still on the whole pretty damn fun. The continue to release successful expansions. It continues to make buckets of money.

(and yea, its not going anywhere. MMOs live forever. Everquest released a new expansion like 2 weeks ago)

 

[Tom Ganks]

@Chops yes, but you're viewing it through the eyes of corporate success. My initial post is regarding the fact that this deters creative success and makes the gameplay and content lacking. I couldn't care less if they are successful. I care if we're being offered a great product, in which we are not currently. Yes wow might live on for a decade to come, but it's probably due to milking the needs of people who are addicted to their account and progression. Even those people have their breaking points.

 

[Chops]

@Chops yes, but you're viewing it through the eyes of corporate success. My initial post is regarding the fact that this deters creative success and makes the gameplay and content lacking. I couldn't care less if they are successful. I care if we're being offered a great product, in which we are not currently. Yes wow might live on for a decade to come, but it's probably due to milking the needs of people who are addicted to their account and progression. Even those people have their breaking points.

Youd be hard pressed to convince me that the firing of a CFO is gonna impact content. Though I deeply agree with you initial posts assertion that paying the creators and designers more would result in a better product. But thats a wildly broad conversation to be having about the narrow subject of a corporate severance package.

 

[Leek]

"wuy dus a bizzness liek blizzurd kare more aboot m0ney dan the love of there communidy"

 

[Tom Ganks]

"wuy dus a bizzness liek blizzurd kare more aboot m0ney dan the love of there communidy"

Because at one point they cared about the community.

 

[SPQR]

The guy sold shares x2 times for 50mil each within a year. Got welcome bonus of 10 mil or something.
Must be a rocket science job.

 

[Kirise]

Putting aside the sensationalist, misappropriated attention-seeking video (for which it succeeds greatly, by the way) through which this thread came, let's recalibrate some information here.

The guy was CFO of ACTIVISION Blizzard. Not CFO of just Blizzard itself. He was CFO of the whole shebang. Comparing Blizzard's budget with his corporate-wide role is comparing the core of the apple with the whole fruit.

Is 9-someodd million an obscene amount of money? Absolutely. Could a subdivision like Blizzard do a whole lot with that kind of money? Absolutely. Could they actually get as much of a return on investment based on that work? Doubtful. People like to make the assumption that throwing more money at something will somehow increase that endeavor by a proportional amount, and that's simply not true. Scaling investment up (or down, for that matter) is one of the great challenges of organizational administration. There are a few ways to get it right, and a lot of ways to screw it up, and the targets constantly change.

Youd be hard pressed to convince me that the firing of a CFO is gonna impact content. Though I deeply agree with you initial posts assertion that paying the creators and designers more would result in a better product. But thats a wildly broad conversation to be having about the narrow subject of a corporate severance package.

This, right here. QFT.

 

[Tom Ganks]

@Kirise
I feel like I turned the topic of the CFO firing into a direction that wasn't directly related to the topic. And the video certainly doesn't help so much. If I could remake this thread with the intent of topic that I brought up, I'd do so. Maybe for another time, though. Although this may relate to the problems we currently have in-game, I do believe I tried to assume too much given what little we know. All being said, 9.4 million is substantial, and I'm not under the impression it's all-well deserved considering how Activision Blizzard isn't solving the issues it's consistently creating.

I typically don't attack the pay of an individual, since they have the economic freedom to make however much their company see's fit. In fact I am completely fine with even billionaires earning what they have if they have at least made strides to do so. But I simply look at those numbers and think that it's just another shitty allocation of wealth that COULD bring about a better product and/or work culture.

 

[Chops]

Komrade Roboartist

 

[SPQR]

Could they actually get as much of a return on investment based on that work? Doubtful.

Think alot of people (me included) just tired of them à la "hedge fund managers" running the show when it comes to gaming industry this days. Games should come first.

Clearly it doesn't matter how big is the profit since it is never good enough in the end.

Regardless of what they say, this mentality does effect devs and end product.
All this blow backs show that people see through the charade.

 

[Kirise]

Think alot of people (me included) just tired of them à la "hedge fund managers" running the show when it comes to gaming industry this days. Games should come first.

One of the problems corporations have these days (heck, most days) is communicating the value obtained by spending these huge sums. For every Apple (and really, Apple's no exception), there are a hundred Microsofts/ActiBlizzards/McDonalds/etc., with legitimate questions about how they spend/waste their money.

Regardless of what they say, this mentality does effect devs and end product.
All this blow backs show that people see through the charade.

Absolutely. Like @Roboartist said, that kind of money seems like it would be better spent toward developing games that players want. Give me $200K and I'll hire two people at $50K to help me complete my entire WoW wishlist in a year. But the true cost to Blizzard wouldn't be $200K, rather double that when we factor in onboarding, the cost of QA testing the changes, and a host of other details.

Like twinking, the "stats" of corporate finance don't scale linearly. Someone making $10m a year does not equal 100 people making $100K a year. To be sure, the top end could use a serious "stats squish" just like WoW needed one (and will need one again in another expansion), but the nonlinear nature of finance is difficult to communicate (and easy to exploit).

 

[AlisterCrow]

I rarely watch Az anymore because I dislike his melodramatic reactions and his attempts at humor. The Quartering is preferable imo. I've been following along with his videos that are related to Blizzard/Activision for a few months now and I appreciate his level-headed and logical approach to the topic. Just for anyone that hasn't discovered his channel yet:

In one of the earlier videos on his channel, he discusses how an employee from Blizzard (unconfirmed) said a rep from Activision wanted the WoW team to cut costs everywhere possible which could explain why so many corners were cut with BFA.

Then of course, Asmongold - who is to Twitch and WoW what Jerry Springer was to daytime TV in the 90s- talking about and showing a graph of how bad BFA is doing with subs:

It really does look to be dark times for Blizzard with games being banned in china and them abandoning HotS altogether after announcing E-sports events for the game earlier last year. Not to mention the negative reception Diablo immortal got. It feels too soon to say they had a good run, but it's not looking good.

 

[Tom Ganks]

Then of course, Asmongold - who is to Twitch and WoW what Jerry Springer was to daytime TV in the 90s- talking about and showing a graph of how bad BFA is doing with subs:

I'm almost certain he'll play Classic wow if he wants to quit BFA. Or if he's truly addicted to the game, he'll prob just play it when he's not streaming like he does before most wow streams to get boring shit out of the way. But he's realizing twitch audiences like him playing other games. WoW gets repetitive to watch when you're doing expeditions/dungeons/etc over and over.

 

[Bestworld]

 

[Chops]

It really does look to be dark times for Blizzard with games being banned in china and them abandoning HotS altogether after announcing E-sports events for the game earlier last year. Not to mention the negative reception Diablo immortal got. It feels too soon to say they had a good run, but it's not looking good.

I am generally pretty loathe to point to stock performance as an indicator of success but barring the Diablo drop, Activision is doing pretty well.

I would assume (with strong emphasis on "assume") that they're narrowing their focus back a bit. For a long while, they seemed to be intent on having 1 game of every type available for you to play. You like MOBAs? We got one of those. Deck builders? We have one! Dungeon crawlers? FPS? RTS? MMORPG? Blizzard, baby!

But they did some of those very poorly. HotS is a very mediocre moba in a market already saturated with good games. Sure, Warcraft 3 birthed mobas but the genre left blizzard behind. HotS always felt like a research paper a student turned in 2 weeks late just to avoid a zero. I wasnt shocked to see them pull back from that.

Diablo 3 is a personal favorite of mine but they never really figured out how to get it to bring in money. People poopoo the "mobilization" of games but Diablo is a game RIPE for micro transactions (and Im alone on this but Im hella hyped for Diablo Immortal) and Im excited to see it do well. If Blizz can push mobile gaming the way they did RTS and MMORPGs, then the future of gaming looks hella bright. (side rant here: the future of gaming, whether you like it or not, is mobile. The single most popular game in the world is a mobile MOBA and if Blizz can enter that market in a meaningful way, then good for them and frankly... better for us)

I am an eternal optimist so maybe that clouding it, but I see a company thats cutting some of the chafe to focus on shit they do really well. Provide compelling games that redefine genres. A rerelease of classic and Warcraft3 says to me "this is what you want. This is what we remember being good at. This is where we're going"

 

[AlisterCrow]

Yeah, I don't think the advertising/marketing team is making all the calls at Blizzard, but I will admit subs only went up in BFA at launch and after the six month sub/pirate ship mount bundle as well as the "see you later" bundle. It's not at that point....yet. At least imo.

I see a company thats cutting some of the chafe to focus on shit they do really well. Provide compelling games that redefine genres. A rerelease of classic and Warcraft3 says to me "this is what you want. This is what we remember being good at. This is where we're going"

I hope you're right. They need to go back to "It's done when it's done" instead of pushing out a beta-ready Xpac annually. I doubt that will happen considering recent developments, but time will tell.

 

[Chops]

I hope you're right. They need to go back to "It's done when it's done" instead of pushing out a beta-ready Xpac annually. I doubt that will happen considering recent developments, but time will tell.

My hope, ever since Overwatch took off, has been that another game will take over the cash cow position from WoW so they can stop worrying about quantity over quality in this game, since its not their breadwinner anymore. Then maybe we'll get a slower pace of development and a focus on world building again. Because not only does endgame gameplay seem broken but jesus the lore is a fucking wreck.

 

[Bestworld]

Yeah, I don't think the advertising/marketing team is making all the calls at Blizzard, but I will admit subs only went up in BFA at launch and after the six month sub/pirate ship mount bundle as well as the "see you later" bundle. It's not at that point....yet. At least imo.

I think it fits rather well. WoW arguably holds the monopoly over the MMORPG genre currently, and has so for a long time. So when the product development doesn't "show success" (money) at the bottom line anymore, the marketing starts to take over (store mounts, store pets, micro transactions), because that yields "success" at the bottom line. This is what's currently rotten with the game. They're holding a monopoly position where product development doesn't create the same results as marketing solutions.

Blizzard used to be a company by gamers for gamers. A lot of these people, who shared those values, either abandoned ship, or are working on "other projects". I don't see Blizzard as the same company it was back in vanilla to wrath. There was passion and commitment, Blizzcon was an epic event, and the game was at an all-time high as far as the fanbase is concerned. One can't help but realize that Blizzard and its fans drifted so far apart from each other. I mean, just look at the events that has taken place over recent years. Just look at last Blizzcon.

If last Blizzcon wasn't a major wake-up call for Blizzard as a whole, then I don't know what is. I hope that MMORPG's become a thing again, and that other companies will seize the opportunity of Blizzard's recent failures to give MMORPG fans what they want, and leave Blizzard in the dust.

You think you do, but you don't.
Don't you all have phones?

 

[MYT]

I agree with the opinion that blizzards problem isn’t that the marketing/advertising people rule, but clearly product design isn’t king either. That being said, it can’t be at this point in wow’s lifecycle.
Mobile is definitely going to dominate gaming but it’s just as definitely going to noob it down. I played L2R and was into it pretty seriously for awhile. Thing is it’s a huge money sink for a far subpar experience relative to pc, even if it was an incredible step forward for mobile. Mobile and MMOs just have a lot of compatibility issues - time commitments and mobile are at odds to some extent as are any level of sophistication in ability use just given the limitiations or mobile. Even when I migrated solely to tablets it wasn’t that big of an improvement.

Pay to win games that flash and go away are our foreseeable future, because they can bring in a ton of money. There’s kids everywhere spending thousands on them and the best players are spending 5 figures. Nobody but Blueballah and a few others are dropping that kind of cash on wow, and when they are it’s going to other players not Warcraft itself.

If you want wow to succeed long term, quit being cheap and stay subbed and support it.