But at the heart of the gaming console is still the games, and where there are games, there are large corporations that are dedicated to making games for these boxes we connect to our television. But with each Konami and Ubisoft out there, there is one major conglomerate that can be seen to not have the best interest of quality and standards at their heart. For most of the 2000-2010 decade, that company was viewed as Electronic Arts. However, in the recent couple of years, that balance of power has shifted, to Activision Blizzard.
While the company of Activision has been around since the early eighties, Activision has only been a true powerhouse in the industry of game development since 1999 with the start of the Tony Hawk series. Ever since then, Activision had been greatly chipping away at the market share that their biggest competitor, Electronic Arts. With the success of the Tony Hawk series, then Call of Duty, then Guitar Hero, Activision had become one of the largest gaming companies in the world.
On the same token in the PC market was Blizzard Entertainment. While only producing few games for the PC, those games have been monsters on the charts. Ever since they changed their name from Silicon & Synapse to Blizzard Entertainment, most of the titles they produced have been in their three largest franchises, Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. However, each game has been majorly successful, and in 2004, Blizzard released World of Warcraft, the largest MMORPG ever to be produced, now holding 11.4 Million Subscribers.
In 2008, the companies merged, forming the new Activision Blizzard, with Activision CEO Bobby Kotick having control of the entire company. Publicly, Blizzard Entertainment was still going to be run the way it was, with Kotick offering no interference. It was also in 2008, however, that we saw a downturn in quality from both companies.
In November of 2008, Blizzard released the second expansion pack to World of Warcraft, entitled Wrath of the Lich King. This expansion has been deemed some of the worst content in the game's history for both Player vs. Environment and Player vs. Player content. With some of the most boring and repetitive opening raiding content, and a questing environment that took away from the community aspect of the game, WotLK has been criticized heavily.
At the same time, things for Activision weren't any better. The Tony Hawk franchise that truly set the company on the map was starting to fall flat, with game after game being rated lower and lower. The Guitar Hero franchise was losing more and more market share to EA's Rock Band, and was also being scored lower than the franchise as well. Other Activision games were also lackluster, with the main money makers for the Activision Blizzard being the Call of Duty and World of Warcraft franchises.
However, in 2009, Activision released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game was lauded by critics, but gamers had some complaints about multiplayer glitches, rushed storylines, and all too similar feel of the gameplay on both sides. Later litigation by the former heads of the Infinity Ward, the company who made Modern Warfare 2 for Activision, revealed that Activision rushed the release of the game in order to meet the 1 CoD game per year deadline.
I call this company the Evil Empire of Gaming, because of the fact that Activision has put it's fingers into every aspect of game design. The biggest margin of proof of this comes from the release of the third expansion to World of Warcraft, Cataclysm. The expansion had been in development for at least a year, with artists working to rebuild the entire original world from the ground up and add new content into the game.
However, upon release, players saw almost two months straight of hotfixes (updates that can be done without patching), fixing different issues from bug fixes to damage in combat. 20-30 different changes a day, were released, which made the game have a very rushed feeling behind it. At the same time, Blizzard came out and admitted that one of their classes was broken.
These are things that should not happen with a company. No game or piece of software is ever going to be perfect, and it's expected to have some glitches when a game is a massive as World of Warcraft. However, when things are this broken upon release, when Blizzard has never had this magnitude of a problem before, is evidence that Kotick and his Activision design philosophy has severely impacted the company.
The next fault in the game is coming in the soon to be released content patch for WoW, 4.2. This patch has new raid content for endgame players in the Firelands, a dungeon designed with seven bosses and a new daily questing area. However, there are certain things that have been admitted by the company that make it seem like their either resting on their laurels, become lazy, or Activision is tightly holding the reins of the company.
This patch is supposed to be comparable to 3.1, which was the first released raid content in Wrath of the Lich King. 3.1 introduced Ulduar, a 14 boss raid encounter which, while the rest of the expansion was frowned upon until the final raid, had some of the best raiding experiences that the game had to offer. The World of Warcraft community praised 3.1, noting numerous changes to the game made the experience better and had much more to offer.
However, Firelands only has seven bosses, with their Baradin Hold instance getting a new wing added to make up an eighth boss. At the same time, a 5 man dungeon called the Abyssal Maw was supposed to be released with Firelands. However, in a recent post by the developers, the team on Abyssal Maw was moved onto Firelands to include additional bosses into the instance.
So to think that Fireands was actually supposed to have fewer than 7 shows that Blizzard has moved from a philosophy of "It's done when it's done" to moving towards the Activision philosophy of wanting the bottom line and getting the maximum dollar value of everything, regardless of quality.
It is sad when a company begins to take this route. In gaming history, we've seen this before. Electronic Arts during the last decade was like this, with most of their major game releases only being yearly updates to their sports franchises. People were buying them up, but the games in about 2006 begun to take a huge downturn. The releases of Medal of Honor weren't any better, and the whole company began to fall.
However, in 2008, things began to pick up. New IPs were introduced, and other IPs were transformed into innovative and powerful franchises. This allowed EA to once again become a major force in the gaming industry. But it took them a few years to figure this out, and now I have to wonder when Activision Blizzard will learn this same information.
With the next games coming out from the Activision Blizzard lineup, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Prototype 2, X-Men, Transformers and Spider-Man, things aren't looking to change. Activision has already put certain franchises on hold, but their studios are working on nothing substantial. On top of this, World of Warcraft just lost 600,000 subscribers, going from 12 million to 11.4 million. When you look at how much this is lost in revenue per month, that's 9 million dollars lost per month. Every month, the company will make 9 million less. And if the quality of content doesn't increase, it wouldn't be hard to see that loss go even higher.
So, as a company, Activision Blizzard, I plead with you to move away from this path, but it's only we the gamers who can truly make a difference and change this. The next release of Call of Duty, don't buy it. Or maybe for the 12 million wow players, cancel your subs for a month. Look at how Activision would feel at that point. That is a major blow to the company itself, and possibly could turn things around.
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