Game News

 

Alright, it is time for some game news.

Blizzard has been in the news again, this time for financial reasons. It has been a know fact for over a decade that Blizzard pays low wages compared to other companies in the AAA industry. They have always pushed the passion line, i.e. people are such fans its a bit of a privilege to work there, so you don't need as much money.

Staff has now started comparing salaries and are furious at how little they are earning. Seeing how Blizz HQ is in Irvine, California, it's no wonder their workers are broke. Irvine is not the most expensive city in the US, but it is still pretty eye-wateringly expensive. Anyone who works for a living knows that landlords and grocery stores don't accept passion instead of money, but now it has hit a bit of a boiling point.

Stories have been shared about how staffers are forced to skip meals, how they have to do extra work as Uber drivers, how they even have to give up even talking about having kids as they know that can't afford it. At the same time, Activision-Blizzard keeps reporting record profits and their CEO Bobby Kotick has apparently earned about $40 million this year. Some shareholders have tried to stop Kotick from earning his obscene bonuses, but failed. Kotick has even been called the most over payed CEO in the world...

The bottom line is that Blizzard may well see an imminent brain-drain, if too many of their seasoned talent find better payed positions elsewhere. There seem to be a golden goose moral in here somewhere.

Bioware are still trying to get Anthem fixed. After a... lets call it lack-luster initial performance, they pulled the game in an attempt to fix it.

Back during the 6-8 years of development time Anthem had, the production leads refused to even look at what the competition was doing, and now it seems they are just copying their competition wholesale.

When you are designing something like a game you have to take in to account what the competition is doing. Otherwise you may end up creating cheap knock-off or even committing theft of intellectual property. You can't create in a vacuum. We'll see if their efforts pay off, but for my part I doubt it. The very name Anthem is now a poisoned pill and few gamers are going to want to swallow it to see if it tastes good.

Finally there have been talk of a new method of revenue generation in the AAA industry: In-game ads.

It's all in an early brainstorming stage, but there are elements who wants to integrate ads inside PC and console gaming much like in mobile gaming. Off the cuff I think it's a reprehensible idea, but to be fair there are a couple of minor ways I could possibly accept it. If it is an option you can turn off, if it does not handicap the player and you earn something extra for watching the ads, then maybe? If you could offset a subscription by seeing some ads in loadscreens, then maybe?

The problem is that the greed of these executives is beyond control and I have 0% trust in their abilities to rein themselves in. Look at the lootbox drama for an example.

Speaking of lootboxes, this may be a reaction to the increased ban on the addictive little boxes of doom. Either way, time will tell, but I don't think this will go over well at all.

That's that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week and stay safe and healthy!