Saturday Morning Gaming: Blizzcon

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

Related Post Roulette

10 Responses

  1. Murali says:

    Given the pace at which Blizzard normally makes games, Diablo 4 is going to be out in 2029Report

  2. Doctor Jay says:

    You know, I went to a Tom Petty concert once. It was late in his career. He played several songs from his latest album, but he didn’t lead with that. Nor did he close. I liked the new stuff. I went out and bought the album. But that wasn’t what I came for.

    Too often, somebody wants to make their mark as the new marketing chief and really do the big push with customers. And it usually ends just like this. You have to start with what people want.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      Well, I can’t *TOTALLY* blame them. The main market for the phone game was expected to be China from the outset. They just thought that, hey, maybe we can move some product in the US too.

      The problem is that the overlap in the Venn Diagram of “People In The US Excited To Play A Diablo Phone Game” and “People Who Bought Tickets To Blizzcon” consists of maybe a handful of people.

      I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have brought it out… but, if they were going to bring it out, it should have been an afterthought here “HERE’S DIABLO 4! And we also know that sometimes you want to play Diablo when you’re standing in line at the DMV, so you can do that too. BUT DIABLO 4!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

      Fly in the voice actor for Cain and have him walk to the mic and say “Stay a while and listen!” and then point at the video screen and then they wouldn’t even have needed a gameplay trailer. Just the storyline one would have been good enough.

      And then, in China, do the same thing except swap it around. “FINALLY! DIABLO FOR YOUR PHONE!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA EVERYBODY PANIC!!!!! (Oh, and we’ll have Diablo 4 for your desktop, if you care about that.)”Report

  3. They shoulda said, “We effed up last year. Sorry. What we aren’t going to eff up is Diable 4 (pause for audience,) and Overwatch 2 (another pause).

    Then the big titty dancers come out to entertain everyone.Report

    • The main take that I noticed after the Diablo 4 trailer came out was something to the effect of “HOW HARD WAS THAT? SERIOUSLY!”

      I know that my response to the storyline trailer (entirely CGI) was “that’s all well and good, but where is the gameplay?”

      Then I saw the gameplay.

      Okay. I’m intrigued.Report

  4. jason says:

    Yeah, I often wonder about some of the video game marketing folks. Like when the xbox one announcement wasn’t really about games and they thought that was going to go over well (I’m sure Sony enjoyed it). They also tend to do things like this:
    Game Co: Here’s our product.
    Gamers: We don’t like it.
    Game Co: You’re just not playing right
    Gamers: Different game it is.
    (See Destiny, Fallout 76, and many others)
    Edit: Diablo 4 looks cool–I hope they keep the same screen co-op so my wife and I can play.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to jason says:

      I’ve heard rumors that it’ll be Playstation’s turn to pull a bonehead move next E3. They’ll announce the PS5 and Gaming As A Service will be the only game in town but the PS5 will come, automatically, with Fallout 76 2: Even Wester Virginia.

      And Microsoft will just have to make one announcement: “The Outer Worlds 2 will be an Xbox/PC exclusive. And, yes, you can date Parvati in this one.”

      And then we’ll have a riot.Report

  5. DensityDuck says:

    I think the issue is that Blizzard hasn’t yet figured out that people don’t stan them anymore; that gamers aren’t just going to Love What Blizzard Does the way that they did when it was Starcraft and Warcraft 3, and people were inventing entire new genres of games based on WC3 mods (DOTA).

    They’re starting to realize it, but they’re still thinking that they can be the Cool Fun For-The-Gamers Guys in the West and Blizzard The Multinational Media Powerhouse in the East and that the two won’t find out about each other.

    Anyway. Gaming as an industry has gotten odd recently, and it’s because the gamers won, gaming got the mainstream acceptance (and the mainstream-media-company cash) that they always wanted, but now they’re realizing that the mainstream won’t let companies get away with edgy shit, because the mainstream doesn’t like edgy shit, and so companies have to make money by exploitation rather than by being unique.

    As I said on Twitter, “a decade of gamers being oppressed gave us FPS, MMO, Magic The Gathering, White Wolf’s World of Darkness. A decade of gamer supremacy gave us loot boxes, microtransactions, and Gatcha-Waifu grind games.”Report

    • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

      That’s a really good point.

      When I got into RTS vs. Turn-Based Strategy vs. RPGs vs. FPS arguments back in 1998, Blizzard owned the RTS corner of the argument (Total Annihilation had a small group of nutters arguing for it, but Blizzard set the standard).

      And now they’re finding that the old standards only still apply in some very, very weird corners.

      On top of that, if you go out of your way to court a vocal group of socially connected personalities, you’ll find that pivoting back to “hey, we’re just a video game company!” is going to be one heck of a difficult straddle. (And, so far, I’m not sure that Blizzard has demonstrated that they’re particularly deft.)Report