That’s a tough sob story to buy coming off their self-proclaimed best year ever and handing out a $15M signing bonus to their new CFO. Not to mention Bobby’s ludicrous compensation. Can’t expect any of those guys to ever take a hair cut on their salaries and bonuses, right? Seems like given their current situation,…

That jumped out at me too. Especially given that part of Blizzard’s business model for their games (particularly WoW) relies on people staying subscribed, QA and tech support are crucial.

“It’s been a record year. To celebrate, we’re firing 10% of our workforce. Except for executives, of course. Why would we fire ourselves, right? Look at how awesome we are.”

QA is a development department.

The sad part is that, on paper, the Activision-Blizzard partnership is a good one. Activision rakes in consistent money which can be used to fund Blizzard’s long-term development, games which have the potential to create extreme profits. And sure, Blizz has been in a rut with only expansions to WoW and Hearthstone and…

To be fair, that is how capitalism is supposed to work.

“Why even try to fight back when there’s a chance you’ll lose?” is not an argument that has ever served anyone well.

Kotick is not telling the truth obviously. While Activision is doing well now, there are so many signs of trouble over the horizon they couldn’t ignore it. Increasing game development costs especially as we transition to newer hardware, softer performance of annualized releases, games as service not being the panacea…

Victim blaming and ‘whatabout’ is not a good look. Just letting you know.

it equates to them hiring that new ceo with a 30 million dollar bonus... activision is the fucking devil. we had record setting year for us.. but thats going in our pockets and we need about 800 people cut from the books...

So excited for another thread of corporate bootlickers telling everyone, “ThAt’S hOw CaPiTaLiSm Is SuPpOsEd To WoRk.”

I think the most important part in your comment was “...but does not stop people...”. There’s already plenty of spoilers out there if you wanted to look for them. 100 videos with the same spoiler vs a handful that get spread around has the same result.

DQXI also has this message, albeit specifically for the music, because the licensing contract with their composer restricts the use of the music to the game only, with exceptions that are stipulated in the contract. In the current context of streaming and such, it would be so much easier for companies to just ensure…

If a consumer is watching the stream, they are already making the choice to be spoiled. If the game is released, the information is out there for the general public. Restricting content from being streamed isn't going to do anything if a person is out there actively seeking spoilers. 

None of this has any real legal standing except music intended streams. But they can bully their way into this because, hey why not. Not like the USA government actually represents people over corporations and it also doesn’t care about consumer rights.

Even though they name check Disney a ton I’m willing to bet this is much more a Japanese company like Square-Enix issue. 

Gettin’ sick of Japanese companies doing this every time they make a big release. Not that I’m even a streamer it’s just off putting to see them try to control a subsection of their user base. This doesn’t seem as bad as the persona one but neither are great. All of it feels so extremely out of touch with how people…

You are free to stream the game in non-commercial contexts. However, using the streams of the game to primarily provide or listen to the music is prohibited even in such non-commercial contexts.

Companies like Nintendo and Disney that take an anti-streamer stance are mindbogglingly behind the times. It’s free advertising to millions and millions of potential purchasers. What in the world are you guys thinking trying to dissuade this?

Much of the situation here is probably due to the Disney collaboration, but I’ve found that Japanese developers have a very weird relationship with the streaming/sharing that’s become ubiquitous with this generation of gaming.