Blizzard has not been independent since 1994, but people on the internet love picking some arbitrary point in time when "Blizzard died" when in reality the timeline and quality of their releases has almost zero correlation with who they were owned by at the time.

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ram1500natrluvr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I like Jason Schreier's take that the end of Blizzard began as soon as WoW blew up in popularity.

"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."

I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.

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leoc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There seems to be a bit of a symmetry between what WoW did to Blizzard and what WH40K did to Games Workshop.

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anthonypasq 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the end of Blizzard

extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.

	▲	ram1500natrluvr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, of course there's the financial performance of a studio and then the identity of a studio that people get attached to. I didn't get into Blizzard games because they were a financial powerhouse, I got into them because they were fun as hell and the identity of Blizzard at the time gave me faith that their next release would be just as fun. That faith started deteriorating around 2005/6 for me, and was gone within a month or so of SC2 releasing. The identity of Blizzard of the 90s and early 2000s that I fell in love with was gone by 2010. I can go into more detail about the shortcomings of all of the games from 2010 on (IMO, obviously), but the overall point is that they are fundamentally different than their older games and might as well have been from a different studio.

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keyringlight 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Similar with Westwood (part of Virgin interactive) and Bioware (parceled up with Pandemic studios, owned by Elevation partners, who sold it to EA)