Microsoft lays off most of Activision Blizzard esports organization
https://venturebeat.com/gaming-business/microsoft-lays-off-most-of-activision-blizzard-esports-organization/
Microsoft has laid off the entire Activision Blizzard esports organization, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Note: Microsoft did not just cut more jobs after the 1,900 layoffs reported before, the entire ActiBlizz ESports Organization is included in the 1,900 layoffs that were already reported on previously.
Only reading the headline can make it seem like Microsoft laid off more than the 1,900 they did before, but thats not the case this time.
There is still one competitor left!
Microsoft hopes that the Internet will still be entertained by one person on stage playing with themselves.
Microsoft hopes that the Internet will still be entertained by one person on stage playing with themselves.
There is an entire industry for that.
This is good imo. Blizzard's been rotting from the inside for years, and for this Microsoft deal to bring real change they need to let lots of the older employees go. Let's see how it plays out.
Yeah, the purging was needed. You need only see the chat in their free MOBA to know how long they let the alt right gather with impunity in their games.
You hear people make the excuse that losing subscribers isn’t worth the ban, but Heroes of the Storm is free and it’s a safe bet you can log in at any time to see someone spamming epithets.
Blizzard already halted any real support for starcraft 1/2 beyond keeping the severs running.
It makes games more samey because they focus on what pros want, and they like things to be the same. It also tends to drive balance patches to only focus on the top levels of play, so the experience is worse for the majority of players. Features that aren't directly related to the pro-scene get completely ignored.
Play tends to get more toxic even at low levels, because ladder rank is all that really matters. The increased focus on being competitive increases the stress to play well in each game.
Competitive formats are often one of the least popular game modes. It's a bit hard to prove this, because companies don't always release numbers. Blizzard admitted this with SC2, the vast majority of players never queued for a competitive 1v1 match, co-op became by far the most popular format in terms of games played. You saw something similar with complaints about available modes in halo when infinite released.
Esports are actually pretty boring to watch 90% of the time. Most have a major lack of parity so there's at best a handful of teams/players that are actually competitive, so many matches are one sided.
i agree with op's take but only in the sense that games made with the intent to be esports end up being antithetical to what makes games enjoyable, at least for me. it kinda feels new pvp games are exclusively targeting competitive gamers and the casual online pvp space is shrinking or being driven to older games.
but that might just be my own aversion to being told to take my own life by an angry teenager when I make a mistake while playing with a digital toy to enjoy my time off work.
I can kinda see it with how hyper competitive games have gotten at the detriment of fun. Now we have match making with hidden elo vs back in the day just playing on dedicated servers. But it's not all bad.
Hyper competitiveness has always been there, I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the advent of esports. And elo with its many variants came about because of other issues (like smurfing, which is the absolute opposite of competitiveness).