https://www.marketwatch.com/story/activision-blizzard-wants-to-fire-cfo-2018-12-31
Activision Blizzard Inc. ATVI, -0.49% expects to fire its chief financial officer for undisclosed reasons, the company disclosed Monday. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the videogame publisher said that it notified Spencer Neumann that it intends to terminate him for cause. Activision did not say what the cause was, besides noting it was "unrelated to the company's financial reporting or disclosure controls and procedures." Neumann was placed on paid leave while he determines whether to fight the termination.
Definitely sexual harassment
maybe he was responsible for what was happening at blizzard for like the past 2 months and they decided to full 180
I don't know if firing the CFO would change things too much, as the CEO that most people at Blizzard and fans of Blizzard loved is already gone from the company, replaced by someone who has Activision's best interests at heart instead of Blizzard's.
Still, just firing their CFO for reportedly non financial reasons? Either they're lying, or something else is up.
Maybe this means HoTS will get its devs back, it's like the only blizz game that I personally believe is doing well atm in terms of how it is being developed
Probably or some other inappropriate behavior, since they said it isn't for financial reasons.
I don't think any one individual could be responsible for the share value drop.
Never how it is, but it's always only one that takes the fall.
Very optimistic. No matter how well the game is maintained and updated or how virile the playerbase is, they expect it to compete with LoL and Dota2 and for that it's failure.
Like, if someone's being an asshole to someone in that way, fire him/her right away, but I really hope its because the CFO is the one fucking up Blizzard's plans.
He's not. Blizz got a lot of its general autonomy cut because the successes weren't up to snuff in the past couple years.
makes sense, I mean they need to sell it to everyone and their dog, or else its a failure!
clearly he's been sleeping with sylvannis that's why she's got her own expansion.
It'd be reasonable to assume this. For once, it's also wrong. The actual reason is because Netflix poached him from Activision, and Activision is giving him the boot early:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-netflix-cfo-exclusive/exclusive-netflix-poaches-cfo-from-activision-blizzard-source-idUSKCN1OV19B
What a shame, it's by far my favorite Blizz game and especially recently I felt that the devs were knocking it out of the park. Atleast we're getting Imperius soon
2 months ago was blizzcon
The CFO probably does not make the decisions leading to the major fuckups seen recently.
RIP Blizzard, I guess Actvision decided it's billions weren't enough.
To take a page from Jim Sterling, investors don't just want profits, they want all of the money, ever. So many triple-A games are "performing below expectations", and these execs in suits that put their money into funding projects are not learning to figure how to spend their money wisely; instead they learn no lessons and just want more, more, more. Don't please the investors just enough? Congratulations on getting your team pulled apart, your passions devoured, your properties stolen, and a potential void of difficulty getting hired elsewhere if you weren't prominent enough to catch other publisher's eyes.
Even if you're a big developer that needs a publisher, you have to make damn sure you don't sell yourself to the third-party biggies. Mainly Activision and Electronic Arts in the west, Konami and Koei Tecmo in east, with some Ubisoft and Capcom on the side (and probably SEGA for good measure). They'll drain your inspiration dry and actively tear everything apart at the seams to get as much money as possible. Ubisoft and Capcom are on the side because they're fucking horrible but their developers do have passion when they aren't getting whored out.
Basically Overwatch made a billion dollars off lootboxes one year, every year after it doesn't make more than a billion from lootboxes will be considered a failure.
Its a real shame the direction OW has gone in since launch, there was so much potential there and its just turned into this weird vehicle for the esports Blizzard have basically forced into life by financial investment alone. Actual development of the game has stagnated into the same events every year and the occasional balance change.
I feel like I should clarify: Every dev has passion for making games, low level at least. Everyone writing code, sketching concept art, rigging animations, etc.. Most leads still have it. If they didn't, they wouldn't be in the industry - the game dev industry sucks dick to work in. Pay is lower, hours are worse, crunch is longer, than in similar fields. If you don't have passion for making games, and aren't a higher level manager or something where the pay and benefits are actually really good, you get the fuck out of that industry. It's even worse if you work at most bigger places, - like Blizzard - most of them are set in areas with insanely high prices of living that means your already weak pay gets stretched even thinner if you want to avoid commuting an hour or longer to work.
This is a warped perception that a lot of people have. In reality most publisher expectations are proportional to a game's budget. Granted you DO have cases where they are way too high, but in the case of something like Bioshock Infinite, or Hitman: Absolution, games which both took the better part of a decade to be developed and released, they were vastly, heinously over-budget, over-time, and over-developed wrecks, hence why them selling "only" 2 million units was a financial failure -- not enough to recoup costs, let alone be a success.
In the case of Overwatch considering the game took like a decade to be made (including Titan, since it didn't provide a finalized product for all those man-hours) I bet it cost Acti-Blizz way more than it made back in its original release cycle, and it's only a result of loot boxes and the recent deep discounting we've seen that it's started to recoup its likely monolithic budget. Note that Titan counts because, since it didn't provide a finished product, it was money down a hole. Devs still got paid to work on it, marketers still got paid to market it, QA testers were still on payroll, etc, etc. It was all running at loss..
And then we get onto Hitman and Infinite. Both of these games had incredibly long and troubled dev cycles, featuring hundreds of iterative versions of their respective games, dumped concepts, wasted assets, discarded prototypes, constant, constant re-working and re-iteration, etc. That in itself would be disastrous but their ultimate products, while critically well-received (which, if you ask me, is because critics' ad revenue gets paid by games companies), were absolutely fucking maligned by most of the consumerbase and sold like dog shit in perspective to how much money they cost to make.
It was a huge commercial failure and it's only because of deep discounting and the sticking power of the IP's other titles that it's still alive. Irrational was dissolved as a company after BS:I by their corporate sector because of this, and that's why the former auteur of Bioshock, Ken Levine, is now at his own small company making unrelated titles. You can read more in this article...
hasnt sega been mostly okay
To be specific on this; it's not even necessarily that it sold much below expectations. It's just that Levine had no idea what he was doing and he had his team essentially remake the game over and over from the initial pitch until Take-Two hired someone to oversee the production and put together a shippable product from the scraps they had. The team at Irrational was massively over budget and extremely late, which is why the game ultimately underperformed in T2's eyes. The worst part? Most of the team who had nothing to do with Ken Levine's incompetent management got laid off while he kept his job with a skeleton crew seemingly producing pitches without actually making any games.
Only with Yakuza. As a long-time Sonic fan I can't tell you how bafflingly incompetent they can be with that series, Valkyria Chronicles fans had to sit through a failure of an attempted AU reboot before Sega finally acknowledged what they really wanted, and they've screwed over so many of their own series or flat-out abandoned them over the years. About the only other game doing really strongly right now for them is Phantasy Star Online 2, and they still ban western players despite not having bothered bringing it over, and mar that game with stupid design choices to try to make excess amounts of money that have pissed off that community too. Where Capcom is reckless but have been on a recovery fraught with stumbles, and Konami's basically burned their bridges and tried to torch their developers, Sega's flat-out stupid, bumbling and incompetent. Have been since the 90's, especially when it comes to the undermining nature of Sega of America vs. Sega of Japan.
This might sound really stupid but in my opinion we need something similar like the video game crash of 1983 or the dot-com bubble, but only the part with videogames only. It will surely end up with awful collateral damage, but on the other hand it will burn out the weeds that are just pumping out obvious cash grabs and desaturate the extremely saturated videogame market. Maybe it will force companies to listen to their communities and make greedy investors pull out once they see the videogame market is nose diving, causing industry wide shakeout. Fallout will be awful but I'm pretty sure that EA will still survive like some stupid cockroach after a nuclear blast and learn nothing.
tl;dr just straight up thanos snap the video game market
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
