Poll of the Day > Blizzard stock

(+) Yeah! (+)

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Up, because people are fickle and outrage only lasts so long before rebound kicks in.
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Up because the investors weren't the gamers. Gamers are whiny.

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Gamers have proven time and time again that as long as you make a mediocre game in a franchise they like they'll forgive and forget.

Overwatch 2 is going in the wrong direction

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If I was as certain for January from now as I was for now back in early October, I would put my money down on two or three Puts or Calls depending on the direction I believe it'll go. It would have to wait until after my share in another stock is done presumably growing for the next couple weeks, but still. I would like to think Acti-Blizz is collapsing and becoming non-profitable for anyone not betting against it, but there are reasons the stock could rise again, albeit probably not back to 78.00+ per share.

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More sequels and mobile games accompanied with claims of sexual misconduct within the company only means it'll go down

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Depends whether or not they can commit to a new due date for D4 and Overwatch 2. The uncertainty around whether or not they'll be able to push out two of their most-anticipated titles is why the stock is dropping, not anything directly related to the abuse issue. It's very unlikely that enough people will boycott those over the abuse to significantly affect their bottom line, so stock prices should recover once it's clear that they are coming out in a timely fashion.

JixHedgehog posted...

More sequels and mobile games accompanied with claims of sexual misconduct within the company only means it'll go down

I hate to break it to you, but garbage mobile cash grabs tend to make stocks go up, not down. As much as We the Gamers (tm) despise them, mobile spinoffs are generally quite profitable, given their low development cost and significant potential for exploitative monetization. Diablo Immortal will almost certainly make Actiblizz a buttload of money, unless it truly is unplayable (that is, completely unplayable, not just unplayable without whaling, since the latter will still snag a few whales).

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Entity13 posted...

I would like to think Acti-Blizz is collapsing and becoming non-profitable for anyone not betting against it, but there are reasons the stock could rise again

They've already been talking about reorganizing internally and changing some names. That alone would defuse a fair bit of negativity and inspire a push to buy stock with expectations of rising value.

Stock value has more to do with perception than reality.



adjl posted...

I hate to break it to you, but garbage mobile cash grabs tend to make stocks go up, not down. As much as We the Gamers (tm) despise them, mobile spinoffs are generally quite profitable, given their low development cost and significant potential for exploitative monetization.

Mobile games tend to be more profitable than actual AAA titles or major hyped games that gamers view as "successes". It's why so many publishers are looking at mobile gaming as the future of the industry to the detriment of what "gamers" have wanted for 40 years now.

GTA makes more money via microtransactions now than it does from actual sales of the game itself. That speaks volumes to publishers, and helps determine what sort of path they want to take in terms of future game design.

And stock value has always been more about the amount of money a game makes as opposed to how good the game is. Game quality doesn't mean shit to investors. They just want to hear that you turned $80 million in pure profit last year. Show a profit (or the promise of profit), and your stock value will go up. Outrage, scandal, or outright criminal behavior doesn't matter in the slightest unless it threatens the bottom line.
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Cruddy_horse posted...

Gamers have proven time and time again that as long as you make a mediocre game in a franchise they like they'll forgive and forget.

its almost like they care about games more than other things

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Outrage, scandal, or outright criminal behavior doesn't matter in the slightest unless it threatens the bottom line.

Which, in this case, it has, because it's resulted in a bunch of critical staff being removed from major projects such that they're being delayed indefinitely. That really is the only reason, though. If not for that effect, the stock prices would barely have budged aside from some early uncertainty as to whether or not such issues would arise.

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adjl posted...

Which, in this case, it has

It has... but my point is that it may not continue to do so.

If they can smoke and mirror their way back into their potential audience ceasing to care about those sorts of things, it won't hurt the bottom line any more than it already has. Conversely, they pull the "bread and circuses" card and just put out a highly anticipated game that doesn't completely suck and they'll earn back a ton of goodwill from people who don't give a shit about the well-being of devs or other employees.

There's lots of ways to do that. It's arguably much easier for a company to spin PR than it is for them to actually fix problems.
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Blizzard is not going to exist in at most 4 years. We will see how well that goes for actv stock

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Cruddy_horse posted...

Gamers have proven time and time again that as long as you make a mediocre game in a franchise they like they'll forgive and forget.

Yes. This statement works for everything in this world. What a crap of s world this is.

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Blizzard is in trouble. They need hits on their hands, and it's difficult to see how they can deliver. The Blizzard brand doesn't mean what it used to. It's almost toxic to the touch these days. They rush a poor remaster of one of their greatest games, WarCraft III, and never bothered to finish it, 2 years later. The past 2 WoW expansions were not well received by the community, and during the pandemic, where other games gained players, WoW LOST players. They just delayed Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4. And not to mention the PR nightmare that is Blizzard and all their horrible horrible choices and internal culture nonsense. They just announced WoW 9.2 is the end of Shadowlands, and the announcement reeked of desperation, just aping everything from FFXIV and Destiny 2. They need big shake ups at Blizzard. They need to put people that know what they're doing in charge of games. If they could get off their high horse, acknowledge they're fucking up WoW, and lay out a clear 5-year plan on what they're going to do to fix it, and stick to it and actually listen to fan feedback for once, they could turn their prospects around. But that's never going to happen.

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Blizzard has lost so much talent who were driven out by assholes or who were assholes themselves. The entire leadership structure is gutted and needs to be rebuilt.

Activision essentially needs to slap the Blizzard logo onto a whole new company. But at this point, what do they gain by doing that? Blizzard has no goodwill left. It used to be that Activision dragged Blizzard's reputation down, now it feels like the opposite.

Blizzard should probably get renamed and significantly restructured and have any projects worth saving transferred to this "new" studio incorporating whats left of their talent, while dumping all the crap they currently make (WoW).

Or they can be shrunk down to a shadow of their former self and used to publish mobile and low effort microtransaction crap (WoW), and just accept that as their lot.

The latter option is probably more profitable/likely.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Stock value has more to do with perception than reality.

With the way things are, I'd say it's more the other way around, which is why this whole country needs help. Such is the ways of avarice or gluttony. In the end, Activision is going to do what it does to most companies it sinks its teeth into; Blizzard is no god emperor. Blizzard will be consumed as sure as the others, and Acitivision will seek the rhythmic heart of another victim unless the economy becomes too unviable for their continued survival.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

If they can smoke and mirror their way back into their potential audience ceasing to care about those sorts of things, it won't hurt the bottom line any more than it already has.

Oh, they probably don't even need to do that. They've had to can staff that have been outed as blatantly abusive more because of immediate legal threats (keeping publicly identified abusers in management positions is a pretty good way to get sued) than PR concerns, and it's the loss of those staff that has caused the games to be indefinitely delayed. They haven't taken enough of a PR hit to appreciably impact those games' potential sales, so stock prices will recover pretty much as soon as they can commit to rolling them out in a timely fashion.

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