Visual Concepts not being able to make football, lead them to concentrate on basketball as the NBA told EA "No." from trying to buy up that license. Resulting in Sony competing which lead their baseball game to be the winner with the Show. Pushing Take Two to buy the baseball license to keep EA from locking that up and let anyone develop a baseball game. Making deals with the NFL that lead to only Madden being the only licensed football game.
They purchased player licenses, ESPN license, logos, boxers, etc leading to everyone else being forced out of the market. Then, EA went on a buying spree to kill competition or buy up their rivals. Remember when (if you were old enough) there was competition on the videogame sports market and you had multiple basketball, baseball, boxing, football games, etc on the market?
Kern identifies this as the shift away from Blizzard being a "boutique" developer of niche games for a hardcore audience and towards its current "big corporate" approach to mass market games like Diablo Immortal.** Blizzard went ahead with the firings and they were hugely unpopular and damaging to team morale. In a closed-door meeting of 4 or 5 top Blizzard executives, Kern was told that with WOW's success "we're a real business now." Kern says this was the moment when "big corporate gaming" thinking similar to Electronic Arts began to take over at Blizzard. Instead, he proposed normal performance reviews and firing only those hires who weren't performing up to standards. He also didn't believe that the firings were necessary because WOW was a huge financial success. Kern was opposed to the firing, saying "we told them that we were like a family." The team spent the last 2 years in crunch time and didn't deserve to lose their jobs. Top executives now wanted to do a mass firing of these hires. In the years leading up to launch, Blizzard had hired many new employees. Shortly after WOW had launched, the game had become a huge success, performing much better than Blizzard had anticipated. **Mark Kern, the Team Lead on the original World of Warcraft, and a former producer & developer on Starcraft, Brood War, and Diablo 2, tells the story about the meeting that led him to quit his job.
ApocalypseShadow 10d ago (Edited 10d ago )
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