Troubled Times, both IRL and in Azeroth

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, you'll know that the world's economy has fallen into the twisting nether. Corporate giants and banks have been failing worse than that druid tank I grouped with who forgot to "spec" for faerie fire to pull (hint: THE *$&% TRAINER HAS IT!).

These hard times are not just limited to the real world. Warcraft has seen some setbacks in the quality control department recently.

In the past, Blizzard has always had the mentality of releasing content "when it's ready" and not a moment sooner. Of course gamers being gamers always want their cookies and milk now and will complain about anything that does not go their way. Regardless, Bizzard never differed from their policy of religious attention to detail. Perhaps that is why they have one of the most successful franchises of all time and THE most successful MMO.

However, with the merger of Activision last year that created ActivisionBlizzard (much better name than Blizvision or Actiard) quality seems to be less than top priority. Now don't get me wrong, Wrath of the Lich King has been a phenomenal expansion and arguably Blizzard's best work yet, however, this advancement in product depth and gaming is to be expected. Unfortunately Blizzard seems to be picking up on Activision's old habits regardless of stating that their practice of developing games will not change.

Activision is a corporate monster that is in the business to make money. Proof lies in their history of titles. Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Quake; all are quality games but are definitely used to extract the most money from consumers. Each game has multiple incarnations. For example, instead of offering the upgrades of guitar hero 2 as an expansion to the original, customers have to buy a whole new game! This business model is fantastic for profit if you can get away with it (and they do). Instead of developing new characters and new ideas, they merely have to improve on old ones and just repackage them.

What does this mean for Blizzard? Well a company like Activision wants to maximize profits. As I described above, they want to hook customers on a franchise and make them pay for multiple installments. With the exception of its expansions, World of Warcraft relies on a different principle to make money, subscriptions. Without constant content updates, WoW's user base would melt like a snowman in June. Now that Activision is in the picture, I guarantee you Blizzard is under pressure to increase revenues, especially in this economic recession. The result? Quicker content development in order to maintain subscribers and potentially get new ones. Quicker content means lesser attention to detail.

If were to create a car, I would want to go through engineering R&D, production and testing. Probably the most important step in this process is the testing. Blizzard's content development is similar (albeit I've dumbed it down a lot for this analogy). R&D is like the developers sitting around musing on ideas to incorporate into the game, production is the actual modification of code, and testing is the QA process before a patch goes live. If Blizzard is getting pressure from Activision to pump out content faster, testing is going to get cut off since it's the easiest to "skip". The result is lackluster product that's not what we've come to expect from Blizzard.

Now there have been many blogs discussing the problems with patch 3.0.8 and I'm not going to dive into specifics, but this latest patch has seen glaring examples of a curtailed QA resulting in an immediate mini patch to fix bugs.

If Blizzard does not take the time to develop like they have in the past, I guarantee they will lose customers. Ironically, if Activision is pressuring Blizzard to cut corners, their bottom line will bleed as customers leave. Cutting corners doesn't save you money if you take advantage of those who provide you revenue!