The Queue: The call of Allied Races, Acti-Blizz, and the Alpha

This is the second week in a row I’m going to opine on Acti-Blizz, so let’s jump in.

Heh, good question.

There’s a lot of different ways mergers and acquisitions can go down. A common one is where a successful company buys a distressed company and integrates the necessary assets (humans, products, etc) into their environment and continues to produce their main offering, while cutting the redundant resources (ie: no need for two CTOs, two CFOs, etc…). Another is where two successful companies see that they’re on the same trajectory and merge together, this gives them a lot more power in each corporation by diversifying their products, talent, and capital. (And yes, this is a gross oversimplification of M&As, but let’s just go with it for now.)

In Activision-Blizzard’s case, from what we see it was the later — both were successful companies, they were headed in the same overall direction in the marketplace, and their strategies complimented each other versus directly competing with one another. They were able to combine resources and become larger and better because of that merger. Like I mentioned in last week’s Queue, this makes perfect sense, and seems to has worked well. Look at Activision-Blizzard’s stock over the last five years, it’s done really really well.

C0uld Blizzard walk away from Activision if they felt it wasn’t being treated fairly? At this point it’d be suicide for both companies most likely — and remember that they are one unit at the end of the day. It’s also important to keep in mind that a company is not out to please its customers, but its shareholders. Often times this can be done by pleasing its customers, but when you look at the macro level that’s not necessarily the case. Any shareholder of ATVI is in love with them right now; splitting the company would need a crazy good reason to do so, one that I can’t fathom. Going back to my point in the Queue last week, even though as a WoW player I don’t like that Activision games are showing up in it, but if I were a shareholder (note: I own some ETFs, but I don’t believe they’re invested in any ATVI stock) I’d be happy with the decision because it’s getting the product infront of a lot more people. On the micro/customer level it might not make people happy, but on the macro level it succeeds very well. (Again, I am grossly oversimplifying this, so feel free to yell at me in the comments or on Twitter).

But let’s take a step back too; why would Activision, or anyone, screw around with WoW’s creative direction? It’s successful! The market loves success in whatever form it comes in. Sure some expansions fall flat, but then we get a WotLK or Legion and all is (rightly) forgiven; in any business there are ups and downs, and that includes ones built upon creativity and innovation. It’s the same thing with Blizzard Watch too, if I’m being honest. Some months are better than others, we have issues internally with content, creative direction, business decisions, etc… but overall our trajectory remains one of success, and I think it’s going to continue, and we’ve only been around for three years. Blizzard is ancient by comparison (so is Activision for that matter), and any sort of creative fatigue or differences is only going to be temporary. This is where the leadership of people like Mike Morhaime comes into play in a VERY big way. He’s got a vision and set of guidelines that drive the business in the right direction. There’s parallels here to my day job as well, I work for a CEO that has a very similar set of guidance he’s provided and it steers the entire company in the right direction in a very big way. It’s very very cool to see this work over the long term, and both Morhaime and Kotick deserve a lot of credit for this (despite what some members of the WoW community might have to say about Kotick).

So to answer your question; I don’t think what you’re asking is flawed/ridiculous, but I think at the macro level, baring some major financial collapse of the entire industry, this would not happen anytime in the next decade.

I’ve been seeing this kind of question being asked, usually in the form of very declarative statements about how Blizzard is giving up on group X, Y,  or Z, and I think the answer is pretty straight forward:

Blizzard is just doing something they’ve always said they’ve wanted to do. For years (a decade?) we’ve heard that they’d love to have playable Dark Iron Dwarves or other races, and they didn’t have a good way to make it happen, but it was something they were interested in. It’s the same answer we got about flying in Azeroth (to a lesser degree, if you want to get particular): it’d be nice to have, but not something that people were focused on when there were better things to do.

So this idea of sub-races/allied races finally gets around to becoming a possibility, the designers and everyone goes to work fleshing out what needs to be done, and it becomes a thing. Given the amount of content we know that’s coming in the next expansion, this seems a worthy bullet point but does not appear to be indicative of any attention drawn away from end-game content or other development efforts.

At the end of the day this is Blizzard doing what you said at the end of your question: giving us an option to chill and do what we want. I power leveled a void elf priest because I knew I wanted to get back into healing, and I really liked the backstory and look (I’m meh on the heritage armor). I’ll eventually level the other allied races to 110 because it’s not like I’m going to stop playing WoW anytime in the next ten years; but there’s no rush, and I don’t feel that there’s a significant pull away from current content do so.

Install it in its own directory, it’ll be a different folder called “World of Warcraft Beta” (or something similar) and the two environments are completely disconnected. Don’t try to run addons, etc unless you know what you’re doing in a big way — a lot of times things break completely or there’s stuff that’s being done on the client that is just plain “broken” for a bit which prevents addosn from working correctly.