#activision-blizzard

This Sunday (Apr 30) at 2PM, I’ll be at the San Francisco Public Library with my new book, Red Team Blues, hosted by Annalee Newitz.

In blocking Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, the UK Competition and Markets Authority has made history: they have stepped in to prevent a notorious, convicted monopolist from seizing control over a nascent, important market (cloud gaming), ignoring the transparent, self-serving lies Microsoft told about the merger:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/644939aa529eda000c3b0525/Microsoft_Activision_Final_Report_.pdf

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/27/convicted-monopolist/#microsquish

Their treatment of their customers is of course a far lesser evil, they have just been assholes to them. Still just looking at the Diablo series, there are examples of pretty much all the bad practices triple-a game studios towards customers have made in the last 20 years.

Diablo III is infamously one of the first notable examples of always-online DRM, despite the game having a single-player campaign. Now the game servers have stayed up a remarkably long time for Diablo III, because it was widely succesful (the fourth best-selling pc game of all time according to wikipedia with 20 million copies sold). But requiring a central server to play will mean the game will eventually die when the server is shut down. And not “die” in the sense that you can’t buy it anymore or can’t play multiplayer, it will die in the sense that you can’t ever play it at all anymore. This is despite the game having a substantial single-player campaign. This is a terrible practice for game preservation and I encourage you to join this campaign against it.

And Diablo III also had a foretaste of the predatory monetization to come, with the infamous real money auction house, that was so bad that it got shut down by Blizzard after a few years. But it was just a prologue to what would come with the next major installment: Diablo Immortal.

Immortal is a mobile game that became a meme right from its announcement. That was because the announcement that it would be mobile-only was greeted with boos at Blizzcon. And we should keep in mind that Blizzcon is a convention just for Blizzard games that cost 199 dollars to attend at the time (now it costs 299 dollars), so a very receptive audience to Blizzard’s bullshit, and Blizzard still got deservedly booed.

And then the actual game released, and it had such predatory monetization that it got nicknamed Diablo Immoral. I use the site macrotransactions.org, which grades games according to the presence of predatory monetization and they gave Diablo: Immortal a well-deserved F.

And this trend has only continued with the recent Diablo IV, which is again always-online and has predatory microtransactions.

Not that Diablo II is free from Blizzard bullshit. Both the original and remastered versions of Diablo II can only be bought from Blizzard’s own website, which I wouldn’t begrudge them if they didn’t also have DRM.

The installer for the original Diablo II only requires a key code you either got from the CD or e-mailed to you when you purchased it digitally. So not so bad. The original Diablo II however kinda shows its age and has always been a janky game, despite patches it still has serious bugs like the lying character screen. And the game shows its ages otherwise, despite the excellent art design, the game is also resolution locked to 800 x 600, and that’s only after you install the expansion. And the base game plus expansion still costs 20 dollars, despite being more than 20 years old and not properly patched.

It’s the kind of game that deserves a remaster. And Blizzard thought the same and released a remastered version in 2021, Diablo II: Resurrected that attempts to fix these issues. But the catch is that it also upped the DRM, this time the game requires you to “check in” online at least every 30 days, so the remastered game is just as doomed as III and IV when the servers shut down.

You just can’t win with Activision-Blizzard. The only Diablo game that actually feels worth getting legitimately is the first Diablo, which you can buy drm-free on GOG, and reasonably cheap too when there is a sale.

And it’s not that the games are bad either. They have very talented programmers, writers and artists working for them (which they treat horribly). Diablo II despite the jankyness is a great game, a very good sequel to the excellent first game that massively expands the scope of the series in interesting ways while remaining true to the first game.

I recently watched Noah Caldwell-Gervais’s excellent franchise retrospective video on the series, and he has played all the games, and finds much to praise about even the most reviled entries of the series. Even Diablo: Immortal, despite being a mobile game with predatory monetization, is a full-fledged entry into the series, a proper meaty action RPG with lots of story content. We will actually lose something valuable when the servers are shutdown.

The problem with Blizzard is not that they make bad games. It’s just that they are an evil company, which mistreats its workers (especially the women), ruthlessly monetizes their artistic efforts, and DRMs so badly that it will eventually destroy the games entirely once they are no longer profitable.

At this rate I can at best recommend getting Diablo I from GOG when it’s cheap in a sale, anything else is too heavy with Blizzard’s nonsense to really recommend. And "gamer boycotts" are kinda worthless, so I won't call for one, but I'll admit supporting that kind of company is worth questioning.

First off, AI “art” is an abomination, and the only reason to not abandon the idea entirely is because the singular way it can be useful is as a tool an actual artist employs to make some minor corrections, like noise cancellation. That’s it. But simply writing better algorithms for those might be all that’s needed..

Using it to generate imagery (and by that I mean, it’s stealing things it copied from prior inputs) is lazy, stupid and devoid of any kind of soul or meaning. Every single other potential use is harmful. Unless it’s going to be used as this sort of tool, it should be burned in the bin with those and we can all move on. Not all tech is worthwhile; need I remind you of self-destructive DVDs?

In my world, one of my old routers died after six years of heavy service, so I got this beast, the GT-AX11000, and the performance improvements are so tremendous I’ve made it my home’s primary connection point.* Not only am I getting the full download speeds I’ve been paying for instead of slightly lower, sometimes it’s even a few megabits higher on wired connections (like to my PC), and the triple-band setup helps devices throughout the house stay connected seamlessly. Very happy with it, and before you ask, yes I use the Merlin firmware suite as well. Being able to switch back to the standard UI instead of that stupid “gamer” one it defaults to would be reason enough!

* = The router & cable modem are on the 2nd floor in a corner, so I have another access point and a repeater boosting signals downstairs due to it’s location not being optimal. We have cameras outside that also require a connection, so the WiFi radius needs to extend beyond the house on top of that. Physically moving it makes interference worse as there’s an insane amount of traffic for a suburban area, and also results in wires going all over my room, so it stays put.

Slaver, son of slavers continues to fuck the birdsite. Here’s his plane status, btw. I’d care about his privacy if he gave a damn about ours. And don’t tell me the richest man in the world can’t afford anything; he could literally solve all sorts of global issues single-handedly, but won’t. None of them ever will. Fuck ‘em.

Grifter uses NFTs to launder money. Film at 11. The less I have to talk about that loser, the better...

And then, you know, I’m enjoying the new Warcraft expansion, happy with the new patch’s raid boss (!) in Fallout 76 and it’s associated Nuka-Cola themed content with most of it actually new (!!) instead of copied from 4, and all that.

Like, if you honestly believe that the same people on the Overwatch dev team have the same power to make the meaningful, systemic changes needed at Activision-Blizzard to fix the studio’s problems, you’re a naive fool.

Activision-Blizzard put out a terrible, no-good, very bad tool that is quantifying diversity, and while it’s nice they’re talking about diversity there are so many issues with this that show they clearly haven’t learned the “nothing about us without us” and no marginalized peoples actually weighed in on this.

But, the countless issues with it aside (Zarya, tall and butch, has more body diversity than Torbjorn the super short one-eyed amputee?? Russian is more ‘culture points’ than  Swedish??) if you dive into the article you see another interesting screenshot.

There are some additional issues here, in particular the confirmation that diversity is being boiled down into pre-filled drop down menus worth more or fewer “Diversity Points.”  (Also let’s take a moment to acknowledge that We’re Taking This Seriously, We Swear Blizz is still internally calling the character McCree.)

BUT what I want to talk about right now is the last image, showing correlations. 

Let’s look first at just the sexual orientation category where we see many 0s. We can see here that Blizzard does not consider any supports or tanks to have diverse sexual orientations. They consider an equal number of male and female characters to have diverse sexual orientations (76 and Tracer, could also have additional equal numbers and/or additional that have no gender identity) and that all of them are DPS heroes. There are approximately twice as many “neutral” diverse sexual orientation havers as “good” and none are evil. 

Ergo, it seems that Blizz sees no correlation between sexual orientation and evilness (All Blackwatch = Straight), or support or tank (non-DPS heroes = straight).

Additionally, we can see we apparently have a high correlation between a gender: woman character and gender identity, but none for male. This likely means no trans men in the cast and more than one marginalized gender identity for “gender: women” tagged characters. (Obviously this is a weird/bad way to label this comparison but it’s Blizz’s words.) Gender identity diversity correlations are higher among supports than the other roles, but are represented in every role. They are slightly lower among neutral characters. With this (combined with the previous screenshot showing that identities are “scored” and absolutely knowing Blizz is stupid enough to consider non-binary as worth different numbers of points as binary trans) I believe this sets us up for a non-binary Moira (her colors are the flag, after all lol), only cis men, and some more non-cis women somewhere in the cast. Given that the first screenshot of this tool showed Zarya with a low but not zero score on gender identity I’ll throw her in the mix as our gender identity tank woman.

I also should probalby acknowledge that what is very likely happening is Blizz has not assigned many characters to be anything but cis-het and they just go in and find someone and give them it after the fact and write the lore if they need to get some more diversity points (quite literally now with this system), so it’s possible these correlations won’t be true of the same cast in the future, but it does paint a picture of how Blizz currently labels their cast.

No developer should delist and delete their original game to force people to play what looks like an inferior sequel.