My Life As A Gamer: One Week To BlizzCon

Next weekend is BlizzCon. Time to talk about what will likely come up at Blizzard's in-house fan convention.

• There will be nothing for Diablo, again.
• We'll get something about the patches to come for WOW.
• Overwatch will get some esport talk.
• Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone will talk about new content.
• Starcraft 2 gets its swan song.
• Nothing new at all gets announced.

Blizzard is a company in maintenance mode. The company's last jolt of dynamism spent itself a while ago when Overwatch decided to be an esport, following Heroes of the Storm's decision to fight with other MOBAs as such and Hearthstone's own turn to do so. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but this is too often a sign that a company's gone into a managed decline while the talent and capital flows out to where the action goes.

There is no escaping that this lineup is not the powerhouse it once was, especially the older games. Starcraft 2 has been on the downstroke for years, following its entire category of game, and Totalbiscuit's death is likely going to be the event (fair or foul) that will prompt a lot of people to check out of it entirely. World of Warcraft's newest expansion has had reactions that are far below expectations, such that several retention gimmicks have already been deployed as well as intentional leaks on the first patch released, and if not for its cash shop probably would be in much worse shape. Diablo 3 has been on a skeleton crew for years now.

The dynamism has left the newer games already. Hearthstone's been feeling unfun since they began restricting card usage via implementing Wild vs. Standard. Heroes is more fun to watch than play, and the same is true for Overwatch. The latter of those games has also shown that the aim of turning IPs into multi-media brands hasn't done well outside of tie-in novels (that few players read, or even know exist)- not even the comics have been that successful, when tried at all, and don't talk about the Warcraft movie if you don't want to talk about misaimed passion. (When you need to rely on the Chinese to save your movie, you dun goofed.)

"No king rules forever." indeed, and I think that this is a turning point for the company. With the turnover at the top, we'll see if Blizzard has the leadership necessary to regain its momentum and once more earn the glory its been coasting upon for the better part of a decade or more. The big properties need to hit big and hit big soon, and the smaller ones need to either go big or go home.

This is the moment at the party where the savvy sense if there's any potential for fun left, and either they dip out to find where the fun's at or they go for one more big moment before they blow it out and call it a night. We'll see by this time next weekend where Blizzard is at.