>>717859628 (OP)
Bobby Kotick
The Kotick method of game publishing is to buy up studios and IP, install management and HR who's sole job is to replace the original developers and creatives at the studio with underpaid interns and contractors, then strip out any benefits the company once had.
Blizzard went from a company of 20-40 full time designers, artists, and developers, to a team of 500 cheap interns.
>But wouldn't hiring more shitty devs be more expensive than keeping one good dev
Not to investors, Investors believe in growth at all costs, opperating costs and ROI increase valuation in a company, this is what publishers and investors want, to pump numbers and sell stock, they don't give a fuck about the actual ROI and profits from the company, so if you sell the idea that the company is getting bigger, hiring more employees to work on more projects, it looks good on the books.
Now if you want to talk about what actually happened with Blizzard itself, simply put the original blizzard devs who made all the good games went to work on Project Titan and left a bunch of interns in charge of WOW and SC2. The Scope of Titan was too dumb to actually be realized and there were creative differences between Metzen, a storyteller, and Pardo, a game designer, which really shows when Metzen went off to make his own D&D campaign book while Pardo went on to make a dogshit MOBA.
Without Metzen and Pardo, the other major IPs were left in the hands of interns like Ion Hozzikotas and Ghostcrawler for WOW, Dustin Browder for SC2
Also Blizzard north was shut down, and Diablo without David Brevik just isn't diablo, and blizzard keeps failing to hone in on that gothic horror fantasy that Blizzard North was able to do.
And I can't stress just how bad their current leadership is, Ion Hozzikotas isn't a game developer, he never was
TL:DR, all the old devs are gone and the new devs are retarded interns who have never created an original product or IP in their lives.
