Sad but true ...
@AC: You're right.
The bigger a games company gets, the less willing it becomes to innovate, and starts lying to itself that what customers REALLY want is last year's game with new graphics and another new annoying game mechanic (usually removing LAN options and enforcing multiplayer through centralized laggy servers). Worse, they support and spread this lie by churning out the same crap year on year, until there's almost NO CHOICE for a consumer apart from their drivel.
The problem is that they throw increasingly big budgets at a game, most of which ends up in marketing and product placement, NOT in actual software development.
It's gotten so bad that marketing (well,management decides; marketing just has near-full control of the choices presented to them) not only decides what gets developed, but also when it's going to be released, regardless of what state it's in (waiting till the "gold" release of a game isn't just about saving money anymore, it's usually the first version that runs without too many crashes and major bugs) - and then charge an outrageous price for it.
Yes, I've seen this up close; smaller game companies are beginning to emulate their bigger counterparts believing that "release early, patch often" will actually enhance their reputation .... of course, the contrary is true but they're so stuck in the lie they probably couldn't change if they wanted to.
I'm not going to cry about Blizzard - they're getting exactly what they deserve, and should have gotten it long ago; they're no more than a name with a famous past, and little future other than to churn more content for their "star" title.
What a fate for what once was one of the most innovative game studios.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
