As with the EA thread. 

Some people love them, some people hate them. Why?

I like them. Call of Duty is still fun in moderation, Warcraft and Starcraft are as fun as ever to play and in general the games they release on all platforms are good efforts. They know how to make money and thats always good for the industry.

Despite what they did to Crash Bandicoot, theyre cool.

Activison, i dislike for pumping CoD every year and generally buying and closing studios just like EA. They milk franchises dry and move on to the next big thing without looking back at what they have done.

Blizzard i dislike cause they are arrogant. They used a strategy of making you buy something for it to be fixed (usually the next expansion). Thw whole carrot on a stick strategy. Do you know how long it took them to fix some classes in WoW? The MMO's today launch in a much better state than WoW ever did, but peoples memories are very short.
Generally they ignored fan feeback for many many years and PvP on WoW is a joke. I was never a fan of any of their IP's to begin with.

I don't mind them. I wish they'd be a little more adventurous with CoD, but I don't really play the game, so its not really my place to tell them what to change. I'm mainly interested in the Blizzard side of their business because of Starcraft.

I liked blizzard alot more before the merger. Their older releases seem to be higher quality than their current crop. In no way does that mean their current games are bad. I love me my Starcraft II but I wasnt really a fan of Diablo 3 and WoW has never been my cup of tea either. So apart from starcraft the rest of blizzards current games are rather Meh when compared with their predecessors.

As for activision... I hate them. Worse than EA. All they ever do is milk franchises to death and release yearly sequels until its run into the ground. Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, etc etc. all of these games were amazing ideas and concepts at first but all of them got/get yearly updates and they got/are getting really stale.

For such a huge and successful publisher they are surprisingly irrelevant to me. I can't even remember the last Activision game I played... probably Transformers. Their practice of milking 2-3 IPs at once to the exclusion of all else is dreadfully boring.

And that's the only feeling they can muster from me. Boredom. They're not a particularly egregious company otherwise. As far as I'm concerned, EA has reclaimed the throne as the evil empire of gaming.

Blizzard is a quality studio. They might have messed up a bit with Diablo 3 but they are still excellent in a lot of ways. I'm interested in seeing what their next MMO looks like. As a former WoW player, they really were ahead of the game for a long, long time. It wasn't by luck that WoW was a beast.

The Activision side is immaterial to me, however. I can't remember the last Activision game I played, as military shooters do nothing for me. If you take away CoD and Blizzard, Activision is a lower tier publisher.

I never liked them. Not because they are evil, I just don't like most of their games.

I prefer smaller editors like Nippon ichi. They are not expansionist, they don't try to make the next Best seller. They are just keeping their fanbase and makingb it so they have just enough profit to keep making games. That seems a lot more clean strategy to me

Things I like

They use steam instead of there own annoying digital store.

They are improving the quality of there PC ports.

They don't just do cheap tie in's to film/tv ip's ( Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and Transfomers War/Fall of Cybertron)

They don't waste time with cheap cash-ins to popular gimmicks.



Things I don't like

There only interested in developing sure fire cash cow's and while that worked with the skylanders spyro reboot it means they don't risk jumping into genre's that have already established mega hits i.e western RPG's have Elder scrolls and sandbox have GTA.

I think they should stop selling COD yearly and think up a good and lengthy campaign. Until then, I stay away from COD. I'm not sure if I play any other Activision games.... Come to think of it, I don't. :P

They're actually a pretty even-handed publisher and are decently fair to consumers. The heat they get, somewhat deservedly, is from their apparent lack of creativity (more on the Activision side) and that they seem to have all their eggs in the World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Skylanders, and Starcraft baskets, such that a collapse in consumer appreciation for any one brand could well be fatal.