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coolbeans said:
Ok... I'm not a fan of how Mark Kern's tweet either, but the implications with "dev" are outright obnoxious. You're talking about someone who was an old-school Blizzard dev, including StarCraft, Diablo II, & team lead for WoW, who was partly inspired to leave based on moral grounds. It'd be nice if we just stuck to casual dunking of a dumb tweet versus this attitude. |
Yeah, same here. Kern's tweet was stupid, and it's pretty obvious that it is motivated purely by a personal dislike of Microsoft, but the man is still a game dev, putting it in quotations seems unnecessarily rude. Yes, his next game (Em-8er) is taking awhile to release, but he is still a game developer, a rather legendary one who directed vanilla WoW and was head producer on Diablo 2. He is also a man who chose morals over money, deciding to leave when he learned that Activision intended to buy out Blizzard because he knew that Activision's ownership would destroy the culture at Blizzard, and his prediction proved accurate, they transformed from a legendary developer into what they are now, a rather soulless company that injects microtransactions and battlepasses into everything, one that has over time driven away many other classic Blizzard devs including Chris Metzen and Overwatch creator Jeff Kaplan.
I think it is pretty obvious that the reason Mark Kern is angry about the ABK buyout and now attacking Xbox every chance he gets is because he personally sees some parallels between Microsoft buying ABK, and the original Activision-Blizzard merger that prompted him to leave the company. He clearly still cares for Blizzards IP's and what remain of his old friends that still work there, and is worried that Microsoft will do even more damage to them than Activision did, via even higher levels of monetization to go alongside day one Gamepass releases. I personally think he is wrong, I think Microsoft ownership of Blizzard will be a boon for the Blizzard developers and their IP's, but I understand why he is worried, because Microsoft could very easily decide to take the greed route at some point in the future. I just wish he would stick to those talking points instead of finding increasingly stupid things to criticize Microsoft/Xbox over, like a title screen being too static and simple for his liking.
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