Activision Blizzard has arguably spent the last 9-10 months blundering and torching themselves.

Since October 2018, their stock price started reflecting this, plunging from $82.50 near the start of that month down to $48 right now (just over half of its peak).

Arguably, they have Bethesda beat for the "Video Game Megapublisher Financial and Reputational Self-Immolation 2018" awards.

On August 14, 2018 there was the disaster known as World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth - arguably the worst expansion ever in the history of the game. All classes and mechanics dumbed down to near-mobile standards, fundamentally broken item and class design, extra frustrating RNG and grind for item upgrades, and the most incoherent mess of a storyline that ever disgraced WoW. I can't remember any time in the history of WoW that I saw more furious posts on the official forums calling for the producer to be sacked.

This doesn't seem to have impacted their stock price immediately that much; its value dipped slightly before surging over September 2018. Between October and their next massive blunder in early November, their stock had already started sliding. I don't know the specifics although it could be a delayed backlash against WoW:BfA as players give it 2-3 months for evaluation before figuring out how badly it sucks and cancelling their subscriptions.

On November 4, the solid waste hit the inverse wind turbine. Tone-deaf Blizzard Entertainment (part of Activision) disappointed a significant part of their fan base when they announced Diablo Immortal as the next in the franchise - specifically designed for mobile. People were expecting a Diablo 4 and instead get this cheap mobile "Made in China" (TM) crap expected to have ridiculous microtransactions and/or gacha due to Blizzard teaming up with Chinese gaming giant NetEase. I've been looking forward to a really good ARPG on mobile for a while (and generally mobile games that don't suck). Unfortunately this seems like a game that could have been promising and instead Blizzard decided to ruin it with NetEase. FAIL.

A week later (according to a post on Reddit - see https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/9vtxd0/blizzard_stock_is_down_20_since_diablo_immortal/ ), their stock was down 20%. Further reading: search "blizzard announces diablo immortal and stock tumbles" in Google.

In mid-December, Blizzard once again proved that it was completely tone-deaf, shifting developers out of their "Heroes of the Storm" MOBA and scrapping plans to make an e-sports league out of the franchise. This had arguably the worst negative consequences out of any of these blunders mentioned as people were expecting an e-sports league. Some invested in hiring announcers and other groundwork required to run a league, and when Blizzard announced it was scrapping these plans (with no advance warning), these investments lost all of their value.

Even worse: people who planned to make a partial career out of this MOBA (competitive players, announcers, analysts, venues, team merchandise designers) were suddenly out of a job. Obvious moral of the story: don't invest in Blizzard e-sports. For further reading, type "blizzard cancels moba esport" into Google.

By now, Blizzard is reeling and looking like the village idiot who just figured out he was on fire and reached for a flamethrower (instead of the nearest extinguisher) to put the flames out. Later in December, Kotaku and Eurogamer started reporting that Blizzard was offering more employees money if they would voluntarily leave, and giving its finance department more leeway to cut spending. According to an article on PC Gamer, this buyout program was originally intended for senior customer service representatives (this explains why the modern WoW ticket and reporting system is specifically designed to make it as difficult as possible to report a problem) - and now it has been expanded to QA and IT - departments you should almost never consider cheaping out on if you're an online gaming company like Blizzard. QA is quality assurance - testing, finding, and sometimes fixing errors. If you lose your QA, chances are all of your future games are going to be an error-riddled piece of crap. The IT department is needed to maintain company computers, servers, and connections - obviously an online gaming company doesn't want to lose this, except if it happens to be Blizzard. For further reading, type "blizzard pays employees to leave" into Google.

The most recent news: Last week, Bungie split with Activision, likely contention over the future of their Destiny franchise. This move was widely celebrated among their fans - who often blame Activision for all the problems that plagued Destiny 2 until the recent "Forsaken" expansion. This news shook Activision stock again causing it to tumble. For further reading, type "bungie splits with activision" and "bungie splits with activision, activision stock tumbles" into Google.

I post and read on Reddit under a different name, and all I can tell you is Diablo Immortal was a catalyst that woke up the sleeping giant this is Blizzard fans who no longer care.

I stepped away from the whole situation back in December, but for Blizzard to just keep digging itself deeper, I have to blame this on the forced retirement of Mike Morhaime and his buddy who co founded Blizzard taking over. The tea leaves spelled doom earlier in 2018, but this guy who took over is a real piece of work. Because of him, Blizzard is shifting its focus almost entirely to mobile and away from pc/console gaming and esports.

He claims it's because his devs are tired of "working on big projects". I'm not so sure. Though the guy who announced Diablo Immortal really did seem to think a bunch of pc and console gamers would love it.

They've been dying for a long time. I do enjoy some of their games, but I think they lost touch.

Diablo 3 was playable, but it was the first blizzard game that really told me that they were done with giving what people wanted. It was a corporate machine's Excel spreadsheet made into a graphical story-lite soulless game. They touted sales when people complained about the story, gameplay, auction house and graphics. That's a company's response. Not a passionate player's or designer's response.

Wow was dying and dead ages ago, held aloft by relationships, not the game.

And with all of that wow money, I don't think they capitalized correctly.

We'll see what the future holds. I don't think they're ready to be done. But they need to wake up.

Activison + Snow has been floundering for a very long time.

Honestly, for me to walk away from WoW and not even really crave it at all, it's telling. I've been a WoW gamer since 2005.

It has always been a massively overvalued pig stock. The question to ask is not why it is dropping, but why wasn't it dropping much earlier?
Even now this pig is worth 36 billion at yearly earnings of 1b at the best of times and a negative net book "value".

Don't leave out EA the competition for that title.
Battlefield V has been a disaster - which is awesome. Soderlund got canned - which is awesome, too bad he got a severance package at all and worse that it was in the millions.
Belgium kicked their ass in loot boxes.
Bioware is on life support until Anthem crashes and burns.

New consoles in 1 to 2 years.
Perfect time to clean up for companys long time in the game like A/B.

Never expected any stuff from Diablo before the next gen is announced. Never understood what those guys thought they will get.
A part of A/B isn't big into service games. Bungie understood that Destiny has to be one too be successfull, while A-part for sure liked the idea to not pay the montly costs of Bungie while regrouping.

In fact they get into position for the next gen. You can be sure they know more and rumors say, that devkits are already out there.

That Blizz was stupid at reading the people is another thing. But thats the current way of more than one big dev. See Battlefield or Bioware.

dnt forget bethesda is also on notice aswell cos of the fallout 76 disaster on PC, its not just activision/blizzard who need to wake up its all the big triple A companies that need to wake up, so please dnt just paint blizzard as the super villain when all the other companys have had big diasters so please mention them aswell

I wouldn't be too sure about that, most companies are aware that 'traditional' gamers aren't fans of casual stuff via their focus groups, surveys and the like- they just don't care if they think the casual stuff will make them more money. Indeed, Bobby Kotick made a bit of a thing out of being deliberately antagonistic- or more charitably, blunt/ honest- towards gamers over some unpopular decisions made with CoD and other Activision franchises that were designed to make money over improve gamer experience.

In many ways shareholders are the market even supposed fan orientated events are aimed at, especially in terms of big announcements, and if they have to pick pleasing one group it will be the shareholders. End of the day an announcement had to be made, since they're a listed company they couldn't fudge more palatable news so they had to make the best fist of it they could. Mr "Don't you guys have phones?" would have definitely hoped for and probably expected a more muted negative reaction than he got, but I doubt he had too many if any illusions about it being a popular announcement and being carried off stage on the shoulders of grateful fans. He's not going to come out downcast and disappointed though, he's always going to try and be positive and spin it in hope it will lead to a more positive response.

Activision overall has looked like an overinflated balloon for years now. They rely on too few titles and have almost no successful IP coming through in case of failure. They've made money consistently though and the share price has been high, so no one important has cared.

seem to forget that warlords of draenor had next to no content 3 raids and ashran for PVPers, classes dumbed down so did you enjoy having 30 -70 keyinds even with macros? and you talk about story, the story in wow is pretty good atm compared to time travelling back into the past in warlords of draenor, RNG and grinding thats what an MMO game is all about if you dnt like that go play another game genre and you go to the offcial forums to see rage posts lol, the forums for wow have always been toxic and fulla of little kid whiners, do some reasearch into wow just cos a few people hate it DOESNT MEAN EVERYONE DOES

and no im not a blizzard whiteknight i do agree there can be improvements made but its not as bad as your saying

ea, activision and ubi are dying and it makes me hard.
anyone trying to debate me dont even bother.

Same.

What saddens is that there is still a significant playerbase in wow and they will get hit harder and harder by actiblizz (in the form of cut content, even more intrusive cash shop etc.) as the company's stocks continue to plunder.

Isn't this the perfect example of a small company run by passionate developers making good games, getting success, becoming a major publisher in the video game industry, and then taken over by managers, marketeers, shareholders, etc., to change their goals and make money through any mean they deem necessary ?