Vicarious Visions Staff Left "Blindsided" By Reported Merger With Embattled Blizzard

Welp, that's the kiss of death. RIP, VV.

That's disturbing.
To surprise workers with news of a major corporate merger during a "light and quick" meeting is shady enough. But to absorb a studio into a company that's hemorrhaging goodwill amongst fans and facing a parade of legal action? That's low.

Such a shame. VV are a quality studio and being folded into a toxic brand like Blizzard has to be painful for the staff.

Maybe the intended response was for them to be excited, but I guess that wasn't the case.

how craven do you have to be to merge with a company like blizzard

@nessisonett Say goodbye to crash...

And yet another studio is ruined by Activision

What did they expect when you sell your soul to the devil?

Maybe Retro Studios can be a new home for these talented developers?

Unfortunately shady practises like this are common place. Many places drop bombshells at the worst and most inappropriate time. You are very lucky if you work at a place that doesn’t have a toxic environment of one sort or another. It’s rampant.

Given all the recent announcements at Blizzard, I would be seriously thinking about leaving if I worked there. And I don't mean the complaints but the stuff they've announced they are doing to "fix" things.

Maybe 200 more people are going to be fired again so that the boss can recover back his money.

Just waiting for the talent to leave and restart vicarious visions or their own studio. Buying a name or studio doesn't mean you're buying talent.

Activision ruins everything. They ruined Guitar Hero. They ruined the FPS genre with COD. They ruined 007 games. They ruined Blizzard. They're actually worse than EA, which is quite the accomplishment. 🤮

Enter the blob, studios like Blizzard are deemed “too big to fail” and end up making smaller studios like Vicarious Visions suffer most.

Activision blizzard just keep getting worse and worse don’t they?

Didn’t they also make at least one of either the X-Men Legends or Marcel Ultimate Alliance games at one point?
They’re a pretty solid studio as far as I’m concerned it’s rough that they just don’t exist as their own entity anymore. And it’s basically just “this is happening byeeee”

Am I missing something here? I thought this merger was anointed a long time ago, before Diablo II remaster was even revealed…

@Tharsman No, the last announcement was that they'd be working as a supporting developer for Blizzard and no longer making games of their own (I.e. subcontracting). Now it's a full merger.

Didn't they already get doomed to be support developers for cod

Good lord, it's like Blizzard is trying to keep looking bad. At this rate, I'm half expecting OW2 to get its console ports cancelled so it can launch as a mobile game.

Wasn't it clear from the Beginning?
Seems a bit naiv to think that they wouldn't do it, after "embedding" them into Activision Blizzard.

Damn that sucks

@InkIdols I’m honestly gutted about Tony Hawk more than anything. The remakes proved that they absolutely had the chops to reboot the series.

@nessisonett yeah,. but now they will become a COD support team, most likely. Why do companies never learn that you donb't want to merge with activison?

@Meteoroid Merging with Activison is the kjiss of death

@Meteoroid Yeah, most companies outside nintendo are like that. Ea and Activison are the biggest offenders of murdering beloeved studios

With all the scandal with Blizzard that makes this marriage in HELL truly marriage in Hell all terms. LOL.........

@Would_you_kindly That was Toys for Bob. Another good studio that recently got Activisioned into the ether.

Dang. This stinks. Not unexpected, mind you, with the announcement that they would be a support studio. In hindsight, this should have been seen as inevitable.

With that in mind, the timing is moronic. As if we needed more proof that not only is Activision Blizzard run by scum bags, they are run by very dumb scumbags. They should have waited until next year for this announcement. I suppose I can understand the “in for a penny, in for a pound” philosophy of this decision, but seems to be very poor timing. Though part of this could be Activision looking to downsize and get people to leave voluntarily so they don’t have to provide any severance pay. All in all, Activision is now the worst company in video games. By a long shot.

Merging with a disgraced studio, not a wise move.

Not all divisions of Activision Blizzard are having sexual harassment, it's a big conglomerate with many studios and hundreds/thousands of people involved, but the whole company is dirty, abusing all workers.

They released two successful remasters, and then suddenly, the company is going to be used as food for Blizzard, one of the worst places of the conglomerate.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why would this be interpreted as a bad thing?

This is what concerns me when developers start getting snapped up by bigger fish. Not so much the exclusivity thing in the case of first-party entities like Microsoft, but the fact that these large entities usually end up ruining the studios they purchase by doing stuff like this irrespective of the wishes of the people who work there.

Activision-Blizzard won't get a cent from me going forward.

@judaspete I love crash bandicoot & spyro wish it wasn't Activision that owned the IPs

Why are they surprised? They work for Activision Blizzard.

@Meteoroid I think alot of people misread the article. They are only losing the name of the studio

@Stocksy "Many places drop bombshells at the worst and most inappropriate time."

It's not unusual for the "suits" to keep their employees in the dark about any number of things until the last possible moment. I'm not saying that it's a good policy, only that it's a common one.

Heard a story about one company that hosted a lavish end-of-year party for the entire company. Live DJ, open bar, buffet, the works. At some point in the evening, the CEO gets up on stage to read off a list of names and then says, "If you did not hear your name, then you have been laid off, effective immediately. You may come by the office tomorrow to pick up your belongings and your final paycheck. Enjoy the party."

Welp, Crash and Spyro had a great run, and went out on a huge bang. But I'm honestly not expecting a game from either franchise again at this point, unless Activision Blizzard is forced to liquidate all their assets at some point. At which point, the IPs hopefully gets gobbled up by Nintendo, but even Sony getting them wouldn't be the worst thing ever.

@BloodNinja Considering all the crap going on with ActBlizz right now, and their shady actions?

This can't be anything good.

As a lifelong Nintendo fan, Vicarious Visions was a developer I was VERY familiar with, having been responsible for so many excellent ports and conversions to Nintendo platforms (THPS2 for GBA, Guitar Hero series for Wii, Skylanders Superchargers for Wii U), as well as some truly great original handheld Spider-Man and Crash Bandicoot games.

Alas, while I loved their work on the Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy and THPS1+2 remasters, the fact is the studio hasn't been quite the same since founders Guha and Karthik Bala left in 2016 to start Velan Studios (Mario Kart Live and Knockout City).

I'm saddened by the news of VV being no more, but I was already planning on never purchasing an Activision Blizzard product ever again until Bobby Kotick steps down, leadership is completely replaced, and all reported issues with company culture are satisfactorily addressed. Instead, I will continue to look forward to what the Bala brothers and Velan Studios continue to do in the future.

VV has been Activision's go-to porting superstar for years, not in the least due to their in-house Alchemy Engine (most famous for X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance) and magic at working RenderWare to the fullest extent of its durability.

Kind of weird they'd sacrifice them in such a dumb move.

VV just got 360 no scoped. GG. RIP.

@BloodNinja The brand name for Activision and Blizzard are at all time lows. They assumed they would not be fully absorbed under new management. I’m not sure how long you’ve worked but any shake up like this gets people worried.

i remember Microsoft dismantled the talented Ensemble Studios that made Age of Empires games. Maybe AoE 4 would be better if Ensemble still had some independence

'The one staffer'. That doesn't actually exists.

More fake news from this site. In about a week. There will be an article about how everyone is happy and no 'one' was blind sided.

what? no snarky comment about diablo 2 on this one? Maybe times are changing.
@Thatsalie according to who?

@anzzjam Been working for 20+ years in different fields. I understand that it could get some people shaken up, but I'm also pretty adaptable under stress so stuff like this doesn't bother me, particularly. I was wondering why specifically this merger had people worried, since I'm not an industry insider.

@MegaVel91 Okay, but why? I don't understand why this particular merger is making people worried. People already have a negative opinion of the company, but I also know that opinion =/= fact.

@somebread
Exactly...according to who?
Who said they were blindsided? 'One staffer'?
It makes for good writing because most people ignore the obvious and focus on the title. Not that 1 unnamed person said something out of hundreds or that this person probably doesn't exists.

@Thatsalie there are multiple employees cited in the source article, so it's not exactly "one person", hell, it goes into detail of how the meeting went down in the first place; i don't know why your first jump is that they don't exist
it's pretty standard practice not to namedrop random employees, especially when venting frustrations

I mean not really...the frustration comes from a name change. People are acting like they were fired or abused. Lol are people upset because they might not get a game they want now or that people still have their job and can support their family? I'm confused.

@Friendly Retro Studios/ Next Level Games the new home for Vicarious Vision employees?

@Giancarlothomaz true, but next level games is canadian though. Perhaps a bit too far off? But maybe

@Thatsalie One of the simplest ways to put it is contractually. Since all old legal documents would mention them as Vicarious Visions studios, they now have to remake the contracts and they don't even have to be present for it. New contracts could destroy them in a myriad of ways and the new contracts could be signed by a new head of "Blizzard Albany" instead of whomever leads the group currently which may...will not be in the best interests of those devs. Obviously personal contracts have to be signed as well but that's a mute point when the head no longer cares what happens to any employee.

@BetterThanVegas that is all an assumption.
Not to mention they could have just let them all go. Which they didn't. So let's chill and stop pretending people are hurting financially.

@CharlieGirl That isn't the case. The merger happened months prior. The Name change was what was sprung on them. For the most part its not a huge deal, they were already a part of Blizzard at that point, the name change was merely a formality.

@Meteoroid Blizzard and Activision are hte same company.

@Noelemahc Probably because the projects they are working on are more in line with blizzard IP than Activision. Not to mention their various remaster projects like Diablo 2.

sigh rest in peace Spyro and Crash...
looks like they are entering the void again...

@nessisonett yep. No doubt about that.

Wow just another terrible and sneaky move by a crap company. I can imagine them feeling all good and festive with their costumes and all then suddenly being pissed and confused. Next thing you know they'll be forced to work on Call of Duty or something.

@Octane_st1m VV working on Call of Duty will probably mean Switch ports because they are, among other things, gods of porting. I have fond memories of Call of Duty on the Wii, TBH, and wouldn't mind some of that.

@Noelemahc Im down for a MW Remastered port as well. Anything after BO2 is just bad tho. Didn't know VV were their Switch port specialists. Are they the ones who did the Overwatch port?

@Octane_st1m Switch ports - no idea, but in the past they were Activison's go-to people for porting stuff to lower-gen consoles. And judging by Diablo 2, they are again.

When they use a "light and quick" meeting to deliver extremely important news, squirt some lube up your ass as quick as possible, bc corporate is coming in hot and dry.

Now that I've thought on it some....this REALLY reeks of Blizzard trying to squeeze as many beloved games under their umbrella as possible, so that gamers won't dare boycott nor allow them to fail. Every games gonna have plenty of ppl who don't care, so with enough big names now under their control, it almost becomes a hostage set up. "Be a shame if anything happened to Crash or Spyro, WOULDN'T IT?"