Anyone with any sort of bus dev experience can see the grift here. (That’s grift, not G rift).
It’s about showing papa Phil that the few IPs that blizzard can say are profitable are more profitable than they really are (by means of active user #s). It was all a bullet point on a PowerPoint slide to justify the acquisition.
MTX is a way to ensure, that when blizzard continually fails at producing quality seasonal content, that the dollar figures showing profitability are within the investor report expectations.
What would be interesting is if we could get a disgruntled blizzard employee no longer bound by NDA to share just how much time is spent on content development/balancing/itemization vs. MTX centric activities.
I doubt it’s ratio is as low as 3:1 in favor of MTX work.