I mentioned this elsewhere and wondered what others think.
Blizzard is giving free access for a week to Dragonflight
for those who haven’t bought it.
I have never known them to do such a thing before.
A weekend here and there, sure.
A month is significant, and it makes me wonder if perhaps
their expansion sales aren’t all they wish for?
1st quarter of 2023 was very good for them, so I’d be surprised if something’s gone wrong now.
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Had an email offering 3 days free time and 40% off dragon flight.
mind you its only been 2 years. but it was never the cost of wow just my ability to fritter away time when I was playing wow that I decided to stop playing.
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IDK, I suppose it could be seen as generosity, but I haven’t seen that from them ever, so I was curious what others think.
I think games with monthly subscriptions like pay2play MMO will suffer, but F2P games will probably suffer less.
When people can spend less on entertainment due to inflation, subscription services of all kinds tend to get heavily hit.
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Blizzard segment revenue increased 62% year-over-year in the first quarter, with each of Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo contributing to growth.
Source: https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/activision-blizzard-announces-first-quarter-2023-financial
So as far as up to the end of the first quarter this year, it’s correct to say ActiBlizz was winning.
This, however, doesn’t consider the Microsoft acquisition. When it was announced that it was going to happen, the stock climbed almost 6% in a single day; when regulators announced that they were blocking the merger, the stock dropped more than 11% in a single day, bringing it back to March 1 values. It doesn’t seem like the long term value will be greatly effected, but I imagine a lot of investors got burned by the volatility there (possibly including Blizzard executives).
In short, there’s no good reason to assume that Blizzard is hurting due to lack of revenue flowing in from gamers, but the government hurt them pretty bad and they might feel pressure to compensate for that. This is definitely not a time for more bad news on the investor relations front.
I did wonder. I have never seen them offer a week of free content as an enticement.
I think it’s logical to give that free month due to the intense competition over MMORPGs. If they get someone addicted and bought time for the summer vacation they win. A lot of MMORPGs are free nowadays with in game purchases.
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I only got a week free not a month. Either way is nice as it gives me the option to turn the gold I still have into time tokens and convert the tokens into money to go toward Diablo IV.
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You know what? I am so sorry, it was only a week. I mis- read the offer.
Still far more than I have ever gotten from Blizzard.
I will edit immediately, and apologies to all.
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As far as World of Warcraft goes all I can do is offer my own personal observations as somebody who has played since BC
Since wrath I was in a guild that routinely had 50 people show up on raid nights and during the day when it was slow you could still find 10 people logging on. Started to see those numbers decline during BFA. They continued to get worse through shadowlands and as of right now, my guild is completely dead
It seems like they’ve mashed all the servers together including the huge ones like illidan, malganis, area 52, etc.
I don’t care what their shareholders are being told. There’s no way the game is in a healthy spot right now. Maybe ActiBlizz as a whole is doing okay. But you can’t tell me that WoW is fine
When you have to practically bribe players to come back, you’re in trouble
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As noted above, Blizzard is claiming, in black and white, in their quarterly financial reports, that Warcraft as an overall franchise is up on revenues vs first quarter last year. As far as I can tell, that’s just WoW and Hearthstone for the most part — I don’t think Warcraft 3 Reforged is selling like hotcakes right now 
. Maybe Hearthstone’s gain is making up for WoW’s loss, but at the very least it’s implied that WoW isn’t tanking too bad.
If it was found out that Blizzard lied in their financial reports, they’d be subject to some pretty strict regulatory penalties. It’d be a minor scandal. These kinds of things have happened before, but they’re rare. Are you implying that Blizzard is cooking the books?
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with a money withdrawal system based on psychological studies on the players’ actions, losing money is difficult, for blizzard every player is comparable to a hamster in a cage and the algorithms that control every game and above all every fake random event are the hamster’s wheel, you you send money and they study how to make you send the maximum possible, rigged arenas, unfair matchmaking, rigged heroic duels, and if you spend you get a small buff in the rng, like giving the prize to your pet
The wow classic players are probably bleeding out and aren’t moving to the new stuff like they hoped.
I don’t see one week as being very significant. Even if it was a month I would not play it. The players who got 250 free packs probably wasn’t a great retention rate either.
They have done free trials of the game multiple times before tho. I think more than indicating that the game is not performing well, it indicates that Dragonflight is an expansion that is bringing the game to a level of quality and enjoyment that it had long lost. And since they are pretty sure it is the best time for old players to return, they are trying to encourage people to join the party. I think it’s just marketing.
The trial is kinda dung tho, I got my partner to return to try it for free and as soon as you complete the dracthyr intro the game tells you that you can’t level up past level 60 if you don’t buy the expansion. Kind of a pointless trial if you ask me. It would make much more sense if they let you become hooked to the game first before setting a wall in front of you. Like not letting you past level 69 or something.
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They also had a pretty crappy 2022, so maybe they’ve been trying to make up for that and it just took time for the revenue generation ideas to hit the streets.
Game is old, graphics are way outdated no wonder they are needing more subs.
Then again not many MMO’s that have decent graphics are worth playing.
Most of the MMO’s are so old and outdated with crud graphics.
I also do not believe in the buy to play then a sub to play game model.
WoW is one of a very few that are still b2p and requires a sub.
I have always had a problem with that.
one or the other.
I refuse to pay twice for the same game.
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Yes that is absolutely what I am implying. Anybody who still plays can look around and see it with their own eyes
I think they are not being straight with their shareholders when it comes to World of Warcraft
I think the issue with wow is that the players who played for a long time grew up and don’t have time to play and the new players can’t catch up/understand everything in the game. It’s honestly overwhelming at this point how dramatically huge that world has become.
I also suspect, and I can’t confirm this, that pc gaming isn’t nearly as popular as it was when warcraft was released do to the improvements in phones, tablets, and consoles. There’s just much more competition for free time these days.