Anyone that tells you Blizzard gave you 6 years of content for free, they’re wrong. The player base paid for it.
The only paid $40 once player were important in making that money too as the paying player needs a community to exist in. So they should get a say.
Also, Blizzard sold eSport slots at $20mil ish a pop and profited from the ads, selling exclusivity to twitch and youtube based off its large player base.
The fact is they have made more money via post-launch content than initial sales.
I do however think Blizzard has a right to do what they want with the game but people that tell people they shouldn’t complain cause they only paid $40 is reductive and wrong… Any player that has been a part of the game has a right to complain… they are a part of the community and Blizzard has profited from that and plans to continue profiting from it.
This is why I laugh at all these corporate slaves saying Activision Blizzard has to make money to keep the servers up.
They are one of the richest companies in the industry and OW1 is one of the best selling games of all time. Profit was never an issue for them. What changed is they saw other games like Fortnite had predatory business models that allowed them to milk their players dry which led to suits like Bobby Kotick making the call for the game to go F2P.
Except for the fact that a lot of their “customers” are kids blowing their allowances and using their parents credit cards. It’s a predatory business model designed to groom younger players into being future addicts of buying in-game content.
It’s why you rarely see adults who grew up during past generations of gaming give in to this crap. We know better.
Overwatch has sold around 50 million copies by Blizzcon 2019. That’s between $2,000,000,000 and $3,000,000,000.
The best part is since the team was quite small with 100-200 devs and since the game is not too complex the development cost should be under 100M. In comparison: Cyberpunk 2077, a much larger and more complex game, which had a much larger team and took more time than OW, cost 316 million.
The question now is, where has all the money gone? Not much has gone into the development of Overwatch and the new update and PvE, thats for sure.
That’s the only thing blizzard is actually doing well. They kept servers up for old games for like 20 years, like Diablo2, SC1 and WC3. Now they migrated to the new bnet since their reworks, but it’s still much better than other companies would handle such a thing. Saying they need to make money right now to keep OW servers up is nonsense.
For T rated video games with cartoon graphics? You’re reaching hard to shill for Blizzard. Parents shouldn’t have to worry about their kids taking their credit cards to buy skins in a video game with. Most of them likely grew up with games that didn’t have microtransactions in them and if they don’t game anymore then they don’t even know these sorts of practices exist.
It’s generally what parents have to do. It’s the same as kids buying bits, donating and gifting subs on Twitch with their parents credit card, a platform you can use from 13 up.
You can’t expect others to take care of your kids.
Companies cost money to run. A quick google search shows that at the end of last quarter, activision blizzard had about 11B cash on hand.
It is not uncommon for profitable companies to have some cash. I am so tired of these little kids saying, “well blizzard can afford it!” As if, because they have $10, they should use that money to run the company and never ask for money from their customers ever again. It’s literally a company’s job to make as much money as they can. If you don’t like it, don’t give them money.
uhm, of course it costs Gled to run a company and I’m not saying that all of OW’s money has to flow into the game. It should only be more than it was.
Bobby Kottick had an annual bonus of over 200 million (roughly all of Overwatch’s development money) and in addition over 800 employees were laid off.
When the CEO is making record profits while at the same time employees are being laid off because of “too high” costs and a game needs more of the money it makes to stay alive and develop well, then something goes terribly wrong.
I will also no longer give Blizzard any money as a Battle Pass and skins have no value to me as I only buy the right to use it but never actually own it.
I have the physical Origins Edition and the Widowmaker statue and I own both.
Yeah, exactly right. This game was insanely profitable.
This is like if McDonald’s started saying they needed to double prices because they aren’t able to make as much money as Subway. And then a bunch of people start yelling at you if you complain about it, because the poor little corporation needs to make the most money anyone has ever made and you’re just an entitled selfish brat if you complain that your experience is getting worse as a customer.
Oh yee, the idea this needs to happen is silly. It doesn’t.
It will happen, because it makes MORE money. Which will always be chosen over making less.
It’s why I don’t think people should expect huge constant content now, nothing has really changed.
Overwatch was always a live service using lootboxes. Yee, few people buy them, but those people buy alot.
There was an earnings call at one point which stated OW earned 2.4 billion in profit however. That was just several years into the game’s life.
If you want to know where the money went, it went to bonuses for those at the top.
This is a company that gives tier 1 (starting) developers a starting salary around 40k / year where the area of its HQ is one of the wealthiest in its county with one of the highest cost of living.
They aren’t pouring that money back into development. But then, the company is a for-profit model so that is to be expected.
Aaron K did say in a recent interview they have practically doubled the team’s size in the past year.
There is a lot they aren’t showing. In order to meet the content demand for each season coming up, they would have to have quite a bit “done” in the pipeline ahead of time in order to keep pace.
Fortnites is actually the best one now. Between PUBG, Apex, MW 2019, Fortnite and OW2 Fortnites is by far the least terrible. You can level up your battlepass in a reasonable time, prices of items are the cheapest, they routinely had bundles that include a character+axe+backpack+v-bucks for £3.50 or so. Compared to apex and cod where Apex took me 120 hours to max the battlepass and COD’s is pure gametime with 0 missions and no matter how well you play, you gain the exact same amount of progress.
You should check the buy in price for teams in OWL. The amount they had to pay just to compete covers the cost of it 10 fold. Then they got even more from ads and ads on twitch and subs etc.
