Reminder:Blizzard made $1 billion + post launch

General Discussion
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Reminder that to people who keep comparing the content OW puts out vs. other games that are live service and use the monetization model people don’t want OW to also have, some of which are even more predatory by locking characters behind paywalls, that lootboxes only made 1 billion over 2 years. In that same time span other games make close to 4 times that.

Reminder that despite lootboxes being their only secondary monetization that they are actually doing everything in their power to make buying them completely obsolete. They give them away for free, they give you coins for dupes, skins make a return and there is even an event where every skin in the game is available again at a 3rd of the coin price, that you again get for free.

Reminder that OWL and OW are not the same thing, they don’t fund each other. They are two different teams with their own budgets. Esports are also an advertisement for the main product, OWL is not a moneymaker for OW, it’s a glorified ad.

Reminder that the OW team has about tripled in size for OW2.

Reminder that apart from the report on lootboxes that it made 1 billion over 2 years, we haven’t heard much about how well OW is doing afterwards which likely isn’t a good thing.

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Tell me the development, marketing, post-launch, wages, etc. The model worked for 3 years, and then it was budget cuts m8.

I’m 36. Battlepasses are the best mtx model so far.

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Keep in mind, their are a lot of costs going into a game at a given time. like paying a full time employee can go from anywhere between $30,000 to $150,000 depending on the position and seniority. more in some cases.

like a team as low as 30 people can cost some where between 900,000 ~ 4,500,000 to maintain a year. And now the ow team is over a 100 employees. so that’s somewhere between 3,000,000 to 15,000,000 a year (flat 100). Let alone a 6 year period. not to mention the costs of making ow which was around the smaller team of 30 ish people for quite a few years with no income. The failed project titan that sunk 100s of millions a year to produce. Give or take inflation for a given year, as new worlds at the moment has reported spending of 500 mill a year. (but that is on the higher end)

That not including advertisement costs which can be a quarter of a games budget if not more. The upfront cost of making the owl which is money that’s going back into the esport’s players, stadiums, advertisements mostly. And has suffered in the keeping peoples attention part for a bit now, and do to recent events even advertisers.

Not to mention these stadiums were left empty the last couple of years, without the benefit of having live ticket sales. That their mostly still paying off.

So a lot of that isn’t going into ow it’s self, if anything most of that is going into activations bank account. Not into team 4 the developers of OW, to do what they want with.

the fact that OW made Only a billion or so back, in 6 years. Might have not exactly have payed back the sunk cost of it all, or at the very least if it did well it’s only in recent years that it made that money back.

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Yes.Yes they did.

But you still have shills vomiting the same excuses.

It keeps the developers from starving.
It keeps the game alive.
It could be worse.
Paying a one-time price makes you a freeloader.
Get with the times, your way of thinking is antiquated.

All jabberwocky.

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It’s a business, not a charity. They could have made trillions of dollars from OW1, that doesn’t mean they’re obligated to deliver OW2 for free.

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So it’s okay to be a little evil, and greedy, gotcha.

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What’s evil and greedy about charging money for a product, a product they’re going to let you play for free if you don’t care about cosmetics :clown_face:

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Reasonably priced doesn’t exist in these type of games, that’s the problem.

Anything (and I mean skins), over 5 quid in this game is stupid.

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CAAAAAAAAAPPPPPP

The majority of revenue from MTX is from whales, the bulk of which are retired dudes in tech, finance, oil, and stuff like that. Generally, kids aren’t rich.

Is there some element of trying to get kids hooked early so that they will eventually spend a lot of money? Sure, I won’t deny that - but kids and teens don’t have money, and contrary to what you may believe, the majority of parents aren’t willing or able to let their kids max their credit cards for Fortnite, and most of these kids will not eventually become rich. It’s not the most ideal business plan.

It’s the rich dudes that don’t care about money but want to be the best, look the coolest, have everything now, whatever it may be. Specifically - it’s the ones that want everything now. Most of in-game sales come from convenience, the “I could play the entire campaign so I can do late game raids, or I could buy the skip so I can do it now”. Cosmetics make up an incredibly small amount of revenue compared to most other sources, on average.

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Well, I don’t know how much predatory Fortnite is/isn’t, but they definitely are going after that model right now. It’s like OW1 was a testrun, with it being “regular” bought game. Granted, Fortnite wasn’t as big in 2016 (or was it not even out yet?), but pretty sure TF2 was alredy free-to-play. Blizz definitely wanted to see if they can pull off a team shooter first and now it’s full speed ahead into the battle pass model.

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Pretty sure the devs are not even near to a situation of starvation even if all the money goes to the higher ups.
And speaking of that some players can’t even afford a cell phone judging by the recent threads so not sure who is near starvation here.

Not an excuse.

The biggest nonsense of the decade. I guess everyone who buys AAA games is a freeloader now.

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Made over a billion post launch not only a billion. If you have include everything it’s 2-3 billion.

Your point is some napkin math to say Blizzard can do what it want. It can do that anyway.
Point of the post isn’t about how a company will try to make a profit.

The point is debunk the incorrect argument that blizzard gave the playerbase free content for 6 years and because of that we got our more than our monies worth so people aren’t entitled to an opinion.

Blizzard profited on the content they add so it wasn’t free just not everyone payed for it.
Blizzard are using the community to make more money so anyone in the community is entitled to criticize them.

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Breaking news: Online games cost money, gamers outraged.

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Lol. Very misleading post it never takes into account or explains how revenue works after releasing a big ip or any of the pieces and players involved with its release.

Like blizzard just got a vault of a billion dollars somewhere looney tunes style. Lol.

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My point is that Ow was a huge money sink for a while now do to it’s connection to project titan. Not that they should be able to do whatever they want with it. (Be it that I am and was all for the sequel plans, including the PVE.)

And to add to that point, it was kind of obvious that OW was bleeding players for dozens of different reasons. Even before the content drought. So even if it did make billions, it could easily go the way of most modern mmo’s and simply fade out a decade in it’s life span.

your are more then welcome to state your opinion.

However people are also welcome to criticize such to an equal extent.

Like OW is one of the most content rich shooters on the market, it did run for over 6 years before being reworked into ow2.

That money put into it did get people a ridiculous amount of content for the base price of $40, with micro transactions giving people either loot boxes or OWL skins. Which is content they did receive for said price.

That transaction didn’t promise anything past that. Especially it didn’t promise that the game will be handled exactly the way you wanted it to be.

The game you bought is still their, the content from launch is still their even if it has been changed at different points. Which is more then I can say for well a lot of live services people collectively dumped billions into, that are simply gone forever now. With maybe a small handful of people trying to keep it alive via fan servers.

Keep in mind you effectively payed for lifetime access to a service, and products that enhance that service. What exactly that service is or provides can change at any time, as long as it doesn’t stray away from being a hero shooter. Like if it was suddenly a tetris knock off tomorrow. You do have the right to sue at that point funny enough.

So criticize away it’s just that if your argument is I put money into it, so I want it a certain way. Or that blizz make x amount of money so their should x amount of stuff. Is not exactly one that holds water.

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No, you paid for the original game and helped support DLC which was on top.

Which literally has zero to do with the deal they made with the playerbase.

No its 100% correct. I do however defend their right to pressure them to a live-service model if that’s what they want and accept what goes with it like Battle-Passes, etc. As Papa Jeff said, be careful what you wish for…

Ah … community… is that the angle? No, you are just individuals making a buy, you got more than fair value over six years, and no, you are not directly therefore “entitled” to make calls about the game going forward. It’s their game, you just got a license to play it. It’s okay to profit from a community provided you give something of value in return, they did, that doesn’t turn into some extended social contract.

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So they only have the right to complain if they want a live service.

Maybe if you want to make a point worth considering you might not want to contradict yourself.

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LOL how on Earth did you come up with such a though process? I said nothing remotely on that order. Complain all you want but to act like you didn’t get a fair deal on your first $40 is a joke.

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Makes it extra annoying that theyre about to lock people out of the game because of their type of phone too :))))))

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This!

Between Loot boxes (which ALONE generated over 1 billion in sales by 2019 - would have been a lot higher if Blizzard kept them updated + didn’t have most of the developers jump ship for OW2), OWL (contracts with teams, players, broadcasting platforms), and merchandise (funkos, figures, clothing, plushies, etc.)

OW1 was HIGHLY profitable and a very successful franchise. You don’t just measure how much money the game generates in base box sales because a game like OW which receives constant updates (or rather is supposed to receive continuous updates) + is constantly growing, and relies on that constant growth to generate money.

Higher ups at Blizzard decided to be greedy and double dip by making the stupid decision to force OW2 instead of updating OW1 and they severely damaged their relationship with the player base.

But anyone who goes “you got all that content for free” is incredibly dumb, because the updates most certainly weren’t “free” because the content kept the game fresh in player’s minds and contributed to them spending $ on the franchise.

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