how about a combo currency trickle and the weekly arcade lootbox rewards brought back.
As far as I understood the ban, it was on monetizing lootboxes, as in, charging people for undisclosed contents and effectively circumventing gambling regulations in those countries.
From what I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with offering free prize packs that give you a random bobbin, since the intrinsic value (zero) is the same as what you paid for it (also zero). I’m not sure if they’d be able to offer them as a premium battlepass perk, since that is a paid format and may run afoul of the same gambling regulations.
could just… not spend the Money, but that takes willpower.
What you’re not happy with your 60 weekly coins? I mean come on thats one free skin every eight months :P. /S nah they are not gonna give you anything, they are hard in for the short term cash grab. They gotta boost up those revenue numbers prior to the MSFT buyout.
Well that is the point of my suggestion. This would be for everyone whether they have the BP or not. Most free to play games have some form of trickle system so they can easily justify the shop to the players which gets people to willingly buy more anyway.
They are only banned if you can buy them with real money. Also you can get around it by doing what valve did and showing people what is in their lootbox before they open it but you cannot open another loot box until that one is opened.
More than the legal climate, they weren’t making money with the lootbox model anymore. Everyone who played semi-regularly had most of the skins they wanted and any regular play had most of the skins. I think most of the late day OW1 revenue came from selling smurf accounts. It was an unsustainable model. The playerbase was shrinking. The game wasn’t getting updates.
I remember so so many “lootboxes are bad and gambling and too expensive” posts from years ago on these very forums. When I would defend them as being essentially like buying packs of baseball cards, people praised fortnite’s BP and shop where you could see what you were getting. Funny how times change things.
Yes. They were…
Nope. It wasn’t sustainable. It was a huge dollar franchise 2016-2018 (making more than Warcraft) but by the end it had dropped precipitously in revenue. Wasn’t even listed as one of Activision Blizzard’s top franchises anymore on . 2019, 2020, and 2021, it was lumped in with THPS and Diablo as “Other Games” - in 20201 in total accounting for less than 10% of revenue. It used to be listed with the big boys like Warcraft and COD, but dropped into the "other games’ categories. Not to mention that Blizzard’s total revenues and monthly active users were at an all time low in Q1 2022.
I honestly think lootboxes were fine, we just needed better ways to earn them and better currency rewards.
You know basic incentive stuff that every game has to make you want to, idk… Play the game.
I remember that document and, while I agree that OW made less than other franchises, that document was weird
In the same way that Overwatch was bundled with other games, CoD was bundled with Candy Crush which is essentially the biggest game in the world.
And even though the bundle that included OW was around 10% of profit, that was around a billion gross and around half a billion after subtracting taxes, fees, etc.
Additionally, pretty much all the games in that bundle were on life support or not updated…and they still made half a billion dollars together
EDIT: Additionally, that bundle saw a profit increase even with a dwindling player base
That is a huge drop off from where they were. It wasn’t sustainable. They were still cranking out skins. Why were they making just a fraction of what they were. People weren’t buying lootboxes because they had so much in game currency. This incentivized them not wanting to crack down on smurfs in OW1 too as it was another game sale that added to the revenue.
Also that other games bundle total revenue decreased every year according to the Activision Blizzard 2021 Annual Report. Where are you getting your data from?
While it is a drop off, saying a profit of half a billons isnt sustainable for products in a keep-the-light-on mode is a bit of a hot take imo
We’ve literally had three years of people complaining about a content drought. A few skins a year in exchange for half a billion in profit seems fine
I have no idea what the exact lootbox numbers were, so I have no idea how many people of the active playerbase bought them
There was an article someone posted in another thread that linked to blizzards financial pages: I got the document from there. There were around a hundred pages of financials, but I’ll see if I can find it or at least the thread
Yeah… they have to pay all those Kotick bonus, anti union campaigns and lawlyers
Found it and I was incorrect. While totals were up, the other section did see decline, though how much is OW is unknown.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/85996/overwatch-made-less-than-10-of-activision-blizzards-2021-revenues/index.html
the docs are linked in the article.
I’ll probably review them again later since I misremembered. Looks like even some of the monetary values I mentioned were pretty off.
EDIT: also here’s the original thread for reference
Did you want new content or not? Let me spell it out: It wasn’t sustainable to GROW the franchise with new content. Skins are what sell the lootboxes since maps and heroes weren’t in them. So they were still cranking out skins and making less and less every year because of fewer players and regular players having plenty of in game currency. That defines sustainability. If you leave it in “keep the lights on” mode an revenue continues to drop you are circling the drain.
Did you see the discounted lootbox packs they were trying to seel in OW1 over the last year. Giving bonus multiple legendary lootboxesand deep disocunts to entice sales?
You mean revenue. FYI - Profit is NOT the same as revenue. Revenue is total dollars. Profit is what is left over after costs are accounted for. Don’t conflate them.
There are some leaps in logic in the assumptions in the article. They just list what 10% of total revenue was since Blizzard said not other franchise made more that 10%. Assuming the 10% number is what OW made each year is a huge leap. While true it is unknown exactly what percent of the other games revenue is OW, it is a pretty safe assumtion that OW continued to decline. If you think OW grew in revenue from 2019 - 2021 while the other games in it just shrank even more drastically to make room for OW growth, I’ve got a bridge to sell you… especially as more games and releases were added to the other games section. (For Example: Crash 4, THPS 1+2 both hit PS4 in 2020 and multiplatform in 2021) They brought in revenue. Therefore it is extremely likely that OW1 was declining in revenue year by year.
The 3 year drought (Keep-the light-on phase) was originally them working on OW2. The new content intended to grow the franchise was PvE. Sustain OW1 until the OW2 PvE grows the franchise. It’s not uncommon. Even at my job we’ve had phases of keep-the-lights-on while we prepare for a big launch. Keeping the lights on is not supposed to be permanent. At no point did I say Blizzard could not or should not seek ways to make more money.
What I will say is that Blizzard was far from “cranking out skins” when we saw less, especially in the last year. Even if they were cranking them out everything else was prety much at a halt. People called it a drought for a reason.
I didnt conflate them. I mentioned it already in the previous post.
What I did do was get numbers wrong
Why would you come to the conclusion that I think OW is growing?
I stated that the other profit was bunch of games were bundled together, I stated that I dont know the number for those franchises, I stated that player base overall was declining, and that profits of the other group was declining after looking at the article again and doing a quick scan of the 144 page document.
Not only did I never say that OW was growing, but three of those four things I mentioned before even looking up and rereading the article and documents.
And I’ve used the term keep-the-light-on multiple times at this point.
So, I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in a bridge…unless I can legally use it to make a reasonable profit from tolls and it’s isnt a pain to maintain.
agree. without anyting really earned it just feels dull boring and pointless.
if you still get that f2p feeling of ‘fun’ by stomping or being stomped, go for it. otherwise it’s a placeholder on ttv until the next best release.
This has nothing to do with whether lootboxes would stick around tho. Even if OW2 launched as a boxed/paid for PVE expansion: Lootboxes were gone. OW2 always was going to mean new monetization mainly because of the lootboxes legal struggles in multiple countries. Plus, the clearly diminishing return of people buying them.
Until 2022 with the multiple anniversary events and the recolored legendary skins, there were multiple new legendary skins every seasonal event. I would buy them with my stashed in game currency because I, like many, didn’t need to buy lootboxes anymore.
I guess I wasn’t sure where any profit number came from - at least any number that specifically pertains to OW or any other game or group of games. Usually earnings reports don’t have any sort of net profit numbers until much further down the line.
That last paragraph was a response to the article that was linked in your edit than anything you said directly. I was addressing the points it was making.
Maintenance isn’t a pain but the taxes are astronomical. Gotta pay the troll toll.
I agree with this. I’m just saying that I think loot boxes could have sufficed until PvE if we didnt have a drought. I can also agree that the current model has the potential to make more.
Sure we got some seasonal skins, but I believe there was a decrease in overall skins yearly
Yeah it was further down. They also do some interesting splits. For some metrics they split Activision, Blizzard, and King into their own sections. For other sections they divide by market or the groups noted in the article. Imo it’s purposely obtuse to make some numbers look better while technically still being true.
Dimensionality at it’s finest.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah The view of the article was a bit weird which it why I just looked at the document myself. I failed the memory test though.
I’ll just sell passes. Premium one lets you bypass the troll toll, so if you drive more you actually pay less.