Downfall? They’ve consistently been one of the titan studios since day one. They were still one of the industry leaders when they were bought. They’ve never “fell”.
It does if the succeeding administration uses the same metrics to make decisions, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility seeing the new admin is also a video game publisher.
You’re focusing in the wrong place. Revenue is revenue. That’s what matters to corporations.
That’s naive. Like above ,capital is capital, no matter the circumstances. If revenue will not meet expectations, a project is cancelled, retired, suspended, etc no matter where it was in production. It speaks volumes when a pre release project is cancelled.
Exactly? I never made any such assertions. Quite the opposite, in fact
I have to say, between the fabrications (like above), incorrect claims (ATVI falling), and naive claims (the fate of preleased games), all you’re really communicating to your audience is a lack of experience/understanding of the underlying tenets of business… that you base factual claims off of subjective opinions. That makes what you say difficult for an audience to get behind.
Eh, After everything that’s happened, the numerous controversies that came out in recent years, the (effectively hostile) takeover and removal of anyone old-blizzard, the recent releases and general attitude towards their player bases, and subsequently their player bases towards them… yeah they’ve definitely fallen. Perhaps not as far as people think, but they definitely have dropped the pedestal.
Again, Furaijon, true to form, you fail to read/comprehend what I’ve written. I have not been talking about opinion at all here. What’s more, “They’ve never fell” isn’t expressing hopium. There’s no desire for an alternate present or for a desired future. You have a propensity to jump on the first thought that comes to mind, relevant or not. So, please…
I’ve only been speaking financially, as a business. Has opinion fallen? Maybe. However, what real effect has it had?
First, as much as people like to point to the things they don’t like and say, “this is why Bliz or game X is dead”, or “go ahead and see what happens, Bliz”, none of that has been true or come to pass. Meaning it’s had very little effect overall on the business. People still buy and play the games despite the constant flow of criticism.
Second, the proportion of the population that follows game industry and its news, and therefore could have any power to impact the industry, is negligible compared to an entire player base. Meaning, the vast majority of ATVI customers have no idea what ATVI is ever doing, and therefore, that majority will continue to happily keep ATVI in the echelon it is. An example of this is how frequently we see people coming to the forums to suggest feature and improvement ideas. There’s a steady flow of people who don’t know that SC2 isn’t being developed anymore. Same in the SCR and Heroes forums. And that only accounts for those who come to the forums. There’s plenty more out there who we will never see here who have no idea about anything going on in ATVI or MS.
So ultimately, negative opinions haven’t overtly harmed the business of ATVI as evidenced by their consistent status in the industry. All the major studios have a handful customers constantly raging about the decisions and actions they take, and they are all doing fine as well.
If the takeover was truly hostile, then it cements this notion: A goliath wanted to absorb another goliath into their fold. This is done to increase size, scope and area of influence, while at the same time absorb fierce competition. In other words, MS didn’t acquire ATVI because they were a dwindling money sink… as so, so many would have the world think.
Look at it this way. It’s an extremely successful model for countless other games. Minecraft servers, which are entirely OPTIONAL and not required to play the game, net around $1 billion in revenue per year. Playstation plus is another good example, Xbox live gold, etc.
I don’t think it’s realistic, but even under a “mass exodus” model where 90% of 1v1 players leave the game over a $5/month fee, it would still net somewhere in the ballpark of $50,000/month. That’s more than enough to pay a team of 5 people to roll out balance updates, professionally designed maps, etc. Under this model, the number of players would likely increase because the game was actively being maintained with new content.
I’ve been called biased more times than I can count, yet all I do is set my opinion to whatever the data says. Protoss have had 40-45% of grandmaster slots & tournament wins & insanely high win-rates (ever since the infested terran delete). In the pro scene, they’ve hit as high as 61%, which is a record. It’s just a fact. The data is absolutely clear about the state of game balance and you can verify it yourself by playing Zerg. PvZ is an insanely hard matchup and you’ll play against guys who clearly do not have the same skill level. In GM, I ran into a GM toss who accidentally move-clicked all his phoenix into spores. Another one accidentally rallied his first carrier into spores. You have literally 15 seconds to fix that problem before 1 spore takes out a carrier, and he didn’t. You can verify this at the pro level too. The highest ranked professional protoss will lose 4 oracles in a single game, basic multitasking mistakes, and yet he punches deep in tournaments, and that’s just not possible with that quality of play unless protoss has an advantage.
Computer modelling very much relies on the skill of the scientist, and can go awry in a million ways. A good example is that they had to revise climate models because they under estimated solar panel sales (one variable in thousands). There is a fine line between fine-tuning a model and infusing bias into the model to get a conclusion that you want. That’s why the process is the most important part. If you can’t trust the methodology of the process, then you can’t trust the results.
An important part of eliminating bias, for example, is to sanitize the data. When the data is pulled out of replays, the names are blacked out and the race names are randomized to a letter (I, J, K). The same is true for all the variable names, such as Stim or +1 melee. You design the algorithm to hone in on the correlations, and once you know what the predictions are, that’s when you reveal the variable names. This gives you the ability to build the model & tune it to get the right answers, without infusing bias into the equation.
Data analysis is basically the ONLY way you can understand such a complex question. We’re talking about 100k players and millions of games. How can you even define what strategies are being used, let alone their win-rates and the reasons for their success, if it would take you YEARS to review the data manually? The only way to review the data on that scale is through computer modelling. Computer modelling is extremely successful, it’s by far the most accurate of any modelling on Earth, and that includes humans themselves.
A good example for this is how Uthermal did a vote on youtube for the worst unit in the game, it was decided to be the swarm host, and I proceeded to stream a proxy swarmhost build that almost beat 6k korean terrans. Nobody, in the tens of thousands of votes, would have predicted that swarm hosts would be strong enough to do that. So defining what strategies exist & how good they are is simply impossible, without data mining, because you have no idea what strategies are out there, let alone how strong they are or why they are strong. The “why” matters a lot.
Nah, those numbers really don’t add up. The average daily players for SC2 (per https://activeplayer.io/starcraft-2) was generally around 50,000 last year total, including ladder/coop/arcade/campaign/smurf/etc players, with jumps around when the major tournaments are.
Assuming that 10% would pay, you’d see about $25,000/month. That’s not quite enough to pay 3 software engineers at the low end of Blizzard’s salary range for them. (That’d be around $9,000/month each, from a quick google search.)
So they’d be running a deficit for a measly 3 workers, no way Microsoft would kick development back up for that.
U must be looking at a different page because the one you listed shows 410,000 players as the 30 day average. If 10% of those stick around, it’s $205k/month. That could support a team of 25 people and still have a 1 million a year profit.
Well, no, that 400,000 is just after concluding a major tournament, so that number is skewed as well.
But you’re right, it’s closer to 150,000-200,000 unique logins each month. I stated daily players, since that’s a better metric to how many people play frequently enough to consider paying a subscription fee, since I doubt many that only play the game once or twice a month would pay for it.
That’s why there is a 10x safety factor in the estimation.
Average daily players is composed of a spectrum of people who play once a week, twice a week, three times a week, etc. Other games have no issue keeping their numbers up despite subscription services. Minecraft server hosting nets $1 billion in revenue a year. SC popularity would probably go down a bit, then it would go up once people started to see the new content. $5/month is really inexpensive entertainment, it’s less than Netflix for example, and it would in theory be helping to generate new content. People spend 3x as much going out to eat a single time and that’s, what, an hour of entertainment?
Minecraft is a terrible comparison, that game tends more than 10 million(!) daily players
Besides, are you talking simply a subscription for ladder, or are you including coop? Guaranteed you’d lose campaign and arcade players if you tried charging them, so no point there. Coop players would expect their own content if they had to pay, which would split dev time as well.
Of course their revenue is up, they have millions of little kids addicted in gambling with scammy lootboxes. But who cares about the kids, revenue is all that matters right?
I’m not talking about revenue, I’m talking about game quality and community care, that has been in downfall.
Havent u thought maybe the project sucked?
This is u saying no one at Microsoft can handle SC2 development and then trashing the community, peak actiblizz employee right here…
Can someone really take ur opinions seriously? u are or has been in direct relationship with the company u are defending blindsided, so u r obviously biased and even contradicting urself.
We’re talking about a 13 year old game here. Theres no version of this where any company starts devoting resources to it again. IF they wanted to do more with the Starcraft IP or RTS, it would be as a new game.
Age of Empires is also a series with mostly symmetrical factions. The factions may have unique units/upgrades or different limitations on what units & technologies they can reach in the tech-tree, but otherwise the factions are all using the same units with similar stats.
Basically, Microsoft can always add new factions to Age of Empires II to keep the game fresh. This is something that Blizzard cannot do for Starcraft II.
What r u talking about? there r tons of desgin tweaks and improvements that could be done as well as cool skins to add. Like broodwar siege tank. Of course the development is different, actiblizz would have dropped AoE2 too.
There’s a limit if you want multiplayer to be balanced.
That is not a problem for AoE2 because of the symmetry between factions. Making new AoE2 factions is a relatively easy process because so many units and mechanics are shared, so Microsoft can create and sell bundles of new factions whenever they want. The same would be true of Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (a Star-wars based AOE2 clone) if there were any active development on it.
“Skins” are pretty much the only thing that Blizzard can add to the main game mode without causing problems in multiplayer.
I disagree. If Blizzard had made a game like AoE2 where the factions were mostly symmetrical, they would also have found it profitable to keep developing and releasing new factions for it.
They couldn’t do that in WarCraft I & II because online updates were not an option yet.
They couldn’t do that with WarCraft III or any version of StarCraft because of the asymmetry of the factions.
Basically anything cosmetic, yea. Skins, voice-packs, Banners, HuD cosmetics etc. But even those all have to be limited so that the units retain their readabiity in game.