Warcraft III Reforged has a monetization problem. In order to get updates and more content/attention it needs to bring in some revenue.
My suggestion would be to create purchasable campaigns. I would love to play through some Warcraft stories we have not seen before!
Any other monetization ideas you would like to see?
This is not going to happen. Monetization through extra content requires a budget for creating it in the first place. The game won’t receive any, not after the flop. The most minimal of updates will be made and might possibly even end up giving us a fraction of what we were supposed to get.
Starcraft 2, this game ain’t.
Skins… some of the heroes got alternative skins along with Reforged. They could add more skins, for both heroes and units. But they should also make a system, where you can pick the skin distribution. For example, if you have 2 skins (for units), and you set the distribution to 40:60. When you make 5 units, on average 2 of them will use the 1st skin, and 3 of them will use the 2nd one.
Theozar, I don’t know what hole you crawled out of, but Warcraft III: Reforged already has a “collections” tab for selling skins. A lot of custom maps inherited from “Warcraft III: Frozen Throne” that came before it broke because of the system for selling skins. The way World Editor objects operate is more complicated, in order to facilitate two identical objects with different visuals. This system was responsible for many of the bugs in the “Warcraft III: Reforged” game that did not exist in its “Warcraft III: Frozen Throne” predecessor despite the fact that Reforged began as a fork off of Frozen Throne’s codebase and not as a rewritten engine.
Despite the growing pains of building that whole skin system, after it was added the Spoils of War DLC was the only of its kind sold with Reforged. Beyond that, the entire game-breaking technology change isn’t worth it to leadership. In other words, players of this game ARE NOT EVEN WORTH MONETIZING TO THIS COMPANY. The opportunity cost differential between this game’s financial plan, and the financial plan of other games, is too extremely high. Some mounts on WoW sell for $30, but some people think it’s reasonable to buy Reforged for $30.
The mount took some guy an afternoon to draw, but Reforged took a team of programmers and artists.
In order for new updates to be made to Warcraft III, the person updating it has to want to do self-harm in the form of opportunity cost. And so, only people guided by emotion rather than finance/math are permitted to update this game: i.e., idiots.
As for managers, they talk to their employees and get financial estimates:
Idea 1: Update Warcraft 3:
Estimated financial cost: $500,000, 6 months time
Estimated returns in first two years: $2,000,000 (let’s say 50,000 people buy it for $20)
Idea 2: Update Arclight Rumble Mobile:
Estimated financial cost: $500,000, 6 months
Estimated returns in first two years: $2,000,000,000 (free game where 10,000 saudi princes and “whales” spend $200,000 to be the best most powerful players ever)
This is an imaginary estimate that I created, and it is not based on real numbers, but if you want to see me proven wrong then watch for the day when this company starts selling more Spoils of War-style skins in the game using the system for doing so that already exists!
Until they do, my rough estimated math is probably correct – and in the eyes of managers, this game “is a waste” and “always will be.”
You cannot prove them wrong if they are right.
Edit:
There might be a bright side to this. If people who do not work at Activision Microsoft Blizzard can exfiltrate the Frozen Throne and recompile a version that uses OpenAL instead of Miles/FMOD, and OpenGL instead of DirectX, then it should be possible to build a society future where any human can download the source from GitHub and recompile a modified version of this game, so that its development can continue unchained from the poor design of United Statesian capitalist oligarchy.
Here’s a video of how to do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW5kqJP0VSc
be honest, would you actually buy skins and stuff if they offered it?
No, it has garbage problem, it was trash and nobody is interested in it, so they dropped it like little beaches that they are.
I would not, but I certainly would buy a new campaign!
I have bought some skins for HotS, back when they used to cost money. I spent no more than 20-35$. Don’t remember the exact amount, as it has been what? 7-8 years since then? But if one really likes some skin, I see no reason why wouldn’t they buy it.
But I’d have to admit that I wouldn’t really do that for WC3. Even if Reforged updated the graphics, the gameplay still feels old…
I’d love to see them make the game feel more modern - with smoother pathfinding and collisions and increased max unit group size, for example. And I am still awaiting a native “UnitSpawnMissile” in the editor, accompanied by “MISSILE_UNIT_COLLISION” and “MISSILE_REACHES_DESTINATION” events… maybe “MISSILE_REACHES_TARGET” too.
But changing how the game’s collisions work will change the game a bit too much and may alienate some of the playerbase, while it’s not certain that it will attract new players.
So, honestly, I think it’s rather time for Warcraft 4 instead xP