Yeah, and that’s probably what’s going to happen.
Here’s a vid from a former Blizzard dev, he worked on Warcraft 3 and a bit of WoW. He comments on what he thinks will happen to Blizzard going forward as he answers questions.
It’s over 30 minutes, but I think it’s worth watching.
Your Brutal honesty is appreciated 
Minecraft has player housing.
I’ll take it.
Well seeing as they just kind of left the Java edition and let people play it I am not to worried about WoW. At most on PC I think Battle net will get rebranded in like IDK 2-3 years? In addition some of the games might show up on Microsoft’s storefronts and not require the Bnet launcher to play.
…? Minecraft had always had player housing since alpha
Who said it was a new feature?
If we’re lucky we will get the Shadowed Tokens of Fate in SL for $2.49 purchasable with our Blizzard wallets (as in buy tokens with gold, then convert to wallet-cash etc…), then use that as a way of accelerating gearing, just like all the earlier expansions since MoP…
The alternative is to simply make WoW 10.0 the final expansion and start working on World of Warcraft: Reforged…
not to pick on you man, but there’s a lot of revisionist history here. Minecraft was a high value, high minded, cultural force before Microsoft ever took a look at it. It was a deep thing, it had a big following, and it was heavily protected by the guy who made it. There was no BS. This generated conventions, cult followings, minor worship. The guy was elevated to the level of kernighan/ritchie/carmack/etc etc. Which became a problem for him in the age of internet culture, he had no stomach for it.
It’s true, by that time the guy had sort of run his creative course with the game. He was very protective of it, it was his baby. If he had been able to weather the popularity-storm and resulting negative focuses, if he had been a different person, it would have gone down differently.
Microsoft did three things.
(1) Add some (serious marketing) breadth with bringing Mincraft to wider and wider audiences, education editions and all sorts of tie-ins. Microsft has access.
(2) Unmake the product with a highly developed store and monitization. The protections for the game were off and done with. This was both bad and curious, even if it was ugly as sin there was a hosepipe of ideas. It was very chaotic.
(3) Eventually roll back the prostitution of the game with the more recent windows PC editions that pushed control back to players.
It has not been pretty. But it worked out ok in the end.
The problem here is that Minecraft isn’t Warcraft. MC is a much more simple thing and much harder to screw up. It has a easy structure bedrock idea base that they could go back to and build on. Warcraft … is much harder to distill and the customers are (lets face it) highly emotional and there’s deep competition in the field.
Whatever the ride is, it’s likely not going to be pretty. There’s always some slick talking preecher-charismatic-executive waving the idea of more revenue streams around who has just enough pull to rewrite the scheme.
At least give him the bright side.
Bob no longer bothered although he unashamedly blamed OW and Diablo 3 console ports instead of the scandals he hid.
And they will possibly revive games like Blizzard in Starcraft Ghost which is what Ybarra has in mind.
And for Activision together with Bethesa we may have their spiritual successor to DooM, but now like DooM 2016 we have the Heretic and Hexen series franchises.
And to save the skin of failed games, it should not be said that instead of a WC3: Refunded, they make a remaster of the RTS trilogy of Warcraft Trilogy including a better version of WC3: Refunded and a remaster of Warcraft 1 and 2 as it was with Starcraft 1.
Who knows? we may even have an old school Multiplayer Warcraft 3 mods, NO HEROES… REPEAT… NO HEROES…!!!
thing like it was in the Master Chief Collection, and the old DOS games seen like Age of Empire or Command and Conquer Remastered
Only time will tell if we rise like Halo, and crash like RARE and Silicon Knights games in Xbox.
Couldn’t agree more. This guys ego, is the reason the game is so bad. I’m convinced of it at this point. Even after 3/4 failure expansions that has happen under “his direction” he is still in control, is beyond me. Sure hope microsoft will come in and clean house. Replace these useless members with someone who will listen to their player base instead of fighting with them.
I’m already disappointed at what WoW has become. It can’t possibly get any worse.
Which isnt surprising, as they have been trying to move the overton window toward streaming games for over a decade.
A lot of the problem is us, and marketing. We are an incredibly toxic fanbase. Trying to appease us is futile and without anyone to say “You think you do, but you don’t” they end up shooting themselves in the foot.
If you take an honest look at BFA, now in retrospect, the actual game, the actual stories, the actual systems were all pretty good. What was a mess were little things they did, that seem bolted on and reactionary… sacrifices to the cold and fickle god of the WoW fanbase— the nerds of the same generation that hated the Star Wars prequels with such venom it almost made Jar Jar Binks kill himself.
BFA was built on the same formula as Pandaria. Faction war, foreign land, underlying hints at an old god. The difference is, the experienced devs of MoP knew not to try to appease the people complaining about Jack Black, and what they ended up with is widely regarded as a masterpiece.
Microsoft can’t offer experienced virtual world builders. They came to Blizzard seeking them, but they came a decade too late.
The best time for Warcraft moneywise was during Lich King. It was an era where casuals, raiders and PVPers were relatively happy.
They keep boosting raider endgame, PVP is roughly the same as it was, but they took away the casual endgame.
The hardcore raiders and PVPers are here to stay. They need to bring back the appeal of WOW not being a full time job in order to progress your character. So once they stop the borrowed power grinds and bring back slower gear progression for those of us who aren’t doing mythics or arena, but would still like to do limited group activities the casuals will return.
When the casuals return the money will return. Hopefully the M$ team will be able to figure this out and stop trying to appease the 1% at the top.