19$ up here in canada… and i bought 2 games for 5$ yesterday that’ll give me 40+ hours of entertainment (sonic adventure 1 +2 on sale woo steam-sales!) so… not sure what your point is.
But then you gotta play GW2. A horribly boring game.
Hrmm it is a fun game to jump into for what I pay. I don’t think some of the daily grind ‘amounts’ to fun but the rest certainly does especially what I can do in the RPG. People often forgot that you can choose to play your own game and maybe say go for an archeology achievement or maybe just focus on your own ingame goals.
I have in more dire times dedicated the better part of 2 years in a Age of Wonders 2 Demo. Game was good in that it didn’t have any restrictions in terms of development, but you had to play 1 of 2 set races and could choose 2 maps. Me and my sister had conquered, mastered and learned all the secrets of those maps.
Ion?
I pay 15$ for classic, my interest in live was killed by BFA, and Shadowlands has not done enough to fix it. So yes, 15$ a month is worth it, but not 50$ every 2 years or anything on the shop for me. Maybe it will change next expansion.
Plus tax and canada has some of the highest tax rates. So make that around 50$ a month.
WoW is an incredibly cheap hobby. After a small initial investment (current expansion + month or two sub + couple WoW tokens) it’s entirely free to sub and purchase future expansions with some minor effort. The largest cost is having a PC and paying for internet, but those are obviously not used exclusively for WoW.
Personally, WoW also replaced a much more expensive hobby that I was spending hundreds of dollars on per month.
Your entire premise is actually wrong on the point that you, as the consumer, get to feel entitled to receive whatever you feel your money is worth. It doesn’t mean that the company selling it to you has to agree, but that is the power you as a consumer have.
So yes, it is perfectly reasonable for people to think their $15 a month is currently not receiving fair (to them) value back from Blizzard even if there is hundreds or even thousands of hours of content. The onus falls back though to the consumer to back that feeling up by ending their subscription until such a time they feel they are getting a good deal.
Whether players find this or that a grind is very subjective. And not everyone wants to pretend to play the game over the phone. Why even bother to subscribe if you don’t intend to play?
Anybody who is playing literally hundreds of hours a month is getting a bargain for $15. For people who “play” 2 minutes a day on their cellphone, I would question how engaging they are finding it if they don’t want to actually play.
But logging in on your cellphone creates more MAU’s! So you’re helping out Ion get his golden parachute!
If the game was promoted as a fun game that anyone should be able to buy with the expectation of playing, people who find that restrictions keep them from playing and there’s nothing to do but tedious chores can rightly feel scammed. You drove them away, you’re trashing them, and they won’t be back.