Personally, I haven’t logged on in months… I also don’t have any desire to… the game has, sadly, become boring and has little motivation for me to keep playing. That will sometimes happen after doing something so much for over a decade.
Anyway, the latest Acti-Blizz report says they’re laying off hundreds of employees (while the CEO rakes in a sweet bonus, of course) and the blame seems to fall on Overwatch and Hearthstone under performing. WoW doesn’t seem to be mentioned (other than a few quips about BFA not being a well reviewed expansion)
I think the thing to consider is that even if WoW goes down to 1 million users (which I don’t think it will) it will still be a successful entry in Activision’s eye.
What will be interesting to keep an eye on is how Activision responds if EA’s Apex Legends continues this meteoric rise and dethrones Fortnite permanently. I can see Activision pressuring Blizzard to come up with an alternative to that, since they lost Bungie, and in turn pull a lot of developer talent away from WoW.
All of your theories are just that, Theories. They are based upon conjecture, and lack a lot of information that isn’t released to the public. You also have a little socialism within your post when you mentioned about employees getting laid off, while the CEO gets millions, except you’ve failed to mention that those employees have smaller responsibilities then the CEO. Perhaps you should start a business to see what it’s like to actually meet a payroll every week.
WoW is a success, no matter how you look at it. Given the length of the game, it probably is in “maintenance mode” meaning that it’s fairly cheap to maintain and still provide new content (they have all the dev tools in place to create content at a cheap and efficient pace) so WoW still brings in small profits and isn’t expected to be a huge performer. D3 and SC2 are in the same domain. HotS is more or less a wash.
Overwatch and Hearthstone are their big sellers with OW being the previous hot game that every kid was playing and Hearthstone being a large source of income due to it’s addictive card packs (ask any card store or hobby store, MTG is what keeps them in business). Both of these underperforming is huge, especially with no new games coming out to compensate.
Honestly, I was surprised to hear Apex was EA. Then a guild mate told me that the developers asked them not to say anything as to not get the EA stigma. I would say that was smart call
Steve Jobs explained why that is bad. The peopy at the top have more ‘responsibility’ in the company but generally aren’t responsible for keeping them successful. And often cause the companies downfall, because they don’t understand the product or it’s market. Which is why peopy like to use it as a canary in a coal mine indicator. It was a clear indication of Konami’s fall.
Yeah they said it was clear that being bought by EA and making a BR game with microtransactions was going to be bad press. So they decided to go the best route and make a good game first and distance themselves from EA as much as possible.
I consider AL a mediocre game but the best game of the BR genre.
To show support for a beloved franchise even though I don’t play the current version of it. Maybe they can add it to the pile of feedback and attempt to improve it.
Or they won’t. Either way, life goes on and I’ll find enjoyment elsewhere. I’m happy to post until my sub runs out.
I highly doubt Hearthstone is underperforming right now, Overwatch on the other hand suffers from being glorified rock, paper, scissors game and the only thing that seems to be happening to change that is to be adding more rock, paper, or scissors at any given point in time.
Overwatch suffers from Fortnite, plain and simple. Overwatch was the previous fad of the month game that every kid was playing and now it’s been usurped by Fortnite. There’s no coming back from that.
Yeah and Apex Legends jumped into that same market with Overwatch-like classes which is going to drain Overwatch players on top of Apex Legends probably being the best Battle Royal game.