I read an article on pcgamer (can’t post link) posted on 14th Feb where Bobby just straight up lies about never increasing the price for a WoW sub:
“We never raised the price,” says Kotick. “My view was we come up with value-added services, come up with new things to sell, but just leave the price. We could figure out how to come up with other things to sell them. And it’s a prickly audience, you know? You don’t wanna do too much to agitate them. And even a dollar increase would’ve been a problem in my view.”
Bobby is gone from the company now, but he absolutely did oversee price rises.
Maybe he never raised it for Americans, but a price rise is a price rise. Prices have never gone down for us, though logically they should have at one point if Blizzard is basing pricing purely on exchange rates (we were paying at least $1.50 more than the Americans when AUD was on par with USD in 2011-2013. That’s about 3 years of paying extra).
Our monthly sub price has now risen over $7 over the span of just over 4 years. It used to be under $17 a month in December 2020. Bobby said even a single dollar increase would be “a problem”, but I guess us aussies don’t count?
We have our own servers in Australia, so why can’t we have our own set-and-forget sub price that doesn’t keep rising by 20% every few years?
We play a worse version of the game anyway, ever since the in-game calendar and day/night cycles got desynced from our timezone and locked to the American one (among other things like the borked warmode balancing) which still annoys me to this day.