Or is blizzard too far gone to change their loot goblin business model to a consumer friendly one? I believe they fundamentally cannot grasp the fact that a good game equals more players= higher retention= more money than trying to sell 20-30$ cosmetics to 1/8th of the population this game would have if it was actually good.
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Not really.
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What impact will Microsoft really have or choose to have? Iâm probably completely off but I just assumed they brought ABK for the AK and not really the B. I mean they could begin to change things, but if works, and is profitable, would they change prices and the structure of things that would affect us, or more so just change the internal workings to generate further revenue.
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Wow is the only game that charges itâs own sub fee which is more expensive than gamepass. It had 12 million active subs at one point in time. Can you even fathom how ridiculous blizzards monthly revenue was back then? Microsoft needs to look back and determine what exactly drew millions of people to the game back then and reimplement those features into âmodern wowâ. Classic+ could be the perfect opportunity to gain back the trust theyâve willingly demolished over the last decade.
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Halo Infinite.
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No it isnât. Is this the only game youâve ever played, because this is terribly inaccurate.
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Microsoft willâŚ
- Get rid of all Stack Ranking employee performance reviews across all divisions of Activision-Blizzard. (They got rid of it in 2013.)
- Not give Kotick some ridiculous golden parachute when he leaves (shut up. I can dream.)
- Otherwise be mostly hands-off.
And why would you advocate for Blizzard to make Retail more like Wrath when Wrath Classic exists, while also advocating they change Classic to Classic Plus, instead of just asking for them to add Classic Plus?
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And there lies the key problem with the microtransaction mindset.
Logically, one would think âmore players=more profitâ but the ten players that are lost from such practices are not missed due to the one guy with more money than sense that drops $150 a month for shiny new limited time pixels, lootboxes, and gacha related nonsense.
Now multiple that by the number of people that regularly spend that much.
The sad reality is this: whales might be in the minority of players, but 20K such players that spend at minimum $150 a month on microtransactions (plus any related sub fees) are going to ultimately bring in the same amount of money as 200K players paying only $15 a month for a sub. And thatâs before we start hitting the players with real mental problems related to things like gambling addictions, or the people with actual âFUâ money that would rather throw out their credit card at every last cosmetic, or the chance to make a PvP gacha game into easy mode as they steamroll all the folks playing for free.
And donât kid yourself: with PvP gacha games that can become a massive snowball effect. Eventually, some of those players are going to get tired of losing all the time due to lacking characters, cards, etc. and eventually say âWell, $10 just this one time isnât THAT much!â
Bonus points if one of THOSE players then gets addicted to the idea of paying for an advantage.
Granted, WoW itself doesnât actually have gacha related elements, but plenty of fools still exist. Those folks are more than willing to drop $60 on a level boost as opposed to actually spending the 15-25 hours it takes to get a fresh character from 1-70. Hell, you canât even use the argument of time versus money on many of them as theyâll usually counter with some variation of âI can either spend 15-25 hours leveling, or spend 2-4 hours working to skip all of that!â
Thereâs a reason why WoW keeps reporting record profits despite the fact that the player count is typically estimated to be about 1/4 what it was at WoWâs peak. As long as pay piggies exist, the problem in general is just going to get worse :-/
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they will understand the concept of the harvest like not to have 70$ games for an mmo with a cashshop and sub.
Not going to happen. The game is 20 years old. Even if it was free or on Game Pass, itâs not going to gain back that player base. WoW prime is long past.
What drew in that many people was, it was basically the only casual game in town for a looooooong time and everything snowballed into the peak during Wrath, and had gone down ever since.
Itâs okay that it happened. Itâs inevitable. Thinking there is some magic bullet that will bring back the âglory daysâ is delusional. Classic + isnât happening.
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WoW was one of the only MMOs at the time and the one most welcoming to casuals that ran on a potato. I.e. it was accessible.
Those days will never come again. Ever. Trying to recapture them is, at best, naivete.
These days, $20 skins is standard for AAA games. It isnât going away. And really, the only people to blame are players. Fortnite, LoL, Genshin, sports gaming - these have proven to every major gaming corp that players are willing to shell out money for pixels that have no real value. Corps just follow the money.
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Seriously?
Have you seen Microsoft Windows software lately with their push to subscriptions and ads to your desktop?
This question genuinely made me laugh.
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Hereâs a secret: WoW was such a critical success because it was new and unique, it was giving the MMO genre a level of accessibility no other MMO on the market came remotely close to, along with a strong level of innovation and polish, using an established IP from a trusted developer.
Now? Now thereâs multiple MMOs doing what WoW does and more, the Warcraft IP is very different from what it once was, and Blizzard is no longer the beloved and trusted dev it was.
WoW isnât exactly dying or anything, but it also isnât growing. Itâs basically just holding on to people who are already into WoW. If Blizz tries to revitalize WoW, they would have to try to do something incredibly unique and special to get even remotely the success it once had, and all while risking alienating its established loyal playerbase.
Strictly speaking, back then MMOs were hyper specific to dedicated players and WoW saw a massive untapped market, cracked into it, and saw massive success from it. Now there is an MMO out there for every type of player and thereâs no longer a massive untapped market to tap into.
WoW will never see the success it once had ever again. No MMO will, unless the market homogenizes enough again to be similar to how it was back then.
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Shrugs. All I know is whenever I want the newest Windows Iâll have to buy a new computer.
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I think thatâs kind of naive. I mean the beast was unleashed. They see people freely buy these things already for that price and will surely continue it.
When Microsoft bought Zenimax they compelled them to make some cash-shop items in Elder Scrolls Online available for in-game currency earned through daily/weekly quests. That went over very well with the player-base.
Microsoft definitely will not roll back the greed and microtransactions. If anything theyâll be more receptive to the things we actually want in the game but it comes at a cost. Theyâll probably categorise all of our requests and package them up in pretty little enhancement bundles for $25 to $50 each.
Bigger ones probably come in even bigger bundles.
Housing? $100.
Account-wide ignore? Probably $200
Remove cooldowns on toys - $75
The current WoW model is short term profit, maybe their long term goal is to weed out players who at minimum only spend for a sub cost, because even gold farmers who buy subs with tokens are more profitable than sub only players, they not only take a portion of each token sold when it converts back to Bnet balance, but it keeps players in the game who buy subs, itâs just printing money at this point.
But itâs still a short term goal, you can never release enough paid content to keep everyone happy all the time and keep them spending, there is a limit for all of us.
Roll back some greed, put WoW on the games pass, prune some abilities, roll back the /target ground effects and you will ultimately bring in more players who spend less each, but more overall.
And even if they bring in more players who just donât spend, more players makes the game feel alive, that makes more people want to keep playing, itâs a snowball effect that can keep more and more players coming back if done right.
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MS is going to be an improvement over Activison-BlizZard simply because they will offer better bundle deals.
And they will do a better job of bringing in new players.
Whether that translates to a transformed game or now is another matter. I am crossing my fingers that we receive new leadership because the current course post WoD has been the same failed formula over and over again. It has been downhill since WoD and the change in direction with DF was too late and still not enough.
Correct me if Iâm wrong, but isnât Microsoft one of the first business software companies to switch their products from a âbuy once, use foreverâ license, to a having to pay expensive quarterly subscriptions to legally continue using them? I used to have my own copy of MS Word, but they refuse to support it now, unless I pay them forever from now on.
So much for non-greedy consumer friendliness.
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