That’s not necessarily true. My day job is business analytics and not all consumers are created equal. There’s a reason terms like “whale” and “super whale” exist.
You are right.
The latter part of wrath and the meddling design from blizzard was awful and was the point that people clearly went the opposite direction for subs. it was the end of that 1.0 WoW era and lead us to the 2.0 WoW era.
Then im sure you know that in order to support those 2 groups of people they need the free player base to keep playing. Cant have a super whale in dead games. Though not all consumers are created equal blizzard ~tries~ to keep its base as big as possilbe to keep those Whales and the base to feed them players.
To me they need to tell players there plans for Classic and the future versions of the game MORE than they did when classic launched. Classic launch was just tossing meat out to the hungry and telling everyone to fend for themselves.
Those concepts don’t exist in WoW as there are minimal micro transactions(even in retail) blizzard cares about sub count and how many people buy expansions instead of catering to a small handful of mega spenders.
Thats not true at all. There are huge spenders who buy literally every cosmetic in the wow shop as well as massive quantities of tokens.
This was the reaction to the unbalanced servers the player base created 16 years ago. Just as today with 90% single faction servers, had they never created Cross realm BGs there would be zero BGs for realms like Skeram.
As for accessibility, the game has ALWAYS been accessible. It was built around that idea. What it has come to in live is clearly the end result of that idea while still keeping those Hardcore elements. To that end i would still say that content SHOULD have been more difficult than it was in Classic. Not to the point of needing every world buff to clear a boss and if you wipe your done for the week but clearly harder than what MC and BWL were.
Then again people wanted the game as close to as it was with the data they had so you got that in 1.12
Blizzard makes more money from there store than they do from subs and services than they do from subs. Its one of the reasons why the relative cost of the sub has probably never changed over time. They realized they can make more money from people selling Boosts and race changes than they do from 15 bucks a month sub.
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Sure to some degree but it’s no where near the level of a true game that is catering to those kind of players. And also doesn’t really apply to classic as there are minimal micro transactions.
There is a conversion rate even if it was low, of people that played classic and bought the expansion. That was a group that may not have bought the game at all except that they pay for a sub already. Even that conversion of people is pretty big overall.
For example Legion sold 3.3 Million subs to Shadowlands 3.8. Whos to say that Classic didnt bring in an extra 500k
Who is this “free player base” you speak of?
Whales and super whales are associated with Free to play games more often than not. They are the people who pay for all the cosmetics and advatages then go off and crush the people who are playing the game for free.
Conceptually in wow the “Free player base” would be people who are paying subs and nothing else in wow.
Uhh have you seen the mounts, pets, armor sets, services, etc that make up the store? They make far more on those than subs. Their earnings call covers it. Give them a listen.
And we warned blizzard quite vocally what would happen to servers this time around if there were no faction ratio guide rails. They chose the least effort option, just to have history repeat itself. They put bandaids on the symptom while refusing to deal with the cause.
I am curious, did you play pre nerf Scholomance, Strat and AV pre 1.8?
Sorry, but I will need a citation that players wanted them to simply give us what they had data for. There were many threads pre-classic release that begged for quite the opposite.
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Yes if you were to go buy them all right now. But they only add what a mount or pet every few months? And are also 1 time purchases. Things like tokens are capped per month and also balanced by someone else not paying a sub. And sorry but there just aren’t swarms of people using the repeatable services.
In WoW these are still a supplement to monthly fees not a replacement of.
Yeah and i was one of the voices that was saying they NEEDED to cap the servers and watch them or we would just repeat that fun 2004 server issue. Apperntly that wasnt on the list of things again and we just continue down the path of Vanilla in faction server balance for pvp and pve. Taking the easy fix for X-realm bgs.
Yes i was playing beta back when Strath towers attacked you. That was the best version of strath to me. Was way closer to War 3.
Are you asking me to go find some random player that says 1.12 is what were getting so we should be happy? I mean i dont even need to go back to the forums to KNOW i would find a person that said that. As i am sure you can find a person that would say 1.12 is trash version of the game and we need the full experience since P-servers could get that.
Again, not true. Go look at the earnings calls.
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Doesn’t seem to have revenue for specifically WoW broken out by subs vs micro transactions.
You have to do math to calculate MAUs over revenue to determine the separation. Or listen to the audio calls. It may have not been Q3 but I know this year a stand out comment was the store brings in more revenue than monthly subs do. This is believable on tokens alone, let alone factoring in everything else. the freemium model is taking over the industry for a reason.
That is the modern wow spin on it but i find that the classic player base is mostly players that want the RPG experience. Go toe to toe with other players to either defeat them or work with them to obtain goals on a equal footing based on skill and class know how. With the exception of trying to capitalize with an in game currency system. Either case i understand what your saying but the classic player base is not about that.
The store as a whole might, but they don’t break it out by world of warcraft vs everything else on the store. Nor are the MAU’s broken out by game. And that also wouldn’t break out game/expansion purchases vs services/items.
And no tokens don’t account for it, for everyone who buys a token that’s one less sub that is paid. And you would pretty much have to have every paid sub buying at least 1 something else every month for it roughly break even with sub fees.
Freemium is taking over because games can effectively subsidize thousands of players playing for free with a handful of players actually paying huge amounts of money. WoW does not do that as none of the store purchases are really spammable to that degree nor are they nearly as required being almost exclusively cosmetic.