They’re not. They also don’t need money back. Gaming has actually seen upticks thanks to covid.
I did. You didn’t understand the point of people’s complaints clearly.
No, I know they have downtime. Why do you think big companies used to fire artists left and right when projects ended? They couldn’t afford to pay them once they spent the game budget allocated to art. This has changed since games started releasing paid DLC, because it gives the artists something to do between projects. I find it funny that people buy DLC costume packs for Steam games all the time, and then turn around and complain about the Blizzard store as if it’s not the exact same thing.
This community is the worst, and the skies are also blue.
It’s not the same thing at all. There’s not a single game on Steam I pay a monthly subscription fee to at all.
I also don’t believe any extra artists are getting hired to specifically make one store item, nor that the revenue involved from selling a digital item to potentially millions of players is in any way a match for the cost of one transmog or mount.
What I do worry about and find highly offensive is the idea that items that were originally intended to be in-game rewards, but turned out to be particularly bling-y, are being sniped off the game and resold for an extra fee on top of the already high purchase price + subscription fee. (high relative to other games, very few earn WoW’s total revenue per player year after year.)
Except they are. Covid has nothing to do with anything. Those store items are made outside the budget allocated to expansions, and they have to pay a bunch of different artists and animators to make them, so they need to get their money back. It’s the same principle as DLC costumes for Steam games.
Clearly you didn’t, because I specifically said that I didn’t think artists got money from sales.
Your subscription fee is for access to the game servers, nothing more. Believe it or not, servers cost money to maintain.
Literally no one said that.
And that’s just conjecture on your part. Store items are store items because they were made outside the main budget.
Yet there are many of my Steam games that include server access for those games.
Which is equally conjecture on your part.
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Uhhhh
???
They’re made outside of the budget?!? Paid employees that could be working on rewards are instead working on store items. If this item was a reward for pet battling I would be stoked. Instead we got less mogs than ever on the last two tiers of content and yet another store mog.
Dlcs are box price or completely free to play games. The whole point of a subscription is so that we can keep content coming in game.
Again. If this mog was made to reward pet battlers for an achievement, awesome. I’d never have it and never wear it. It’s not. It’s an entirely seperate mog at the cost of other in game mogs that blizzard is charging extra for.
Pure unadulterated greed. 20 mil bonus for ol bobby isn’t enough. I’d love for artists to get more of that.
Probably none on the same level as WoW. And if there’s no monthly fee, I guarantee they make money another way, like DLC or micro-transactions. Companies can’t maintain servers with a game’s base price alone.
Every game I’ve worked on has been that way so I have no reason to believe it would be different for WoW. What are you basing your claims on?
Like I said in my original post, the potential revenue of selling say a $15 mount to millions of players is not in any orders of magnitude of what an artist would be paid to make one mount. The numbers are so vastly different it makes no sense to link one to the other.
Like I said, you didn’t read:
EDIT: Just so people stop misinterpreting what I said, by helping pay the artists more, I meant it gives them something to work on during downtime so they can get paid, not that sales money goes to them
You don’t understand. When you work for a game company, if you work on more than one project, you’re getting paid from several different budgets. Every project has a finite amount of money they can spend on art. Once that’s spent, they can’t pay the artists anymore, so their options are A) Fire them, or B) Find them work on another project so they can keep getting paid. They can’t work on more in-game stuff if there’s no budget left for it.
No. The subscription is for access to the servers and whatever is part of the game budget (content). You don’t get access to stuff that wasn’t part of the budget. It’s not hard to understand.
You think it takes ONE artist to make a mount? You have no clue, lol.
Yea, the thing is the artists are not making millions. So you really have no argument.
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I realize there are multiple disciplines in getting anything over the finish line. I’m also happy to stand behind it all adding up to way, way, way less than 1 FTE. My point stands.
If they can’t handle criticism then they have no business being an artist. Though I agree some of the criticism is more harsh rather than constructive.
Not really. It doesn’t matter how much the item sells, the important part is they make their money back. And guess what? If they make extra, they can maybe have a bigger budget for art next time. Win/win.
Artists already get little recognition for their work, not just on WoW, but in general.
Are you kidding me? The artists are probably the ONLY Blizzard employees who receive any sort of praise whatsoever. Watch any of the cinematics or in game trailers and you will frequently find people saying things like “Once again the art team strikes gold. Wish the balance team could do the same.” etc…
This isn’t about that. This is about Blizzard taking those SAME talented artist and having them work on high fidelity PAID MTX instead of having them work on high fidelity sets that drop from end game content. Blizzard has homogenized raid armor by removing class sets. And after that they just recolor everything.
What an absolute waste of artistic talent that could have been used where it was actually needed.
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we are all artists!
I’m tired of explaining how game budgets work. Read my other posts.
Can you point me to the credits for this transmog set? If there’s separate credits for it I will entertain it was an independently budgeted cost operating under its own contract (while still not agreeing it is an answer for the fair value proposition.) On the other hand, if there aren’t, doesn’t that suggest it was part of a larger entity?
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