I don’t know where you’re getting this idea from, because it isn’t remotely true.
The subscription model is fine for WoW. If WoW ever does transition to being B2P or F2P then that would indicate that the population of the game has reached critical levels to the point where being a subscription only game no longer provides enough income to keep the game running.
And the shop isn’t going anywhere either.
Yeah, keep thinking that.
I will, because Blizzard only recently added more items to it.
If they were planning on retiring the shop, which they’re not going to do, they wouldn’t be adding more items to it. They’re planning to add decor items to the shop in Midnight.
Hell, there’s even a thread on the forums right now asking players what they want to see added to the shop.
You’re living in a delusion if you think Blizzard is retiring it anytime soon.
Blizzard will remain. But the cash-shop will not. Wow will remain of course. The only difference will be is that players will acquire digital goods via in-game game-play.
Again, Blizzard is planning on adding more items to the shop in Midnight.
It’s not going anywhere, no matter how much you’d like that to happen.
You say that because you are not aware about the history of gaming. For over 30+ years Gamers have hated predatory monetization. Starting with loot boxes and ending with the current game industry’s attempt at including these mechanics into everything from console games to mmorpgs. This is due to the mobile games market influence.
But the reality is that people who are gamers hate this type of thing vehemently. Even though the company may make some vague profits from the occasional “Whale Player” its not enough of a profit that it displaces player dissatisfaction and anger. So what do players do? Well they don’t use the cash-shop, and revenue drops. And many dissatisfied with this nonsense will do exactly what you preach so loudly. They stop playing Wow. Which leads to even greater losses of revenue.
The Parent company execs take a dim view of people telling their customers to walk away if they don’t like their company’s product. They are not amused.
Wow has always been a great game with a faithful generation of fans. These despicable practices are shameful. The only reason the Devs decided to finally give the players player housing is so they can nickle-and-dime them to death by selling home items. But watch. That’s not going to work. It will be the deathknell to the shop.
Yep. They’ve been lulling us into complacency for 20 years now. Another 20 years, and they plan to raise subs to $20! For their 40th anniversary! What schemers they are!!!
I’ve been gaming probably longer than you’ve been alive. So don’t try to cite the deep magic to me; I was there when it was written.
I am more than aware of the ‘history of gaming’, and I am flat out telling you that the shop is going nowhere. No matter what delusions you choose to feed yourself, it isn’t changing. The shop isn’t going anywhere. Blizzard has confirmed this multiple times, and as I just told you (multiple times now, you’d think it would have sunk in by now), they are planning on adding more stuff to the shop in Midnight.
You are wrong, and you’re going to continue to be wrong.
Friend you are not the only “Old Timer” in Wow. We are all a bunch of ancient fossils now. When we are gone. So will Wow disappear.
WoW isn’t going to disappear for a long time.
It still has an extremely healthy player base, and they’re attracting new players all the time.
You just don’t know what you’re talking about.
That is not correct. Wow has been bleeding subs for years. Trust me the younger generation do not want to play Wow. They are all too busy on their cell phones.
Not according to the GDC talk they did last year.
Current estimations based on available data points are that WoW is back up to the 7.25m subscriber mark. Even if they’ve lost subscribers as a result of the end of Dragonflight and this expansion, at worst they’re down to the 5 million mark, but as there’s no real evidence of a mass exodus, I’d say they’re still around the 5.5 to 6 million mark.
Only if you are looking at mmorpgs. But if you look at the entirity of the gaming population you will see that games marketed to the younger gamer population present a different market collective. Look at this analyses:
The games with the highest player populations are PUBG (with over 1.1 billion lifetime players), CrossFire (with 1 billion), and Dungeon Fighter Online (with 850 million), according to all-time player counts. For current active players, Counter-Strike 2 is among the top, with over 550,000 concurrent players, and Fortnite also has very high engagement.
Highest all-time player counts
PUBG (PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds): Over 1.1 billion players
CrossFire: 1 billion players
Dungeon Fighter Online: 850 million players
Pac-Man: 1.03 billion players
Pokémon Go: 1 billion players
Minecraft: 500 million players
Counter-Strike 2: Has had a peak of over 1.8 million concurrent players on Steam and over 550,000 current concurrent players.
Fortnite: Has had over 1.6 million concurrent players.
If you look at it from that perspective you will realize that Wow is not pulling in a large population of younger players.
Which is the only thing relevant to this discussion. We’re talking about WoW. Not other games in completely different genres.
How many players PUBG or Crossfire have is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
So whatever point you were trying to make here was completely worthless.
See that’s where you are making your biggest mistake. Saying that my opinion is worthless is funny. Since it’s obvious that you have no idea what you are talking about. When trying to evaluate games. You must by necessity take all aspects of the industry under consideration. So you can understand where the trends are. Gamer population migrations. New developments in programing, and technology, conducting research in all types of games and making comparisons. And developing new innovations. Tracking which economic models work and which don’t. Tons of expertise and entire market research divisions utilized.
You have the individual studios that develop the games and maintenance them. Then you have the conglomerate parent companies and the investors. Who own them and dictate policy.
I said the point you were making was worthless because you’re trying to argue that WoW isn’t bringing in new players compared to games of different genres.
Which has always, literally always, been the case. Call of Duty brings in numbers every year that would blow World of Warcraft out of the water. No one cares, because how many people CoD brings in doesn’t matter at all to World of Warcraft.
As I quite literally told you earlier, the team at Blizzard are planning on putting more items in their shop in the next expansion (sooner than that actually, when 11.2.7 drops and they add housing to the game for those who have pre-purchased Midnight and decor farming for everyone else). The store isn’t going away. And as long as there are millions of people playing WoW, allowing it to make more than $75 million a month, the subscription model isn’t changing either.
The only time that WoW will go F2P or B2P is when it makes financial sense for them to do so, meaning that subscriber numbers get so low that it can no longer fund the game and when that happens, the amount of MTX on the shop will expand to the point where you’re going to wish the game was still using a subscription model.
Well, yeah we WILL keep thinking that. It has as much validity as your own baseless opinion. Have you got anything to back up what you’ve said? I mean, none of the rest of us do either since we aren’t Precogs or work for Blizzard. So if you got something that will show us all, go for it.
You are throwing a word salad up in the hopes that it will somehow make you look smarter. Nobody here is going to fall for it. The main detractor to your opinion is simply that WoW’s population is actually pretty high. There is currently little reason to change how things work.
Now, if things changed and our population drops by about 90% and they start merging servers, THEN your opinions on this matter would gain a lot more validity. But right now? Not really.
The point I was making is because Wow’s main players are seniors now and they represent the bulk of the Wow player population. They are not bringing in the younger population of players which would increase subscriptions and insure the revenue intake. I.e. If those young players are playing other games, they are not playing Wow. If Wow had an advanced structured marketing strategy, Wow could easily have over 20 million players that would insure Wow’s future.
Well your opinions are completely baseless. On top of being ignorant.
Do you even know what you are saying? If Wow’s population drops by 90% Blizz would be out of business. And the parent company would shut it down.
Except you don’t know what the bulk of the WoW population is. No one does except for Blizzard, and they aren’t telling.
Also, seniors? The player base isn’t that old, not yet. And yes, they are bringing in younger players all the time. To say otherwise is just showing your own ignorance. Which isn’t surprising at this point, you’ve made a lot of ignorant statements in this thread.