Yep. The market is not right for another MMO, and after the failure of Titan, Blizzard knows more than most that MMOs are a very risky investment. A game like fortnite can get to market faster, so even if it flops, you haven’t spent years building a world large enough to occupy millions of people and be a step up from WoW.
The strategy with WoW is mostly likely to keep iterating on the current game. They would also have to have a real leap in technology and design to make splitting their customer base and convincing people to leave their 15 year investment in mounts (some bought with real money), titles, achievements, gear, etc behind.
I would probably attribute its first million or so subs to the Warcraft franchise. Which by MMO standards was “a lot” at the time, but if we attribute more than that to its 12 million sub peak I think we’re severely undermining the quality of game design that came from vanilla, TBC, and wrath that earned those kinds of numbers.
This guy has it wrong. The future is cloud computing. Mobile games are just an intermediate step. Google Stadia, XCloud, etc are the seeds of what is to come. We now have the bandwidth and global infrastructure to start running GPUs in points of presence near gamers and stream frames to devices. Look at it more like all devices will simply become thin clients. The WoW client is a fat client, it stores all the assets and does rendering on your device. In the future you can get high end graphics on your phone, and then pick up on your TV at home, or your VR headset. All that matters is getting the controls right.
So long as the infrastructure of ISPs are not standardized across the world, cloud computing is going to have issues.
There are COUNTRIES where you have like 20 different packages for your internet. You want basic email, thats one package, you want to watch streaming video, your cost goes up, you want to do online gaming, your cost goes up.
There are countries that are that seriously screwed up in regards to local ISPs.
Then of course we have the US that is saying “we’re the ones in control. We don’t need to play fair. We can throttle anyone we want, legally, for any reason. Because we got rid of the laws that required we treat everyone the same.”
It will happen eventually. The only issue is the last mile in America, the core backbone of the internet is already capable of handling the bandwidth requirements - and many Asian and European countries already have easily accessible symmetric fiber with no data caps. In America there will probably be some sort of extra charge for a “gaming” connection, because we really hate our personal liberties here.
I don’t know why people think suddenly having a new mmo would fix the problems. If Blizzard is making boring content and filling it with esports, time gating, sharding theme parks, and cash incentives, chances are that will be just as present if not more in the new mmo.
I have no doubt that classic launch will be overwhelmingly popular because of nostalgia. The philosophy of classic is still good, just the game itself is archaic and i think that will cause the player base to dwindle. Free private servers peaked at 10k active players, i dont expect more than that with having to pay a sub. I just want a current gen with current teh wow with vanilla philosophy. The makers of EQ are naking pantheon which is a current gen mmo with EQ philosophy. Might be worth a look. And i think you forgot alot about classic wow if you think you could play casually and progress far. Pvp was damn near a 40 hour a week minimum job to progress and for PVE you spent hours a night to make sure you had gold and consumables for a few hours of a raid.
Blizzard made a bad bet on esports. What happened is that streaming took off instead and the micro-transaction model started to become a reality, which is probably something Blizzard thought players would revolt against up until the point the market cooled to it.
Now they are playing catch up. esports has a long way to go. The WoW streamering community is there, but Blizzard is still learning to contend with it and not be ruled by it.
I could discuss the various flaws with cloud computing and Stadia but I’m going to stay on topic.
For Blizzard to create something groundbreaking and new would require that they actually INNOVATE. They can’t even seem to do that with WoW. They just recycle and rehash old concepts. That’s about all they seem capable of doing.
So I can’t say I trust their current Dev team to create something new and genuinely groundbreaking.
I remember busting my buns to try and maintain my rank. And I was the low end. I’m sure it was even worse at the higher ends. But yes, Classic will bring in a following, but nowhere near the huge numbers most think. It hasn’t aged well. And that’s going to hurt potential subs for the game.
The technology is there. I’ve tested Stadia extensively and it’s very, very much playable even at 4K. Google has a huge edge network so they have the points of presence to make it happen. A company like Blizzard would need to partner to have access to that kind of technology for their end users.
Gaming has become a sticky situation. We are at the point were advances in computing power have made the jobs of AAA developers many factors harder. They now need larger teams of modelers to compete. Lots of resources just go into building the game world. Then you have to innovate in a very well trodden area without destroying peoples expectations.
It’s simply a tall order, and WoW has so many sub communities it is hard to please them all.
I think just a soft reboot of this game would be fine, make a new version of Azeroth for 9.0 and have a timeskip of something between 20-50 years, make Warcraft 4 RTS set in that timeframe between BfA and 9.0, then start 9.0 with something resembling a clean slate for Azeroth and the faction drama
Google has another issue. They’ve got a bad track record. Also, they have issues keeping their OWN personal networks running stable. They’ve had numerous complaints this year about excessive amounts of downtime.
Even Gmail, which is owned by Google (duh) has stability issues. If they can’t even keep an email server running rock solid stable, how can we trust they’ll be able to keep something vastly more complex like Stadia running rock solid stable?
But again, this is seriously off topic, so lets drop it. Focus on the thread, not tangents. Blizzard and their ability to create something new and groundbreaking.
No doubt the tech is there, just not the infrastructure or logistics. Theres still alot of places with slow internet and it seems every few months more places are going towards data caps and overuse fees. To use stadia is going to be too pricey for a vast majority of people. Also, google is turning into a dictator and i dont think i want then in charge of my escape from reality for a few hours
That could work, but again, who wants to leave behind all their history? Unless there was some kind of “progression” system to carry over old stuff in some format.