So far I am liking Shadowlands just fine. I have my gripes, but there is enough here to keep me engaged… For Now.
We are looking at next month and 9.0.5. Lots of great changes. Basically putting SL how it should have been at launch. Plenty of time to level alts, and check off that AoTC or whatever ya got to do.
But a lot of the consensus from sites and players, is that 9.1 is a ways off. Based on the information we were given, and what was has been shown so far, 9.1 is still very early in the goings. And June/July seems reasonable as a date for it.
I know people will say that they said 9.0.5 will launch and 9.1 will go on the PTR shortly after. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I havent seen any information supporting that. I would happy to see the interview or article where they say thats the plan. And shortly is an estimate. Shortly could be 2 weeks or 2 months.
What puts me in the June/July Camp, is that for the announcement, they didnt even say “This Spring” or “This Summer”. Those are extremely broad windows to give players the light at the end of the tunnel. Additionally they were pushing TBC WoW much harder than 9.1 and seemed a lot closer to launching TBC. They were able to give time estimates on it.
To me, it seems they are going to drop 9.0.5 and hope that carries to TBC launch. There will be a surge of re-subs for TBC, similar to Vanilla. That will carry the financials into a June/July or later 9.1. Look at it this way. 9.0.5 Dropping in March will either bolster or retain the last month of Q1. Then going into Q2, Dropping TBC in April or May, will end up giving Q2 great numbers. Along with the paid “Premium” boosts and services they are tacking onto TBC. That will let them financially ride through Q2. That takes us into July. If they Drop 9.1 in July/August, they will get those great numbers for Q3.
So from a financial standpoint, it makes good sense to stretch this out through Q3. It will negatively impact the players, but I am sure they have the metrics to forecast player return and retention due to content drops.
The fact that there is this big of a content drought this early on in an expansion to where so many people are leaving is a bit ridiculous to begin with. I don’t see this problem getting any better as the expansion progresses.
I dont think the mobile games have anything to do with it. Those all will have their individual budgets that they adhere to and ROI (Return on Investment) forecasts.
WoW is still an extremely profitable game. But they are following a budget to forecast as well. I am pretty familiar with business financials. Not an expert. And these are my opinions.
So the WoW team is given a Budget for the Expansion. This is created from accountants and financial analysists looking at WoW’s financial metrics. They can see every bit of detail from the P&L (Profit and Loss) Statements. They take all this data and forecast that spending X on the expansion will get an ROI of Y. At some point that ROI will shift to the amount of money spent will start to decrease the earning potential. So finding that sweet spot is what they do.
So they create the total budget for the expansion. Broken down into every aspect. Which parts of development get allocated what portion of the budget. An example would be X amount of dollars of the budget is allocated to the Graphic Design for Items. So that area of development has to work with that budget to create those assets.
So the leaders like Ion and John, will look at this budget and figure out how to fit their expansion Ideas to this budget. Then delegate the jobs to the team, and work to keep the team on budget. Things get cut, grand ideas get simplified in order to adhere to the budget.
Now forecasts can be anything from day to day, month to month, or year to year. Ideally the Yearly forecast is broken down into the Quarters. If the team is already hitting their budgeted spend on labor and resources for Q1, they may decide to push things they are working on into Q2 or Q3 to adhere to the budget and put out solid financials for the quarters. They dont want to overspend one quarter and hope to make it up next quarter. Seeing financials seesaw quarter to quarter, makes investors nervous. And anyone with a quarterly bonus structure wants to hit the numbers every quarter. You want to show growth and minimal losses every quarter. So a loss for a quarter, then a huge profit in one, followed by a loss, looks worse than just a profit in all 4 quarters.
Hope that elaborates a bit more on my thought process.
I think there is more too it than just budgets. Maybe they could be cutting the WoW budget for these other games that are in development on multiple platforms. The way things have been going and are still going seems like we are slowly heading to sunset in some ways.
Honestly, I feel like I am getting the bare minimum from Blizzard right now with WoW.
Its a business. They need their products to return a profit. You could be very correct that the WoW budget is shrinking. Like I said, there comes a point in budgeting where you start to eat your profits. Maybe these new games and IP’s are forecasting to a better ROI.
WoW is still a big earner. But we do see our zones getting smaller. Fewer dungeons. One Raid per Patch. No new battlegrounds or arenas. Larger use of recolors as opposed to unique designs. Instead we get more systems related content to do.
[INSERT YOUTUBER NAME HERE] said something similar.
I’m genuinely curious if Shadowlands may be shorter then initially thought… or maybe I haven’t been paying attention enough but stretching 9.0.5 through half of 2021 seems odd.
Honestly, I’d love if it were the case that Shadowlands will be a smaller expansion compared to normal. I truly want them to go all out for 10.0. Expansion 9.
Stretching 9.0.5 through half of 2021 seems odd as a stand alone. But its not. They have TBC to launch as well. Covid really affected Shadowlands. Everything got pushed back. All 9.0.5 has to do, is get some sub retention or return for the end of Q1. TBC will show a great sub retention and return for Q2. They can be less concerned about the Live server bleed, because it wont be a hemorrhage. And many will stay subbed for TBC, for at least a month or 2, to try it out.
Factor in that they are adding a slew of paid services to the TBC server. From paid boosts, to Paid character copy from Vanilla. And it will also be a time for a new 6month sub + mount promotion at the end of Q2. If they pair that with announcing 9.1, it all drives those 6mo subscription sales. That is all going to factor into a solid Q2.
Then when some of the TBC hype dies off, and token sales are dropping at the end of Q2, you run into the beginning of Q3. 9.1 Drops and its spent enough time in the oven, that it is a really well done patch. Poof you have a strong Q3. Token sales go up mid quarter to all the carry AoTC sales, ect.
Everything your saying makes a lot of sense and I’m not disagreeing.
But I can’t and don’t believe this ^ for a single second.
Blizzard is on record saying Covid didn’t impact development and if other companies can make good to even better content during the pandemic. There’s zero reason the multi-billion dollar company Activision Blizzard can’t / couldn’t.
And that’s not me under handing the seriousness of the pandemic in anyway.
What you said makes sense, but now makes me realize we will probably never have another good expansion again, with Classic and TBC they make alot of money. They have no real incentive to work hard to make a great retail game because its not their only cashcow now. Cause WoW isnt one MMO now. Its soon to be 3 MMOs
I am fine disagreeing with you on this point. Both of us could be equally wrong. I will just give my opinion on why I think it did.
So obviously they can work remotely. They can meet through zoom, conference call/ect. Thats not up for debate. They did so.
Heres where I think it hurt them. With a large team, like Blizzard, shifting to remote work, requires a lot of logistics. Organizing all of their offices to be securely accessed remotely by their staff. Figuring out what resources the staff need at home to continue their work. While im sure they all had PC’s, I wager their personal setups were not the workstations they have at blizzard.
If anything all this cost them was time organizing all of this and getting it to work. Especially a project as large as a WoW expansion. Lots of moving pieces to get into place, and to iron out the kinks. If 3 of their designers run into a network issue, where their home work stations arent able to access the blizzard servers for some reason, they cant just have IT come over and fix it. Everything has 10 extra steps.
Maybe it was to save face? in some weird way… but I don’t get why’d they say covid has not impacted development. Unless it was a different team that said it and not Warcraft or Blizzard overall.
I don’t know… seems odd to me. But again I’m skeptical for the reasons I mentioned previously.
