So, if Blizzard can’t do WoW classic right (and they have shown that they can’t), I think they ought to sell a limited number of franchise rights to companies or individuals who would like to compete for Classic market share. Say 3-4 franchises. See which franchise deploys it right… see which franchise is financially successful.
Franchisees would be allowed under contract to address bugs, address player behavior deemed destructive of game economy, overall success,etc., but would not be allowed to add new features or content—they must work only with Blizzard’s original design. Blizzard would have to stop their own deployments, but would get a cut of all monthly revenues.
Blizzard could contract in an option to cancel any franchise agreement after making an appraiser-approved settlement to the franchisee for the value of his respective deployment.
Chances are very good that if someone other than Blizzard was doing Classic legitimately for profit, it would be done right. And Blizzard could learn how to both make money and keep the Classic crowd happy (something they have shown themselves incapable of doing thus far).
I don’t understand… You want Blizzard to spend money on Franchisees, while they can’t be bothered to spend money hiring GMs?
Why in the world would a company purposefully cut down their own profits by hiring external sources to make a game that’s already pretty much made?
Blizzard would retain all creative rights over the game, causing their ideas/suggestions to be forced into the game, whether the contracted company wants it in or not.
That’s not how a franchise works. The developing company pays blizzard for the rights of the franchise and use of the game. Blizzard would be making money by letting someone else do the work of making their product better.
A franchisee typically pays the franchise company a few different fees (They may vary depending on the actual franchise, but overall, they’re generally pretty universal): Royalties and Advertising, along with an initial franchise fee.
In this case, you’d likely purchase a licence to work on and distribute the game under your name, while having Blizzard still majority owner.
Blizzard WOULD be spending money through creating training programs, having employees in place specifically to assist with any issues that franchisees would run into during development (which wouldn’t be able to be handled by Customer Service, they would need actual Technical Support teams in place), and they would likely want to oversee much of development and distribution, adding to their costs.
Additionally, we have NO idea what kind of contract Blizzard would strike up with potential franchisees (i.e. certain equipment has to be used - For example, Apple technical support centres (contracted companies) receive funding/equipment directly from Apple to use within their company))
I believe my wording was poor - Blizzard would be paying FOR franchisees to exist, not necessarily paying them directly. Although, again, we don’t know the specifics.
For Blizzard’s part (and that of the franchisee, as well), it would be whichever franchise makes them the most money.
For the players’ part, it would be whichever franchise is most faithful to the original game.
If both of these were accomplished by the same franchise, and I assert that they would be, the question of what Classic players want is settled once and for all.
As of today, this hypothesis cannot be tested because Blizzard is inept and has not done what it promised (ie, been faithful to its commitment to deliver the original game). What we have seen from Blizzard, however, is changes… and angry players… and imbalanced realms… and dead realms, etc. So yeah, let’s test the ORIGINAL hypothesis and see if we get better results.
That’s not a monopoly works. They will only share their franchises if the other company pays them an outrageous ransom to use one. All is not lost though. Microsoft is taking over and will no doubt produce new games with the licenses they bought.
Paid private servers hosted on Blizzard realms. Sub still required to access, paid to Blizzard. An additional private server fee between $1-3 is optional to be collected by the server admin but not required. Additional settings exist to split fee income with paid subadmins. Transfers to and from these realms are impossible.
Many server settings available. Paid boost options available (95/5 to Blizzard/host)
It could work. In the private server scene, the server itself comes prepackaged with a lot of settings in an .ini file, and many other things can be edited with a SQL editor.