That’s fine. It doesn’t change the fact that WoW and FF14 are the only MMOs believed to be pulling in over a million subs. GW2 and ESO are probably the next most popular MMOs and they are believed to be under 500k active players. EQ might have a loyal fan base, but it is a small one. Same goes for these indie MMOs. There are mobile MMOs with larger player bases than those games.
I would love for a new MMO to come out that is like Vanilla wow was, but there just isn’t any major demand for it. The core MMO market has shrunk, and the bulk of what remains has become more casual. Classic will not be revolutionizing anything. The best we can hope for is a successful launch and healthy stable servers. Something we are not likely to get at the moment.
In its hey-day, WoW had 12.1 million active subscribers. If Classic had 20% of that actively playing, it would be #3 or #2 on the most popular list, possibly even #1. If that happened, people would pay attention.
I disagree. There’s a bunch of popular but tiny MMO’s on that model, because they don’t have the funding of a AAA product. And all the major MMO’s are failing, because of their attempts to make more money. If Classic proves there’s a market, even if Blizzard doesn’t, someone will capitalize on that market.
I would love to see a “separate version of subscription” which only for Classic. Even it will lower what I would be getting, it will make me feel just better. As I really do not involve anything, anything about retail version. Anyone who does not feel same as me can choose “shared subscription”. Technically adding a separate sub shouldn’t be too hard to achieve.
People need to remark, express and show how they feel about Classic and Retail versions of the game, so developers will make some radical drastic changes and decisions on the further development. A “shared subscription” is not strong enough to express this even they will have numbers who chooses which.
We’re talking about WoW, not the garbage they are pandering to the new era of directionless, challenge averse, and short attention span having phone gamers. And in WoW, MAUs aren’t very relevant.
And if you go for easy short term money, it almost never ends well for the company.
Are people really still doing that ‘FREE’ argument. We’re both paying 15 dollars for THE SAME THING. RETAIL AND CLASSIC, that is the one and only sub option. No one is getting anything for free. Just because I already play Retail doesn’t mean I’m getting something for nothing. Yeah, being able to use all parts of a bundled product is better, but it’s a flat fee for everyone.
You are getting what everyone else who pays a sub gets. Access to 1-110 content unless you bought Battle for Azeroth, and when the new expansion rolls around Battle for Azeroth is going to be rolled into that and the new expansion will be the one kept from players who only pay the sub fee.
Unless Blizzard decides to stop charging for expansions, which I don’t see happening, that’s how it’ll be. There’s nothing wrong with that and you don’t deserve anything.
We all know that. But that is the direction we can see, how we knew that Blizzard would make the subs combined.
The continuous argument from this Classic forum is that I want something for free. I didn’t ask for it to be free, I simply saw the pattern already in place.
Every step before that made that conclusion evident. Blizzard gave away Starcraft, despite selling Starcraft Remastered. The first chapter of Starcraft 2 is free to play. Hearthstone, Heroes are free to play. It’s the mobile gaming mindset. Even WoW has the “Starter edition” which is completely free to level 20 (with no time limit).
Even WoW is built to offer a little taste to lure in subs or new players. Whether that taste is good or not is not important, so long as it is there.
That’s why MAUs are “important” for Blizzard - that’s the business model that they’re going for. You can deny that this is how they view their games, but the evidence is all over the place.
So are you. You get 110 levels of content just for your subscription. Also, the retail players who don’t play Classic aren’t getting anything extra. So the people who only play one or the other aren’t going to have any difference.
The only option that would be better than the 15 combined would be an option for Classic or Retail for 10 dollars and then 5 more for the combined. But Blizzard doesn’t seem like they want to do that so this is far and away the most fair option.
You can spin it so that Blizz is tossing you a bone in the form of a two for one, but that’s not the point I’m making. I want it to be as crystal clear as possible what people are spending their money on.
You are spending your money on a subscription to World of Warcraft. They will know the stats of who plays where and how much. Whether or not they share them is up to Blizzard. But we’re paying for the same thing in the end.
Plan to play both to varying degrees so I’m totally fine w/ it.
I don’t think Blizz built Classic just to fudge the numbers. I think it would be interesting if there were a way for us to see who’s playing what for comparison but players would just thrown around those numbers or lack thereof like they do now…
‘Look guys, this barely related stat indicates that we’re down 6 million subs, Half Life 6 confirmed!’
I like when companies who make things I enjoy stay in business.
I want someone to tell me how giving ~2 million people access to servers capped at ~3k that will have at most 100k loyal dedicated Vanilla players is a good thing? When most of those retail players go back to retail, we will be left with hundreds of dead servers. They can attempt to fix it, but then you have to consider what happens when retail hits another content drought, or the next Classic phase hits. When retailers flood back to their free all access pass to Classic, those of us actually playing the game will now be in a queue to get to our characters.
Exactly. You get full access to our game, we get partial access to your game. And again, It is not possible for Classic players to negatively impact a retail server. Retail players on the other hand will have a huge negative impact on Classic servers. Vanilla was capped at ~3k, 90% of a server being taken up by retail tourists is a disaster waiting to happen. Retail shards so it doesn’t matter if there is 1 or 100,000 players on a server.
Blizzard cannot put itself in a position where it competes with itself. WoW’s business model is built on subs and expansions and now some microtransactions. Classic represents a time when expansions and those microtransactions do not exist, thus making it a separate game would inherently stall any potential growth.
As a company, Blizzard is going to look to find ways to monetize their games further. It’s already in nearly everything mentioned. Even Starcraft - they offer Starcraft Remastered. Starcraft 2? First chapter is free, in order to entice players to buy the second and third chapters.
Say you are right, and Classic as a separate game happens. There’s 100k+ players who are further ‘untapped’ to the businessmen who make the corporate decisions. And they will ask “what else can we offer them to grow our business?” And they’ll start talking microtransactions.
tl;dr: If you make Classic a separate game, you open yourself to having these things inserted where they do not belong.
“We want to show Blizzard what game we support!”
The idea that Blizzard doesn’t know where players spend their time is inherently false, since Blizzard has long shown us that they’ve been able to track that sort of data.
The compromise of the combined sub is that Blizzard can show growth for “one game” (a general reference to World of Warcraft), while still being able to offer microtransactions and expansions, yet still have Classic have the integrity of not being directly affected by either.
The use of MAUs are only for investors. Investors are usually not gamers, and probably have little to no idea what Blizzard products actually look like. What they see is if X number of people enjoy this product that has Y amount of growth in income.
What? Are you saying that no company makes several similar products? I think you should really stop talking business or economics. Not to mention that they could possibly make more money by changing the way we pay for those games.
Where did I mention gamers? All I said is that MAUs do NOT show anything about revenue.
I’d be fine with paying a box cost for Classic WoW.
We had to pay one for all of the remastered versions of past Blizzard hits. I’m not Blizzard’s accounting dept. or anything but a lot of time and work is going into making Classic happen and I think Blizz should recoup at least some of that money outside of the sub.