Kinda what the job of a sales man is; sell things be that to customers or investors.
The trouble is, many sales teams really don’t understand how to sell or what they’re even selling. Some get it, but really it’s kinda rare and why “Salesmen” has a very high turnover, but if you get a good one done mess with his commissions; make sure you’re not tinkering with it because they do drive the money forward.
Kinda like production in any aspect of business; been counters often don’t understand the jobs and components they criticize. Even the been counter is important, but bean counters and salesmen should never run companies because it’s not what they are good at.
A good way to express this further; look at older some old games from history before a rubber stamp was made to build games. Quake had the best 3D engine in the industry and was a fun game to play, but Duke3d had a comparatively terrible engine but was 100x more fun because it was so interactive and had so much more interesting depth to the game not just in the cheesy story but in terms of all the little hidden secrets, nuanced things you could do, graphics that for the time and the engine were actually good and pleasing to look at, and a very long list of other little features that made it just effectively better than a mechanically superior game line Quake.
The same can be said for all these new ways to make money; sure they can work and yes they are very effective in extracting money from certain people, but in a situation where you’re trying to diversify your income (classic does that) by getting money in a different more traditional way; ya don’t and shouldn’t go changing that 100% money farm just because your only other product line that makes any income is a flop.
The best possible situation is identify WTH is wrong with the failed product (retail wow) and fix that.
Now at this point for blizzard it’s 4 expansions too late; they’re already sinking due to poor choices in retail. Nothing short of actually working hard and consulting real game designers (who are unlikely to volunteer) to fix retail can actually save blizzard.
Bilking the Classic customers with “added retail flavor” isn’t gonna win them any favors, nor does merging the ideas of Retail with Classic games.
If anything, they need to merge classic ideas with retail, and legit they tried in SL but seem to have only looked to their very misguided “engagement metrics” to see what about classic people like.
The measurement tool blizzard uses to gauge what they think is fun is a horrible fail, it’s this tool that kills them; that and some of the most borrowed, boring and unoriginal class designs ever… seriously, gold pay games on the phone designed specifically to empty your bank account have more interesting designs now days; this is how out of touch they are.