According to former Blizzard developer Jason Hall on a podcast, the Celestial steed netted more income than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.
A horse in WoW made more money than an entire one of Blizzards other IPs. No wonder they never made a 3rd game. Why even bother at that point.
Iâve heard this statistic thrown around a lot, itâs hilariously wrong if you take even 5 seconds to actually think about it.
40% of players in wow have celestial steed (https://www.dataforazeroth.com/collections/mounts)
Lets be generous and assume everyone with the steed got it from the shop (they didnât but just for demonstration) with an estimated peak subscriber count of 12 million thatâs 4,800,000 sparkly ponies sold at 15 bucks a pop. Blizzard themselves have reported that The Starcraft series has generated over $1,000,000,000 of revenue as of 2017 (https://investor.activision.com/static-files/bbfd4b49-bf78-40bd-aefe-3467f211844b).
idk about you, but 72 million seems like a MUCH smaller figure than 1 billion. Clearly a disgruntled developer mad because his personal contribution of all of his effort was less than a horse.
i havenât played sc2 but iirc the story basically ended within the timeframe of sc2 so making a third game probably wouldnât be as viable unless they decided to go with a completely different story.
also starry horse go brrrrrrrr.
Itâs space. You can invent any bad guy you want from anywhere.
Yeah, with the almost cosmic-horror scale Sc2 ended up with, it would be difficult to make a proper âsequelâ. What would be most likely would be a new saga in the same universe but none of the same characters.
yeah sc3 would either have to up the scales in such an insane way that its becomes unbelievable ie: dragon ball z post freezer, or bring things down to a much more local level that no one cares whats going on aka: the fullbringer arc in bleach.
Personally iâd rather a series die in grace than become yet another franchise zombie with only one goal: make the monies from the nostalgias.
Never underestimate the power of the âsparkle ponyâ
This is a terrible comparison because the dev was specifically talking about âWings of Libertyâ and not the whole IP.
Also the celestial steed was originally $25 not $15 like he said in the clip.
I have to agree this is not an accurate representation. The developer said that the WoW mount was more profitable for Blizzard than StarCraft 2 WoL. That is likely due to the much higher development cost associated with WoL than the WoW mount. I bet that Starcraft 2 WoL overall made more money than the mount, but when you take into account the development cost of it, it was not as profitable. But it definitely explains why they have not made a new StarCraft game for a long time.
Unsurprising like who wouldnât want their own Twinkles 
Exactly! Why pay 40 developers to make a game when a single person making a mount is insanely profitable?
Donât blame the guy one bit for being upset.
What a load of nonsense. Starcraft 2 sold some 4.5 million copies at what 2.5-3.5x the price of the steed? There is no way they sold over 12 million steeds.
Then factor in the amount of royalties Blizzard is getting from Starcraft tournaments which are still one of the most popular in South KoreaâŚno damn way making another game is not worth it to them. In fact, they have been pushing the development of WoW attempting to make it more tournament friendly and failing hard at it.
StarCraft 2 is gigachad.
Iâd believe it just because RTS games seem to be pretty unpopular in general :l
But they did pay a whole team to make WoL, and HotS, and LotV. And frankly expecting to be brought back after HotS was already stretching it enough. Itâs less âlol we could make more money on a horse than on you clownsâ and more âat some point we shouldnât keep making games nobody likesâ.
I would not consider starcraft a game ânobody likesâ. Its still played very competitively in South Korea.
Yep.
A fun tangent example. Off some sales data the most successful DCU movie to date, kind of DCU anyway, was/isâŚteen titans go, the movie. While not an official DCU movieâŚteen titans are in the DCU as comics and the show.
It didnât have millions in actorâs salaries, intense cgi farm rendering, etc. It went straight to profit making really fast. It didnât need to break say 200 millionâŚthen now profit. IIRC it cost maybe 10 to 30 million to make?
People who donât believe sparkle pony made more profit than SC2 WoL are delusional and misinformed. Yes, SC2 costs more than the pony and yes it sold a lot of units, but thereâs several points youâre bot considering.
The pony came out during WoWs peak, and people werenât disillusioned on in game stores or Activision yet, so sparkle pony sold extremely well. Blizzard could never achieve these numbers ever again due to vastly lower player count and people being tired of store mounts and greed, but it happened.
SC2 is an RTS game, which isnât a widely popular genre. I wouldnât call it niche, but it certainly isnât going to reach CoD numbers or anything (imo this is unfortunate but people like what they like). Granted Starcraft was a popular IP from a at-the-time beloved company, so it performed much better than most RTS games, but still.
The most important detail: This is about PROFIT, which is after you take away production costs from the total revenue. SC2 was a full game with a large development team, as well as some expensive voice actors (even if I would prefer the OG Kerrigan over Tricia Helfer), and took years to make. That is a LOT of development costs. Plus SC2 was made back when Blizz still made and sold lots of physical copies. Production of all that physical media costs money, too.
Sparkle Pony was made by probably 1, at most 2 guys in probably less than a week. It probably took more development time setting up the framework to make buying the sparkle pony work than it took to make the sparkle pony itself. Itâs also entirely digital, so lots of money saved by not making physical media.
All that, and the fact that heâs referring specifically to WoL, not the rest of SC2⌠yes I absolutely believe the sparkle pony made more money than WoL. Lots more money. Heck, it probably sold a lot more units, too. It probably made a lot more profit than HotS and LotV each individually did, too, even despite those two used a lot of pre-existing tech and models from WoL. All 3 together? Probably not. But itâs ludicrous that you have to combine the sales of three full retail priced games to say a cash shop mount didnât make as much.
OP only includes 1/3 of StarCraft 2 and calls it the entire StarCraft IP. Thatâs like saying WC3: Refunded is the entirety of the Warcraft IP.
Because that was the specific comparison being made by the dev that worked on sc2:wol. That the pony from WoW made more money than that dlc for that game.
I think the comparison is being made because they were released at roughly the same time, but I think isnât a good example because you are talking about two different genres of games. One with a vastly larger audience than the other.