Record profits + late expansion = increased sub cost 
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How nice… no content for what… 5+ months (we pay for shadowlands so you cant include that).
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I still don’t understand how you’re charging 15USD a month for the quality being put out. Might have to call it quits $20AUD a month is just too much for a game during these times.
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Just a FYI they already did this in 2018 in regards to all shop prices and left NZ untouched back then.
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While I love this game, I don’t love that a visually outdated, 16 year old game is charging Aussies more suddenly. I guess I’ll have to hope I can afford 6 months of time if Shadowlands doesn’t suck.
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Classic blizzard. Release mounts and transmogs related to subscriptions & then hike up the price for sub afterwards. Absolute dog move. Not only are we not getting a better service out of this ridiculous price hike, but we didn’t even get any of the content we were promised on time.
Reckon this is the nail in the coffin for me, idgaf how good shadowlands might be. I got better things to spend $20 on per month.
Also it’s completely unfair that New Zealand haven’t had their prices effected!
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amen brother.
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Its like they want the game to fail at this point
Congrats blizzard, you’ve finally done it. I am going to take advantage of the price hold on my sub, and when that ends you’ve lost me.
Other members of my family have already cancelled their preorder or are no longer planning to buy shadowlands. Hope it’s worth it for you
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“Activision Blizzard experienced a record-breaking quarter for Q2 2020 as it generated net revenue of $1.9 billion across all subsidiaries”
Imagine having a record breaking Q2, blowing out your expectation for Q3 and STILL have the audacity to be this greedy in the middle of a global pandemic. We pay $60+ dollars for every expansion, now $240 a year in monthly game time? This has to be some kind of joke.
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Yikes, sorry about that AU
I definitely don’t like the thought of paying $35AUD more per year for the same service, but to be fair it does just bring it in line with the current exchange rate - it is currently around $77USD for an American 6 month sub, which is roughly $105AUD at the current rate. So really, we’ve been paying a discounted rate for a while.
But also, if I’m reading correctly we are basically getting 7 MONTHS notice here, as long as we are subscribed before the end of December.
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Well duh. Blizzard aren’t the only game in town, however, nor the only publicly traded company that has ever existed.
I feel like that Blizzard quality/service has been diminishing over the years, as well. The quality of their actual customer service agents is a particularly good example, as much of that has been automated.
The costs of running their servers have, quite objectively, dropped significantly since 2004, as well.
Edit: I think it’s important to point out, upon a reread of your post, that dodgy private servers run by 3 people, and paying $15 a month are not the only options. Merely two extremes.
Obviously, everything I pay to any company, for any product, is going to ultimately land in somebody’s pockets. However, my point is, I don’t feel as if I’m actually getting anything out of the value proposition anymore. In the past, I could even have justified the ‘cost to access the (very expensive to run) servers’ thing.
Now? I’ve got no idea. It’s just kind of a fee we pay, because we always have - because we’re used to it. 
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How about you let us play with the sun up then instead of being linked to US realms and having to play in the dark unless we spend time walking currency into items
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At first I agreed seemed odd NZ didnt get a hike but as another user posted they have actually been paying way MORE for their subs for a while now. ~22 AUD for a sub and again while this price hike sucks its still cheaper for us aussies to play the game than for US players we got use to playing for cheap and now they seem to be normalizing our price with US base. Now if they where to raise it ABOVE what US player pay, yeah id be bloody pissed but even if i had payed $20 for my 15 years of subbing WoW it still would have been one of by best investments in terms of time played for cash paid.
also people saying wow blizz made record breaking amount of money and still increase price? welcome to capitalism and publicly traded companies unless you make year after year record breaking numbers you are seen as a bad investment.
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^ Perfectly said.
Record unemployment and floundering economy = less people able to justify a hiked price for something like this. What a tone deaf moment to pull the trigger on a sub increase. Clearly, Blizzard doesn’t have any representatives in Australia giving them proper consumer insight. They’re just watching market lines and currency conversion rates.
It means jack all that we’re still paying less on the US dollar per month, when there are far more people in this country struggling financially than in previous years. How that compares to the cost of things in the US is essentially meaningless to the average person.
Honestly, there’s really not much justification for this, other than keeping investors happy. Given the amount of good faith that Blizzard’s been struggle to claw back, this is horrendously short sighted, and honestly kind of disgraceful.
Hope Kotick enjoys his new boat, though. He should name it the SS Harold Holt. Not that I’m trying to manifest anything.
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No doubt the majority of that is from Call of Duty Warzone aswell and that game still runs like absolute rubbish on PC
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It’s not normalised though it is… American citizens pay $15 USD for servers based in their country.
Technically if we’re playing on Australian servers we’re paying $20 AUD to play on servers based in our country.
It’s all relative we are in australia buying Australian products, so if you have an American earning $500 a week and an Australian earning $500 a week the Americans money already goes further due to massively reduced costs of living etc… so regardless of exchange rates, technically we are still paying more we don’t earn our money in USD we earn our money in AUD and spend it on product’s that cost AUD
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Beat me to it, this has always annoyed me playing in the dark unless we spend up big on time walking items to play in the light in Australia during the day.