Saying they were micromanagement soft would have been far more delicious.
Because they’re already paying for Game Pass.
it will take atleast 2-3 years before there is any noticeable change unless microsoft decided to micromanage hard
Nothing really, pretty much some old same old…only reason why Microsoft wanted Activision blizzard so badly was because of king
Right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to play WoW. People have access to ESO, Black Desert, and Destiny 2 (to name a few) through game passes or because they’re free and don’t play those games.
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This is the mentality my mom had where she would get free cat food offers when we didn’t have a cat and neither did our neighbors.
If you don’t need/want something, it doesn’t matter if it’s free unless you’re senseless.
Offering WoW as part of game pass immediately reduces the revenues of the few million left paying a WoW sub, because it would be stupid for existing WoW subscribers to continue to pay $15/mo when they can pay $10/mo and get access to lots of other games.
Now look at the flip side and all the existing GamePass PC subs that now have access to WoW. They either need to:
- attract enough new players from GamePass subs to offset the -5$/mo loss of existing WoW subs; -OR-
- attract enough new players from GamePass subs who will spend $5/mo in aggregate on the WoW cash shop to offset the revenue loss from existing subs.
I don’t see any bean counters at ABK or MS thinking that’s a risk worth the potential reward. Basic business risk management and opportunity analysis says they won’t put WoW on GamePass for PC.
My son and his wife tried WoW and didn’t stick with it. While that’s only a single data point, I just think that the younger generation that likely pays for GamePass PC is simply not interest in a time-sink game like WoW when they can already play a GamePass MMO like any the following:
- ARK: Survival Evolved
- ARK: Ultimate Survivor Edition
- Black Desert Online
- Conan Exiles
- DayZ
- Destiny
- Destiny 2
- Diablo IV
- Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
- Fallout 76
- Guild Wars 2
- Into The Echo
- MapleStory
- Phantasy Star Online 2
- Sea of Thieves
- Star Wars: Battlefront
- Swords of Legends Online
- The Elder Scrolls Online: High Isle
- The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind
- The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited
- The Lord of the Rings Online
- World of Tanks
- World of Warships
If anything, existing GamePass PC subs are trying Diablo IV since that’s the only confirmed change that’s been made since the merger went through. It would be interesting to know if the D4 cash shop has a surge in revenue, but I’m doubting it (Diablo Immortal seems to be the new Blizzard cash cow).
The whole point is that it would be accessible to anyone with game pass. Accessibility is an automatic increase in player population. How much of an increase, dunno but considering that gamepass is in the ten’s of millions of people it’s not out there to think 5% of them (1-2 million) would be willing to give it a try.
I am also of the belief that the in game store and tokens have surpassed subs as the primary source of revenue based on how hard they’ve been leaning on the store. So the gamble is whether or not losing out on subs will result in enough of an increase from store purchases/token purchases and that’s entirely in the realm of possibility.
The dumbest move they can make is to continue to rely on subs when the population diminishes expansion after expansion after expansion.
I’d love to have one of those paper clip pets…that would be freaking cool…
All Microsoft has to do is bundle Office 365 with a WoW subscription and I’ll sub to this game for the rest of my life.
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Yeah, I guess I’m not seeing how there would be sudden, exploding interest in a 20 year old game long past its peak that most gamers have at least tried out. If everything you said is true, might as well just make it F2P and expand the shop.
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My take is that this will end up being a net benefit to Blizzard games in general.
Understanding that correlation is not causation, we do have some circumstantial evidence to indicate that Blizzard being a “little fish” in a big pond benefits Blizzard games. We need to recall that Vanilla, Burning Crusade and Wrath were developed when Blizzard was a subsidiary of Vivaldi, and nothing more than a line item on a very large portfolio.
ABK spun off from Vivaldi in 2008, and then bought King in 2015. Now, it is true that “C suite” executives generally do not get involved with the day-to-day of studio decisions. But the one thing that sheltered Blizzard prior to 2008 was being just one of many revenue streams of a corporation in which they factored very little. Being 1/2-1/3 of a company’s revenue generator puts a lot of focus on that company.
So from, say, 2015 onwards, we start to see more monetizations, more rumors of micro transactions 9and eventual micro transactions. We saw RIFs (reductions in force) at Blizzard to “remove redundancies,” putting marketing and the like under Activision. We saw Kotick’s influence on the game by the increasing “esportization” of WoW at the expense of more diverse forms of in-game engagement. This would also include restructuring and downsizing to make development “lean” (ie try to make fewer developers do more) - all to improve the bottom line and make “line go up” to make the investors happy.
So yeah, technically, Kotick didn’t tell Blizzard what to do, but if you take a celery stalk and put it in water dyed red, the celery stalk turns red. Blizzard made their own decisions, but had to do so under the restrictions placed on them by the ABK executives.
A lot of what players are unhappy about with the current state of WoW has their root causes be with the overarching decisions of a Board that constantly demands profit growth every quarter and a CEO who dreamt of an e-sport empire built on the back of Blizzard games.
Under Microsoft, Blizzard goes back to being just one studio amongst many, and being a subset of just one division within a much larger corporation. And while the desire for profitability will remain, Blizzard doesn’t need to shoulder 1/3 of that profitability anymore.
Does this mean everything goes back to the “before times?” No. I am pretty sure that Microsoft has plans. I just think that Blizzard will have more local autonomy than they did as part of ABK. We are already seeing the star of this by Microsoft staying out of the unionization efforts within Blizzard.
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Not sure why, it hasn’t benefited the other studios in any way noticeable. In fact, it’s pretty clear it was Microsoft that pushed Arkane to speed up production on their last game, Redfall, and everyone got to see just how well that worked out.
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honestly we have no idea outside that fact we can only speculate on what will happen.
Woke means civil liberties and equal justice under the law regardless of majority / minority status. Are you saying someone is against that sort of thing?
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As of a few days ago WoW is not listed on the 50 plus games from Blizz/Activ/King coming to game pass .
Do you mean against Progressivism? Yes.
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I mean they just confirmed it, they’re against seeking to advance the human condition through social reforms based on science, technology, economic development, and social organization.
And if they’d like to come out and reply themselves… maybe we’d like to hear exactly what the problem items are.
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I wonder what the ‘woke insanity’ is they’re referring to. That’d be interesting to hear.
I mean that’s kinda where I was leading, so…