Stream view drops aren’t even a decent sign. Many gamers don’t even watch them much. We…play the game. My 2nd monitor entertainment is way more fun stuff.
Honest game trailers is among my liked watchings on monitor 2. Or vive la dirt league. Some others as well.
You know…fun stuff. I don’t need streamer x yapping about gameplay. I am there, already. Even bellular who has actually made a game (I will give him that) made a SP game. Not MP.
Cool he stepped up as a dev…but not a MMO dev.
A decent chunk of viewers can also be what I call spectators. they don’t even have the game and no plans to get it.
They watch a streamer, see that story bits and go that is nice (or kind of meh) and move on. See game story, some game play…and not pay for it seems to be their angle. Whatever works for them really.
that’s fine but I just don’t think that applies to everyone, someone like belluar’s WoW videos especially lore videos were getting half a million views in a week and now he barely gets over 50k. and the explanation is…people are too busy playing the game to watch videos, anymore? I don’t buy that for a second. that could explain SOME fluctuating, but not everyone’s videos suddenly getting 80% less views there’s really only 1 explanation for why that is happening
Actually the optimist in me is thinking this is showing human kind is getting smarter.
more are realizing its the same crap. Its streamer X’s monthy click bait rant vid. Human kind might be learning to find better things to watch.
Script slightly different…still the same crap as the last 4 of them they did this year.
See retail side when I see the surge in add on threads I go see if streamer x, y or z has put their quarterly add on rant vid.
And they have most times. Echo chamber party time! Some may be getting out of that echo chamber. Good for them. Now they can go watch some quality stuff.
Yes. That the content mill, clickbait, long winded daily/weekly video format is an off putting way for many of us to get our wow news/information.
Many of us can only tolerate so much of that format before completely ignoring it. It combines “this could have been an email” with watching advertisements, sprinkled with some horrible takes, and lastly littered with nontroversy.
I think there might be a generational thing going on too. I’m 40 and I don’t have a “favorite streamer or YouTuber.” I don’t follow anyone on “insta” or engage much with any form of social media aside from this and maybe my guild discord. That’s because there all just designed to waste my time, advertise to me, and influence me in some way.
So because of these things… there is no feasible way any of these streamers/influencers can retain people like me. I’m just not going to be willingly monetized like that.
So… with that being said, yes, I feel that social media metrics are probably a terrible way to measure how WoW is doing, especially if many(and I suspect it’s true) wow subscribers are like me.
Retail doesn’t have any activity, i have 3 70s on dragonflight the game is dead, pvp is empty, and only activity on the most popular NA megaservers is when new pve content is released, its active for 3 weeks till people quit again.
There is no constant activity on retail it has small spurts of activity when new content is released than dies so quick. People do their seasonal stuff and log off.
The way retail works for the past 5 years is log on for content patches than log off, it’s not like classic where people grind/play through entire phases.
1 They think classic is the better game And whenever they hear modern or retail they think bad So by calling it dead in their mind classic is better.
2 They don’t want to acknowledge anything That blizzard is putting out That’s new can be good Will there be good or not they can’t acknowledge it Because they’ve just well They feel it’s not there game anymore.
3 What wow is now Isn’t what they want They wanted to be like classic Because to them classic is perfect whether it be perfect or not or They would rather take the shortcomings of classic because they see it part of its charm.
4 There’s a lot of people that have been burned by bfa and Shadowlands And even though dragonflights better to them They’ve been burned too many times and they don’t want to give blizzard another chance.
5 There is a lot of people that just don’t like blizzard It’s the whole blizzard bad anything new blizzard does is bad, but their old games were good.
6 They want it to be better They want retail to be dead Whether they can say it still a bad game even without playing it Whether it be truer not they want dragonflight to suck At everything Weather be true or not They want classic to be the better version They just can’t picture The newer game being good in any way.
That bit is true. they won’t listen to the fixes for that. 2-3 weeks its rushed and done.
2 months later…most of the content can’t be run solo’d since they made it truly group based.
So it dies for later peeps. Most of the active players zerged this already. the late comers hope enough are there months later.
They need to dial that stuff back and have it so its more soloable. That I have boiled down to they tried to fix potential
(bot) farming. But are doing more harm than the farmers would have.
retail and classic subscriptions are the same thing. I dont know how you would differentiate between an actual retail player and and a classic player who keeps his retail sub running for access to classic without actually playing retail.
Of course if you dont consider this I m not surprised you think retail has “more subs” then classic
I would categorize anyone who owns DF and has a sub a retail player. Most classic players I interact with on here wouldn’t be caught dead buying a dragonflight license. I mean I’m sure blizzard knows, but I just go by things like popular curseforge downloads. Can’t imagine why a classic only player would intentionally update things like dbm for retail.
MoP is the last expansion I owned, I never took blizzard up on their free offers, unless my wife did it, she threatened me with it… Blizzard deleted all my characters at one point and their restore feature never worked, blizz support pretty much told me to suck lemons.
Why would you want to fix that? They get their money, people have their fun for a month or two after a big content patch and then they can just yknow do something else instead of being held hostage by idiotic system design like it was in certain previous expansions.
Final Fantasy uses a similar model and it works, and I’d expect Blizzard finally realised that it’s actually not a bad idea after Shadowlands.
As a retail convert… as it stands… retail requires too much from the majority of the player base who are in their late twenties to thirties. We don’t have the time to incessantly grind M+ or do ridiculous reputation farms every time a new phase/raid comes out - imagine running a key 50+ times for a BiS item. As someone whose done M+ and Cutting Edge raiding in BFA, SL, and DF… it isn’t fun anymore. The game is bloated and while “new” content is put into the game, it’s basically the same ideas being recycled over and over again.
Classic is just farming content over and over though. In retail there is progression for a couple weeks / month then depending on your crew you can just take a break until the next tier. I think the power creep / nerf rollout is too intense in retail and it gives a lot of B tier players this need to burn themselves out forcing months of farm each tier just so they can clear an inferior boss and say they’ve finished.
The need for the best gear encapsulates a very small portion of high end raidings motivation ,its a means to an end. Whereas in classic it seems to be the only end. Completely different populations, the upper end raiding population has always been the minority in every iteration of wow when it was current, and every raid has experienced nerfs. The unfortunate side of classic is that everyone experiences the nerf state, but its not really a big deal because the population who enjoys farming raids are playing classic.
Retail would probably be better if the between patches gave gear better than mythic raiding / upper m+. Maybe people would raid for one off trinkets/bonuses but the current system of forcing guilds to stick to progression so they aren’t handicapped next tier is aweful in the current 4 difficulty:gear ilvl state.
Retail is a horrible trash game made with no empathy for the players and only designed to drain people of their money with the cheapest content possible