I could write some long spiel about this and that, but perhaps talk to my lawyer Steve Berman:
You know why Dre’s record was so successful?
He’s rappin’ about big-screen TVs, bl—, 40s and bi—.
You’re rappin’ about ho— and Vi—
I can’t sell this!!
appealing to small subset of angry internet nerds would drive a $75,000,000,000 company out of business over night
the noobcake masses are fickle. a dime a dozen. will leave you for the next shiny thing.
the uberleet hardcores will build loyal communities that will provide stable flow of capital moola for decades.
pick your playerbase… the masses, or the aristocrats.
Appealing to niche groups is fine you just can’t have a company worth $75,000,000,000
That is why the original Doom was complete genius. It was made by literally 5 guys, if only weirdos bought it like me they still would have made money.
Magic: The Gathering is an interesting counterpoint to your theory.
Do you think MTG would be more successful if they dumbed down their game, added tons of free epic cards in every pack, or moved away from their fantasy to appeal to more people?
Random Google, may not by wholly accurate but to give a sense:
MGIC Investment net worth as of August 08, 2023 is $5.1B
I think for some genres, appealing to the masses indiscriminately might temporarily boost sales, but long term you’re killing the golden goose.
Maybe the leveling used to appeal to the masses but beyond that there’s nothing about the game that appeals to the masses.
market cap is .82 billion sorry
look its a company but smaller!
WoW is fairly casual friendly. The community at large is not casual friendly.
WoW just needs to support casual players more. This doesn’t mean more content or dumbing down the game, but it does imply that the “30-60min session” is important to support. Waiting in queue for LFR for 30min eating away half your play time can be seen as friction a competitor can capitalize on. That’s why we don’t have any dungeons like BRD.
And it’s not about dad gamers, gamers in general want to finish at least one activity in their play session. If I had 30min to play, would I pick WoW or an RPG game I can save and pickup later? Maybe if I was leveling in WoW I could play for a bit, but I likely wouldn’t have time for a M+ dungeon nor LFR/raid if given even 60min.
This isn’t a fair assesment, as with most people on these forums you are comparing apples to oranges. Revenue from activision is roughly 57% of total company revenue, and blizzard is 17% annually. They also own King games, which accounts for the remaining portion coming from this segment. So 17% of your 75b is actually only 12.75b market cap if the conglomerate split. Therefore the MTG comparison is valid and WELL within an order of magnitude.
Not to mention blizzard benefits from activisions large cult classics like CoD, so 12.75b market cap is probably pretty generous, if blizz was it’s own company.
To better compare, a company with around 600m rev is playgon gaming with a measly market cap of 10m
Miss the days where just making something fun was the priority. The constant obsession with numerical peak performance is exhausting
Oh it’s you again.
/wave
Fun is subjective though. Not everyone wants to be leveling for 3/4 of the expansion.
Should this not be the goal? Do you try out for the football team to ride the bench? Do you go play a pick up game of Bball with the homies to be picked last? Instead of dwelling on whther its fun or not, put a little bit of effort in and you will begin to see how fun it actually can be.
It is ironic that the game had its highest rate of success when it was based on fun.
Making the game that more people will like compared to making a game less people will like.
I don’t know. Seems like a good plan.
my mom was like “who would see that barbie movie1”
$1,000,000,000 saw it mom, maybe concerned moms aren’t the cultural arbiters you think they are
the masses want beautiful women, explosions, and goblins
only weird little internet cliques care about ethics in game journalism
Isn’t that obvious OP?
Ion has said time and time again that throughout the years, when they design anything, they have a lot of playstyles, niches, etc they need to weigh when deciding what ‘middle ground’ there could be and what is the direction they want to take - - that would ultimately appeal to a wider audience.
The problem really isn’t who they are appealing to or why, the problem is they phone-in the way they appeal to these groups of players so no one actually wins
Raiding is still a slog for gear with virtually zero bad luck protection for certain bis pieces and vault is just an rng joke without the option to save up dinar or just giving us 1 “guaranteed loot of your choice” token for a full clear or last boss kill each week
M+ gets a lot of love because so many players run it, yet also gets some of the most unfun and least thought out affixes ever resulting in some classes getting hard excluded from pugs among other unfortunate consequences
PvP simultaneously doesn’t exist and gets 1/10th the care the other pillars of content, yet ges some of the most exclusive and some of the only true time-limited FOMO rewards left in the game (to keep the hardcore crowd stuck in the loop instead of leaving to better pvp games)
Casuals get better gear tracks to get into current content, but originality in WQ’s is extremely lacking with many of the same simple objectives they’ve been recycling since at least Legion, the supplementary world zones they keep adding get absolutely zero love and die after 2 weeks because almost nothing is worthwhile to do there and the stuff that is gets zerged by most people within a month and the zone is left to rot with zero rebalancing of rares/elites for solo players/smaller group sizes
Everything gets half cheeked so no one really ends up happy and I know the fault for it usually lies not in the devs themselves but the big brass that only cares about money and pumping crap out while imposing eternal crunches and forcing corners to be constantly cut
I mean they should design fun content then ppl will come for that.
M+ is an example.
Blizz has a habit of designing then abandoning things.
Look at battlefronts. Dumped mid bfa but blizz shoulda made them into rbgs with a time limit. Bingo new pvp content thatd be objective based fun.
Class halls? Gone. Everyone loved those and they gave great flavor and a reason to pick up other classes and gave good rp flavor
Stuff added in df is ok but idk i feel its missing something. I played the crap outta legion but DF i feel indifferent. I log in and see 8000 quests and just cant be bothered. Professions are just irritating mess of time investment im not gonna do because im not gonna make money from it.
M+ still good though. Id still do class hall for mog for sure too. Id do pvp warfronts vs the cross faction circle jerk we got goin now.
This is also a skewed view point. Obviously, the game was new during the point at which you are referring to. That increases popularity. The game is still plenty of fun. Leveling can only be fun for so long.
Well I’m not hardcore and only was for one raid tier throughout all of wow. I’ve been playing since dec 2004. It’s not hardcore players it’s hardcore Warcraft or should I say world of Warcraft fans.
I love the game, I love the stories. I take small breaks here and there of like two or three weeks. Trust and believe it isn’t just hardcore players that are loyal.