Thats amazing. Hopefully, its a lesson learned. Thank you for sharing the info. Cheers.
1 Like
You think you do, but you don’t 
3 Likes
From wowhead
“WoW revenue skyrocketed in August, attributed to massively increased subscription counts due to Classic WoW. Interestingly, their total revenue was still lower than that of last August, when Battle for Azeroth launched, which also had benefitted from a gigantic marketing campaign and expansion box sales, whereas Classic revenue comes from subscriptions only.”
So u have to take all that into context. Basically, subs are not everything. Classic popular no doubt amazing launch no doubt, revenue wise great but not out of this world.
Wowhead summarizes it nicely once again
“It is important to note, however, that one of the reasons Blizzard gave when stopped disclosing direct information on subscriptions was that subscriptions weren’t a good picture of how healthy WoW playerbase was, with retail WoW having many different sources of income for the company. Another factor is that many retail players are likely subscribed in longer subscription plans that overall earn Blizzard less, while part of Classic players probably subscribed for only a month to try the game. Even so, the increase in revenue is still an outstanding feat that shows the potential revenue present in Classic.”
There seems to be a good number of people who don’t know the history of private servers. They didn’t come late after the game, they were contemporary with wow’s development. In fact, emulation began before wow was formally released. If you want to google check me you’ll want to search details regarding leaked alpha, wowscape, Peyton, Burlex, etc.
The largest, most populous (and popular), private server at the time was a TBC server with, iirc, three or four realms with roughly 10K populations. It’s rise and demise was accompanied by a massive $90 million dollar judgement against the server admins. To my knowledge, that’s the largest money judgement against the WoW private server scene if not the only one. There were a number of smaller realms available at the time. Many of the players seemed to choose realms based off stability of server rather than content provided. There were vanilla servers, TBC servers, and eventually WoTLK servers but a large concentration of players were on TBC servers because vanilla wasn’t perceived of as a great iteration of the game (at odds with the popular opinion that pervades Classic discussions), there was a lot of work to make the servers stable and work on PvE scripting (the PvP attributes were completely bonkers, such as, resilience either not working or doing something it wasn’t supposed to) and Wrath was not something a lot of the players wanted to get into given the state of the pserver scene.
I had quit following wow in general by the end of TBC and didn’t follow the pscene after the wowscape takedown so I don’t know how it grew from what I described into the Nostralius phenomenon. I do think there was a chilling effect and perhaps a pscene drought after that massive, unprecedented money judgement (and the main admin ended up fleeing the country herself) so my guess is that after some amount of time the vanilla servers started to emerge and, like before, issues of stability cemented the hold they had over their large/massive player bases that were more to do with how the server was operated and less to do with it actually being Vanilla itself. There’s some interesting connections that could be made between the rise of the pscene, retail, and eventual bridges between the two communities at the management level but I’ll leave that for others to fill in. There was a time when people who were interested in these things academically, legally, computer science-y, couldn’t openly talk about them for fear of the ban hammer so there probably won’t be much on the official forums.
Regardless, it’s not entirely relevant to me since I don’t think the pserver community is the main target or even the primary consumers of Classic. TBC offers a lot to both communities : it’s in the sweet spot where a lot of things were iterated to goodness (itemization and gear rewards) and introduces some content that people love (arenas and flying) without much of the baggage people think went wrong in Standard wow (LFG and content dilution).
3 Likes
The only problem is that we may not get TBC/Wrath… with the way Ion is almost trying to tank Classic with the accelerated content in order to boost subs for modern players dropping off… they are killing he experience.
Classic is likely to see a really big drop in 3-6 months because of the effect sof their folly.
The only thing that may get TBC and Wrath is that it is fairly cheapo to convert and manage.
And yet there havent been any petitions for TBC, it was made for classic… you want TBC, petition for it, all these big numbers you preach is air, nothing, make us and blizzard see, them as ink on paper, as was done with and for classic…
1 Like
This is the EXACT reason why we dont, and shouls never release the horrors known as expansions, especially TBC/WOTLK.
#NoChanges
1 Like
Classic is the only reason I came back. It is why I pay my sub.
3 Likes
yay for WoW! whichever version you like !! good news!!!
cupcakes for everyone!!!
2 Likes
I wouldnt go as far to call them horrors but i agree with the notion of keeping classic expansion-less. I enjoy playing the game in the old original world. TBC would empty that world out a lot.
1 Like
I wasn’t preaching anything just providing a brief history lesson. I don’t particularly care if TBC comes out; perhaps you’re confusing me with the person you were responding to before I responded.
It would be nice if they started sinking some of that cash into fixing class bugs. Hunter’s still have a buggy trap / FD, Rogues, Druids and other classes have issues too.
1 Like
You know what usually follows a meteoric rise…
I for one am growing very tired of the sluggish pace at which classic content comes out. If they cant find a way to stave off bleeding subs while at the same time not aliening players that are still consuming content…
Outerworlds, path of exile 4.0, borderlands 3… there are a ton of games I have on the back burner I am itching to try out, blizzard now announced they are not releasing anything for the rest of the year?
There is always the risk players just wont come back.
1 Like
Youre really close, but thats not the article were talking about. That came out a bit ago.
BC, probably. Wrath was not that great. I dont know why people say it was. The story was probably the best (because it was a direct piggy back off WC1/2/3 arc with the LK) but the game? No. The Game, is when people started asking to get off the ride.
TBC was the peak of the game’s actual growth.
1 Like
No it was not.
The greatest, exponential growth rate was in classic.
1 Like
The speed of the growth is a secondary data point. The main data point is that the subs increased by about 2 million in wrath over BC. That’s the data I’ve seen in my reading. Subs didn’t start decreasing until Cata.
2 Likes
That’s a good point. If subs were 2 million and they went to 4 million that’s 100% growth. Historically, however, the subs could have climbed from 2 million to 3 million to 4 million, etc. all the way up to 10 million but it’d only be a 50% growth each time.
Id have to look, but an argument was made that Wrath had the most turn over. Ppl kept coming in, but ppl also quit.
1 Like
What do you even pay for in candy crush??
That’s like saying solitaire is a good money maker
2 Likes