The thing to remember about something like this is that Playstation charges you for internet access on your consoles. You need PS Plus to engage in online activity. So not only would you pay 15 bucks a month to Blizzard, but then another 12 to Playstation. WoW in it’s current form is barely worth the 15, I can’t imagine people paying 2 subs.
They are, but they also don’t use any graphics API shared with any other platform. This would mean maintaining yet another proprietary backend. Like most technical blockers it’s really a cost blocker. Without any major financial incentive, and a lot of disincentives, it doesn’t really make sense.
Call of Duty has an established playerbase on playstation, WoW does not. Moreover it means complicating the account and licensing system which right now is platform agnostic. There is no separate Mac or PC license. PS5 requires a separate license purchase because of the way Sony operates their store, FF14 has this issue.
To add insult to injury it fragments the battle.net ecosystem. Since Sony isn’t going to allow a separate battle.net chat app on PS5. So I’m not sure guild or in game chat would even work now that it’s integrated into battle.net.
That’s not even counting the fact that Sony has to review updates on their console. Potentially giving them veto on content blizzard could release there. That’s really not acceptable.
As aforementioned there is also the 30% take of any store purchases that Sony would take. So yeah, there are a lot of reasons not to port to the PS5 or XBox (where similar albeit minorly reduced issues exist), than there are reasons to do so. Baring Sony or MS paying ActivisionBlizzard a ton of money… I don’t see it happening.
Any particular reason you only replied to that minor off hand comment and not the others? 
Like where is a list that shows the mouse and keyboard compatible games that i couldn’t find that shows all the games that are compatible? or How WoW can be on mobile without changing the entire game over because mobile’s touch controls are not really great controls in comparing to M+K or even a controller?..
I’d rather play WoW on my PC that’s easily twice as powerful as a PS5.
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The only thing preventing WOW from being on the PS5, XBOX, or Linux is a lack of will to recompile the client.
They have proven this by releasing native M1 Mac version upon the release of that processor/SOC. They will also support Windows on Arm with the release of 9.1. Consoles have better processing capabilities than most ARM devices running Windows.
I wish, that’d be nice.
What does it matter that you can plug in a k&m on a console? It being on the console would mean they have to make it work on a controller and that’s never gonna happen. Not to mention addon support is gone.
Sony is a Japanese company, Blizzard is not, that’s why OP.
And also if I were any Japanese company right now, I would just stick with games like FF14, and focus on what’s working, not what isn’t working, I mean no offence I am not saying that everyone on wow is toxic, but let’s be honest, compared to FF14 community this community collectively is aids,
Anything Japanese or Japanese made is my escape from all of this, not saying that there aren’t bad apples on FF14 and Japanese games in general, but my general experience has been only small amount of bad apples there, but mainly good apples, in wow/American games it’s mostly bad apples, with a few good ones,
For that reason importing something like wow over to a Japanese console simply isn’t worth the time or effort, what Japanese companies need to do is stick with what’s working,
I am sorry to say this bluntly but as things stand now, but if it were up to me, bringing a toxic community over to my console would be a terrible bad investment,
Sorry if I am sounding a bit mean and sorry for anyone this post may offend, but it’s just the honest truth to me.
Sony would allow Blizzard to publish their games on the PS store. As long as they get their 30% cut of sales, I doubt they care what country the publisher is in. Blizzard obviously has a business relationship with Sony already. They do sell Overwatch for the PS4.
Because the rest aren’t really relevant.
Because it doesn’t matter. The game developer can make it compatible if they want to. Why would they care if any other games support it?
It doesn’t matter how they go about making it work. Since they have already announced it is in development.
It is like anything else…Diablo on the consoles and mobile all have changed inputs and interfaces.
Well that’s your opinion. I don’t really know why you think my minor off-hand comment holds any relevance to what were talking here.
I do accept it as a fact that consoles have M+K support. But as far i can see, it’s no where on the same level as PC’s. So whenever somebody brings up “you can plug a keyboard and mouse to console”, usually as a retort to my “PC allows you all the peripherals you want and consoles don’t offer that sort of freedom”, that only makes me question where they are getting that idea where all or most games are compatible enough to where this phrase can be said almost commonly. And this isn’t for the lack of trying. I have tried, but only found 20 games that are compatible with M+K on consoles, while the claims trying to make it sound like the console has more games for that.
You are correct that the Dev can make it compatible if they want to, in the same vein as controller support on PC.
A good chunk of games if you don’t notice, play better with M+K. WoW included. So to a lot of people, this sort of information and support would be welcome to those who are on console. And something that is even way more useful on mobile because ideally you don’t want your fingers to block the screen because that’s where the gameplay happens and you need to see.
It actually does if you still want to retain what the PC version and still have all the features and complexity and such were accustomed to. Unless your suggesting their gonna make a completely different game.
…I might have missed that announcement. Can you link me to that?
Diablo ( i might be wrong, so fans of diablo correct me) is pretty simple in comparison to WoW, so the controller and maybe mobile touch controls makes a bit more sense, if not take a little bit getting used to if your coming from the mouse and keyboard.
If porting WoW to mobile and consoles is changed inputs and interfaces in a way that does not effect the PC version at all, or doesn’t affect the PC version at all to put at equal level with the other platforms, then it’s all fine.
Umm no, consoles massive changes in the codebase to support, they are definitely not as simple as just recompiling. They are definitely not free. Moreover that’s glossing over the massive legal issues of each platform.
Yes those were changes that required minimal effort because there was very little to change about the codebase other than to ensure locking is done correctly and switching matrix math libraries. That’s not even close to the work to support PS5/Linux/XBox.
A Blizzard Developer in these forums? That is great.
Yes, there would be work involved. However modern compilers and mapping to underlying APIs make it a lot easier. Especially since one of the consoles actually runs a version of Windows 10. Blizzard already has developers that work with these platforms. They also have relationships with the Console developers.
I don’t work for blizzard, but I have developed for consoles before and for windows, mac, and linux. 3D support on each of those platforms is unique and painful to say the least.
Yes that costs money, money that they aren’t going to spend unless there is a guaranteed return. Not to mention the massive legal issues of working with Sony and the impacts on battle.net.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can think it’s “Just that easy”.
They already work with Sony… They have products on their console so they know what to do. I would suspect that consoles wouldn’t be in Cross-play with the PC players. At least to start.
That’s insanely expensive for an unknown quantity of playerbase. Particularly when FF14 does have PC crossplay. So at best it looks bad. At worst it’s a massive net loss. When you could be spending that money on content… it doesn’t seem attractive.
Maybe…
You have to spend money to make money. Blizzard is pretty stagnant at the moment. They have no new properties coming out anytime soon. Just sequels of existing properties. Blizzard is also missing the majority of the money in the gaming market right now by not having all their properties on mobile and console. I know people won’t like it but this is the fact of the market. They will have to make changes eventually.
Absolutely agreed, but porting existing properties to new platforms with dubious audiences is not likely to break that.
Generally speaking the best way to break this is to “Let the kids go wild” e.g. set up a place they can crank out ‘cheap’ prototype games to see what grabs the market and is fun and interesting. Hearthstone is from my perspective the only place blizz is actually innovating right now.
Unfortunately WoW as best I can tell is considered a ‘legacy’ and shrinking property. Meaning that unless the risk is relatively low they don’t seem to be willing to take risks and are instead focused on meeting metrics with it.
They will, and they need to desperately. But I don’t think adding a platform is the best choice as it only increases the support burden and upkeep. Instead they should try to shift the momentum back in a positive direction by seriously examining their core design principles. There are countless other threads where that is debated endlessly.
Once they’ve done that they can re-examine if consoles make sense, but until then it would seem to be a fool’s errand. Because if you’re not growing where you are now, it might not be the location, it might be your product isn’t relevant anymore.
Quarter after quarter, they state that WOW is Blizzards highest income property. It is actually illegal to state this if it isn’t true because it can affect the share prices of Activision / Blizzard.
WoW is many things beyond just the game. WoW is also all the licensing and properties around it. So technically even hearthstone and HOTS includes “WoW” revenue to an extent. However WoW revenue is a fraction of what Call of Duty or Mobile bring in. CoD alone accounts for more revenue that almost all of blizzard combined in revenue alone. It’s also worth remembering they just got paid a lot of money by NVidia to implement RTX, and AMD to implement FidelityFX (I can’t tell a different for either… but w/e). That’s not non-negligible. They are also still getting money from the warcraft movie… etc.
Long story short… the game is only part of the picture, not the whole thing.