During the release of Shadowlands, they lost 4 million player’s interest. Which could be linked or not linked to the newest expansion.
Thank god we have store mounts and microtransactions to make up for the losses and the horrible gameplay in this pay to play game, right lads! Blizzard is still making profit this way! It’s all good and we don’t need to worry about this loss since they still managed to get a 7% increased profit with Shadowlands and Classic.
This is the correct way to look at it. Because at least this is using the same metric for each quarter for once.
Unlike their shiny reports which are always shiny because they cherry-pick different metrics for different quarters. Eg, in the last quarter WoW was supposedly doing super-great because of quarter-over-quarter “growth”. Meaning the quarter with the release of SL in it doing better than the quarter without. Where is this metric now? Right, nowhere. Because it went down massively so they don’t report it this time. They report year-over-year “growth” instead. Meaning that the quarter right after the release of an expansion is doing better than the quarter in the middle of the lull for the previous expansion. What a big win.
The numbers cited in the article show the real picture, even though they are given for the entire Blizzard, not for WoW specifically. Blizzard have been on the big decline. This decline continues. And the recovery? The future? It’s in Blizzard releasing phone games and then either making it there or failing that, too, and spiraling down even more. Where else do they think they are putting those “2000 more developers” that they are claiming to want to hire. WoW? LOL, no. They gave us Ion, he will explain that the game is actually great as it is and that they will continue to listen to the players.
Atleast now we know the reason behind the 58 boost in TBC and the store mount added to it aswell.
They’re desperate to raise that profit margin. Most of the normal, casual people are leaving and they’re trying to milk the whales of the game even further.
One day, it will be nothing but whales that are left playing this game.
The saddest thing is, Jagex woke up to that nonsense and gave Old School RuneScape the chance to flourish without MTX and now the game has double the amount of players than RuneScape 3, the original one.
Though times a ‘bad’ and the direction of travel is clearly not what Bobby wants, it does show that despite WoW being in a bad place game wise and active population clearly down it is still a giant of a game and makes Acti-Blizz a fortune.
With that in mind, please, please, please Blizzard invest in the game, bring back real GMs, sort out the WTS issue and make good engaging content that is finished on release to your customers, we are all fed up of paying to be beta-testers.
Monolithic companies and huge publishers will lose players based solely on the fact that there’s more games to play. The strategy for maintaining players is to attract multiple audiences. Blizzard has like 3 relevant games - HoTS, WoW and OW. They are not doing anything to attract a diverse audience anymore. With D2: R and Diablo 4, they will compete with PoE for the ARPG audience. This is good.
But they completely missed out on capturing the MASSIVE audience for action-adventure RPG-lite. This is the biggest genre ever. EA did it kinda with the StarWars game. Activision did publish Sekiro, but they didn’t develop it.
Overall, Activision and Blizz focus too much on live games and singleplayer gamers don’t get too much love from them. So of course, they’ll flock to other studios that provide that. Single-player is still HUGE and Activision is missing out.
Quite honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard was sold to something like Tencent this or next year. They have been underperforming like all hell.
This isn’t an issue. The point is that players are massively leaving games like WoW, but Blizzard does not care, because if you read the report carefully, it means they are selling tokens and microtransactions at a record pace.
I’m at a stage where I would rather have Blizz owned by Tencent rather than Activision. Look at Riot and GGG. Tencent really doesn’t seem to mess in the creativity of the studios they own. They let them do whatever they want. Hell, look at Leyou or whatever it was called, the Chinese company that owns Digital Extremes. Recently bought by Tencent. But they too let creatives do whatever they want. Warframe, even if I don’t like it, is a beloved game. The Chinese are doing well. Activision should LEARN.
I agree. That might mean the real death of WoW though. As in, no development at all and the servers closed after 3-4 years. But even if it does, good riddance.
Pretty sure I see 2M? But I doubt it all has to do with WoW. It’d be quite contradictionary. Since we have been saying that WoW only has 1-2M players for years. Yet they lose so many just due to WoW? Impossible.
SL is an issue but we’re talking about Activision-Blizzard here not World of Warcraft.
Three years ago OW was booming, D3 still had some players, and HS was doing fine.
OW is dead.
D3 is dead.
HS is dead.
Edit, literally forgot these next 2 existed for a minute there:
SC is dead.
HoTS is dead.
(I’m using ‘dead’ loosely here - significantly less popular at the very least)
WC3 completely flopped.
Maybe they’ll realise WoW is still their core game and treat it better…
