Just because they managed to convince tons of people to buy a sub-par product does not mean that the product was worth their money.
Three guesses why that is.
Of course they would say that – Why would they tell their investors otherwise?
“Was” being the key word.
Simply because you have large numbers does not mean that a sharp drop-off of consumers is not an incredibly bad thing. They lost almost HALF their entire playerbase before the first patch of the expansion, that is an incredibly bad performance for an MMORPG.
No argument there.
I haven’t read anybody say that the game is “dead” this expansion. I’ve heard them say that the game sucks, which they aren’t wrong in saying.
You could implement a thousand cinematics, that’s not going to change the fact that the gameplay is in one of the worst states it’s ever been.
You are greatly overestimating the cost of both cinematics and how much developers are paid. Blizzard has reportedly been a horrible place to work at for the past several years now and many developers have left since. Either because Activision systematically has had them removed as is likely the case with Mike Morhaime or for other reasons such as simply being unhappy at the company.
Many developers are struggling to make ends meet and some even skip meals, according to sources within the company.
But sure. World of Warcraft is thriving
Oh I know.
I highly doubt that they care regardless of where you report.
That’s why I told you you should read the Superdata report. It goes much deeper than “booo wow has lost 40% of its sub base booo”. They are a company that’s done gaming market research for a very long time. They know how WoW’s subscription works, because they’ve been following the game since it came out. Their entire credibility and business model lies in giving investors, not consumers, good gaming market advise. This is why people pay for their services. So when they say it’s fine, and the 40% drop off at that time of the expansion’s life is not worrisome as far as investing in Activision Blizzard, you have to take that into consideration. Superdata is not some Blizzard company, they are the most trusted gaming market research company, mate. I know being educated on information is not trendy these days, it’s not what the cool kids do. But you should really get yourself educated. When casual players who subscribe on a month by month basis run out of things to do, they cancel their subs. Around 20% of the subscriber base even engages in serious endgame. It is what it is, my dude. The covenant campaign managed to hold people’s interest for a while longer, in fact the subs would’ve gone down much earlier weren’t it for the time gating. But people saw the content and unsubbed. And they’ll sub back when 9.1 launches.
But can you be assured that the drop in subscriptions has anything to do with the state of the game?
There are just far too many mitigating circumstances at play here. We’d need to deep dive into the specifics for why people are unsubscribing, providing they actually left some feedback upon doing so, to determine if we should be worried about the current subscriber level.
Naturally people unsubscribe some months after release because they are burned out.
Some unsubscribe because life commitments change.
Some unsubscribe because they only tried WoW because they were bored during lockdown.
Some unsubscribed because they have found a new job after being made redundant.
Do you get where I’m going with this? Until we know the exact cause for people cancelling their subscriptions, it’s only pure assumption that it’s because the game is in a bad state.
I’m really curious what you’re trying to articulate OP. Putting words into the guy’s mouth and being overly dramatic doesn’t really make it easy to understand.
That said, you should definitely take your own advice. Not sure why you feel the need to try and convince people to follow you. If you’re truly not enjoying a form of entertainment wouldn’t you just stop instead of trying to lead some revolt against it?
He’s a video game designer not an authoritarian.
I love watching Netflix, but if they ever stopped having corny Anime I wouldn’t try to lead a weeb army against Ted Sarandos. On a related topic I need to get serious for a moment. Voice over Anime is a crime anyone who doesn’t support captions only should be imprisoned.
Nope - I’m just trying to tell others that there is no point of typing feedbacks as we do on PvP forums. There is no point on complaining, requesting. There is no point to keep sub to have access to the forums hoping for changes playing Classic in a meanwhile. If you play Classic you are still subbed so for Blizzard it doesn’t matter.
Only if we unsub and they will drop more subs and income might convince them to make any change. At the moment no changes are going to happen as Ion and his dev team don’t see these problems and for them the fact that new 200 ilvl char is getting stomped by 226 guy in arena is l2p issue (according to interview). The fact that there is more boosting in LFG than actual arena teams also doesn’t matter because Blizzard earns money on tokens that are exchanged to gold that is again spent on boosting.
We had to wait whole BFA to get vendor back while complaints already happened in BFA beta. Adding such vendor isn’t that much coding. Actually they added few of them in 8.3 for other things. Basically unless sub no. drops Blizzard is not going to change anything. Since 3 expansions is usual life cycle of Game Director I hope we are going to get a new one soon cause since Ion is GD the game is on huge downfall.
You forgot that we are customers not shareholders. The fact that Blizzard is doing ok on stock doesn’t satisfy me. I want good quality of content I’m actually paying for. I’m not really disappointed because it sucks now. I’m disappointed because it was good in the past and now it sucks so I know it could be done way better. I don’t know whose idea is to make our gaming experience worse and why are we the group satisfied the most. Blizzard devs aren’t always right. In fact I can point many occasions when they were absolutely wrong like on the fact that people won’t like to play Classic while it was one of the biggest release in gaming history and there are dozens of people who still prefer to play it over retail. While I’m not one of them them I still support people having fun in the game they want to play. The fact that old version of the game can be more appealing is easy to understand for me but for them it wasn’t. That’s why I also don’t understand why there is such a big deal in making PvP gear separate. Just because few top raiders want to gear for raiding from Arena doesn’t mean that the rest of the community has to deal with 226 ilvl players on brackets that grant you with 207 ilvl rewards.
When they say that it’s not worrisome as far as investing in Activision-Blizzard goes then that simply means that it’s not out of the ordinary for Blizzard to lose this many subscribers every expansion, as it’s something that has happened in the past and the sharp increases in playerbase whenever an expansion releases is the anomaly, not the sharp declines. Those are normal for Activision Blizzard.
None of this however reflects to the actual state of the game.
A sharp drop-off in playerbase is still going to be a negative thing regardless of the effect that it has on investors.
Since you clearly do not understand what these numbers mean I figure I’d explain that to you real quick =)
The 40% who has left since will not return when 9.1 launches.
Some will return, but it will not be a 40% increase in total playerbase. Nowhere close to that.
People only quit playing a game they’ve only recently purchased for only a few reasons, the most common ones being:
The product is not as good as they expected it to be,
The product quickly ceased to be fun,
They ran out of content to consume,
They do not have any time to play in real life,
They grew out of it and moved on.
While I’m sure there are some, #4 and #5 aren’t going to be much if at all a factor in the 40% drop-off after each expansion release.
This leaves the first three reasons which all directly reflect the state of the product itself.
The seas of videos on Youtube complaining about PvP, Gimmick Systems such as Covenants and other common complaints such as removal of old content, revamping, lack of immersion, etc. are exactly that.
There is a reason why the ‘common complaints’ are ‘common’.
Which tends to happen when a game is designed to be monotonous and grind-y.
These would be isolated incidents and would not happen on a large scale every time at the same time after an expansion is released. These sub losses are negligible.
Would explain the Shadowlands drop but does not apply to the other expansions which have had similar subscription drops, so it is safe to assume that this is not one of the reasons for the Shadowlands drop.
More people are losing their job each day. Getting a new job these days is incredibly difficult because most people aren’t allowed to do much right now, and business aren’t hiring because they are cutting costs and trying to save money so that they won’t go under.
So this also incredibly unlikely to be a reason for a sub drop.
Players have been yelling at the top of their lungs why they’re quitting World of Warcraft for years now. It’s your own fault if you do not yet understand why, as it would mean you’re just not listening or just refuse to accept that it’s the fault of the developers.
It’s not an assumption when the same complaints have been voiced a thousand times over by now.
Honestly Im not really thrilled with this new expansion, it def isnt enough to keep me interested…
what I do have though is bucket loads of old content that I never got around to when it was current! I spend maybe a 20% of my game time doing SL stuff then Im off to Pandaria, Eastern Kingdoms or Northrend to do some of the hundreds of achievements I missed first time around.
I doubt I’ll ever run out of stuff to do TBH.
Yet whenever they are asked in the interviews what’s the best place to leave feedback they say “forums - and be sure that you will get some people supporting your idea”. I did a lot of posts getting a lot of attention and support but it doesn’t seem to matter. I’m very active on the forums since Pandaria and I don’t remember such ignorance since then.
I really miss Tom Chilton, Ghostcrawler and Holinka times. While WoD was unfinished I still think that overall it was better designed. If they didn’t abandon 2nd raid tier and didn’t invest so much into Garrisons it might be actually very good expansion.
Sorry to break it for you. I pay for what gives me fun and since I don’t enjoy it anymore I cancel my sub and yes I pay for content I desire. If I don’t get it then I don’t pay. That’s how business works.
Many people play the game for different reasons. You may play for quests and nice zones, maybe transmogs. I play for PvP encounters with intriguing specs and class interactions. Someone might play for M+ and someone might play for raiding. There might be a person that plays the game for pet battles because he is a pokemon fan or whatever. Every audience has it’s niche - forcing the same type of progression and making every piece of content “attractive” to everyone makes it attractive to none.
The reason we had high participation in arena wasn’t the fact that arena gameplay is that good this expansion but because PvP gear was so prominent that Raiders and M+ players felt forced to get it in order to perform. For the same reason M+ had huge participation last expansion because every PvP player had to get gear from there. The problem is that instead of making people do certain content because they like it they make you play it to get something in exchange to fulfill goals set to them by their managers. I don’t understand why they can’t make each group satisfied by making certain content the most satisfying to the core audience. Why arenas have to be appealing to raiders for the cost of arena players performance. Why aoe cap has to be implemented because few MDI teams complained about big aoe pulls. That is my main concern. I feel like Ion is trying to make the best game for himself as if every WoW subscriber had the same goals and enjoyed the same content as him - hardcore raiding.
That only applies to those people who have the time, willing and ability to produce those Youtube videos. They’re also tailored to gain as much views and and promote as much discussion as possible. That only applies to a small amount of the feedback and doesn’t represent the majority.
Yes but it would explain the fact that a new expansion is advertised, people try it, and they stop. Lockdown aside, it’s a new product. The release of any new product follows the exact same trend.
Redundancy has never been so high because of the pandemic. I’d say it’s a very likely reason.
Double-edged sword. People who are happy with the game very rarely provide feedback. It’s the same when researching a company you’re applying at. People who are disgruntled are usually the ones who bother to provide feedback, and as a whole doesn’t provide a holistic overview of the company.
And because you give them your money, that means you have power over them? Comical.
We get it, you don’t enjoy it, you’re leaving. Good for you. Also, you still haven’t provided the source for this apparent 50% drop in subscriber activity. Myself and a few other posters would like to review this data which formed part of your argument - please can you provide?
