I’m sorry, but no half-decent executive leadership would just resign itself to fate determined by external circumstances.
Then you’ve doomed your own company’s future if you just concede to things being bad.
I am going to assume that Blizzard are professional enough to look at their red numbers and make an action plan for how to turn failure into success.
Any respectable company will do that, and surely Blizzard will too.
My only input in that regard is that here and now Blizzard just needs to throw money at it and increase game production and actually deliver MORE for their customers.
If your input is that there’s nothing they can do and the game is the way it is and either people like it or they quit, then we’re going to disagree on approach.
And I hope Blizzard will side more with my approach than your approach. And given that Activision Blizzard (and Mike Ybarra) have said that they’re increasing investments into their big IPs like WoW, then I think they side more with my approach, but that of course depends on where those investments go specifically. We’ll see.
You’re thinking as if the game’s design is set in stone. It is not.
Blizzard’s goal is to make their games as popular as possible. They will change the game design to accomplish this if they have to – and they do. Whether they will make the proper changes remains to be seen. But they’re not going to resign themselves to fade into obscurity when they’re sitting on the most popular MMORGP of all time and one of the biggest game IPs in the industry.
As a company they have an obligation to their shareholders.
It is the job of the executive leadership to take action on behalf of the company, and it is the job of the relevant teams to take action on behalf of the individual games – like WoW.
If they cannot do that, then they will be replaced with someone else.
Complacency is not how you drive a business.
That doesn’t say much, because Blizzard don’t really have any game they can compare to. There’s no other modern MMORPG that has existed for as long as WoW that Blizzard can draw experiences from.
Blizzard and WoW are venturing into the unknown. So what the future entails is for them to decide.
I’ll rephrase that since you seem to miss the point.
There’s no other product with a comparable history to WoW that Blizzard can look at and evaluate what decisions to make for the future.
Blizzard cannot look at Knight Online or EverQuest and make business-related decisions based on those games. They are not comparable products.
WoW is a 17 year old evolving MMORPG with a billion-dollar IP, world-wide availability and localization, and a customer base of millions of people across the globe.
When Blizzard needs to decide how to use a $350 million investment into WoW over the next 3 years, then they cannot look at Knight Online or EverQuest to see how they’ve done it. Because they haven’t done it.
For every penny that Sony has used on EverQuest, Blizzard have used a dollar.
For every market Sony has establised EverQuest in, Blizzard have localized WoW to an entire region.
The Coca-Cola company is not going to get tips on how to run their company by looking at the lemonade stall that little Lisa set up outside her grandparent’s yard.
I’ll summarize my thoughts seeing as the back and forth probably makes a mess out of everything.
Blizzard are losing customers in WoW.
They need to do something about that.
There aren’t any directly comparable products Blizzard can look to for guidance.
Blizzard needs to figure it out themselves.
Activision Blizzard have said they’re going to increase investments.
Mike Ybarra has said they’re going to increase content delivery.
I say that this is the right thing to do here and now. Make MORE.
In this thread some players are saying that the game’s content emphasis revolves too much around a minority of high-end players. I agree.
I believe it is paramount that any increased investment Blizzard makes into WoW goes toward a wider audience and not toward the extreme high-end or the extreme low-end.
It should be MORE for MANY rather than MORE for FEW.
It’s not dying, there’s an interest. People just got tired of trash games and low effort cash grabs over the years.
Making a good MMORPG is hard and takes time. So many became skeptical overtime and for good reasons.
There’s still interest for Ashes of Creation.
The next big online game just need to have respect for its players and offer a unique and refreshing take on the genre.
When you see a modern MMORPG, they always go down the same systems and gameplay. So of course it’s boring. Not mentioning the bad jobs done for balancing.
Well WoW is obviously not viewed as a dying thing when the company chooses to increase investments into it.
And it may not be the goal to draw in millions of players either, but simply to retain the existing audience. Simple customer retention.
And that would honestly be a very sustainable business strategy, because WoW continues to generates great revenue despite a decreasing playerbase.
I think it’s fair to say that Blizzard are calculating that they can get a great return on investment if they can maintain WoW’s existing core audience for some years to come.
The question is just where to emphasize the investment so that players do actually stick around for the long-term.
No, it means you had to kill them to shut them down or they win the race just because they’re npcs. Blizzard have a tendency of having non-player stuff cheat in their games. Like in starcraft they get resources faster than players as well.
It was extremely hard, if not impossible, to beat them at the start if you tried to just race them instead of shutting them down. At the end of bfa you just pulled the whole island in one go and they couldn’t even get any resources.
You had absolutely no time to actually explore because of racing against them at the start. Island expeditions were advertised as procedurally generated islands that you can explore. Neither of them were true.
