I repeat: there are over 100k players playing BC on private BC realms. There’s nothing made up about this. A simple google or reddit search will show you that. A single server holds between 5000 and 10,000 players. I just logged on to my BC realm now. There are 3027 players right now, at 4:49 AM server time. There were 6200 earlier during the day - everyone can see that by running “.info” on the server. There are 2 such realms on the server I play on right now - both “full”. Dozens of other private servers exist - again, look it up.
You’re going with “made up” when you can verify this in like 2 minutes…
…What?
OK, I’ll try to explain it, I can’t believe you fail to understand such a simple thing. I’ll give you a quote - look it up.
Nostalrius servers offered the vanilla WoW experience to 800,000 players since it first opened up and over 150,000 players have remained active to this day, according to a petition written by the Nostalrius team in an effort to get them to change their minds
(google it, I didn’t make it up).
150,000 active players. Just on Nostalrius. Activision wasn’t getting one red cent off them. This was, in fact, what triggered the whole Nostalrius shutdown/cease and desist thing and what convinced Activision to come up with WoW Classic - something they refused to do for years.
You’re asking “how can they make money on something that’s free”. It’s simple. Instead of abandoning those 150,000 players (just Nostalrius) to private realms, you release your own classic servers and those players suddenly flock to your servers.
What happened in reality was that according to Blizzard/Activision, TWO MILLION PLAYERS (figures provided by Activision, the exact quote is above, but I’ll provide it again) came back to play on classic realms, resulting in better than expected (177M extra) revenue FOR ONE QUARTER.
Here are the relevant quotes again.
Activision Blizzard shares rose 3.7% to $50.50 in early trading after touching an intraday high of $52.22. The company said late Monday that the classic, pre-expansion version of the game is being released for its 15th anniversary. “Blizzard has continued to bring WoW Classic realms online around the world to accommodate the more than two million players who have created characters in anticipation of today’s launch, and will work to add more based on player population trends,” the company said in a statement.
So that’s how they make money on something “that’s free”. They provide a paid service for people who are getting that service free of charge, although they’d rather pay for it. They get back subscribers that have been lost due to changes made over time in various expansions. Those people suddenly come back and start paying again. Is it truly that difficult to understand?
It’s all I’m saying here. Why abandon over 100k BC fans on private servers when they could simply spin up 5-10 servers for them to play on and get money off those subscriptions? Why do you think Activision sent out that survey? Were they just bored, in your opinion? When was the last time you got a survey from Activision, asking your opinion on which way wow changes should be made? Not if, but how. Really…
…so they’re worth at least 12M/year - that is IF they’re just 100K. But like we’ve seen with Nostalrius and WoW classic, there weren’t just 100-150k, were there?
To me, that sounds like 12M reasons to come up with BC servers - and fast. I’m arguing for that here, hoping that someone at Activision takes note…sooner rather than later. Like I said, one can only hope.
…so what makes you think they’d stop paying for Classic, since they want classic? This makes no sense to me. It sounds like you think that spinning up BC servers would cause those 700k-1M players to stop paying for some reason. It’s simply not the case. I don’t know whether they’d keep playing Classic or whether they’d switch to BC, but does it matter? They’d keep paying anyway. No, not for two years. Vanilla private servers have been around (and populated!) since 2008, although most of them held at best 10k players (with the notable exception of Nostalrius, which had many times more). In short, people have been playing vanilla on private servers for 11 years before Activision released WoW classic. 11 years.
This is not about alienating classic players in any way. For some reason, you’re assuming that they’d stop playing (and paying) after two years…but there’s no reason to think that. History shows the opposite. I don’t understand this “two years” thing. People haven’t lost interest in Vanilla - released in 2004-2005. That’s why they’re playing it in 2020 - and they’ll be playing it in 2021. Do the math. It’s just not…“two years” to me.