Blizzard, please let Xbox know that the layoffs of your Marketing Team definitely impacted your Gamescom Perception

Community General Discussion
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I think many of us have realized it themselves while watching all the shorts, badly edited stream uploads and more.

The marketing team of Blizzard was let go a few weeks prior to the Gamescom showcases and it clearly shows that it did negatively affect Blizzards performance to sell Midnight as a product.

You don’t even need to watch Bellulars video to understand this issue.

So please Blizzard, send our “kind regards” from the community to Xbox Division that the replacements they got you as outsourcing, did a horrible, horrible job at giving your Devs the stage and tools to properly display the Midnight expansion as a product.

I definitely won’t blame you for those negative impacts. As a years-long Xbox player (since around 15 years by now), I do find this to be extremely worrying. And if there’s a time to speak up about this negative impact, both within the community AND behind the stage at Blizzard, it is now.

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Giant as MS is simply doesn’t care.

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They care about money. Having bad marketing is not earning them money. It’s literally THE point of such a division.

Ergo they want their marketing to be as good as possible.

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No Blizzard have been doing a sterling job of obliterating their legacy long before Microsoft came along.

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I seem to have a problem. I like this game a lot and I wait for the next expansion, with housing & stuff.

But on the other hand I’d hate to give any more money to MS.

Difficult choices are difficult.

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I miss the funny shorts. And yes, they were very much in tune with the community, and the information they posted was almost always accurate.

And with this mess we see just how much they were worth. I think Midnight will sell far fewer copies due to the bad and incomplete information. We could take hundreds of thousands of copies.

Firing that team was bloody idiotic. They were amazing. Try to hire them back and double their pay. :sob:

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Do you think someone new is gonna pay for a pc-only wow expansion, make a Blizzard account, download the battlenet client, and subscribe for 15 dollars a month, only because he saw an advertisment or a youtube short? I don’t see that happening. The way the game is positioned in the market makes heavy marketing budgets a waste of money I think. If I was them, I would consider putting all the marketing budget into Blizzcon and do the minimum for the rest. Gamescom appearance was a good idea, but we couldn’t even follow their content online. I saw their cinematic in the opening, and that was it. Is someone gonna return to wow, or subscribe as a new player, because they saw this cinematic without the gameplay deepdive, and without the Blizzard fan crowd at Blizzcon hyping themselves and the game? I don’t see it.

In the end, in terms of marketing, what are their strengths? Price, product, promotion, place?

Price: No, the game is very expensive in comparison to other games and it has MTX on top of it.

Product: Depends, who you ask, but I’d say the game is pretty good overall, and gameplay is going in a good direction.

Promotion: depends heavily on influencers nowadays, if there is no Blizzcon.

Place: no, because Blizzard is PC-only and only sellls their game on their client. They don’t follow the player through platforms, they want the players to follow them to play wow.

So… would you invest into youtube shorts in their position? I wouldn’t. The way wow is positioned, they need to hold current players, and gain new ones via community momentum, not via direct marketing, because their barriers to entry are too high for an individual deciding to play spontaneously.

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MS gaming doesn’t do marketing…

There is a reason why WoW went from 12m subs to 2-3… How do you get new players if no1 knows about it lol…

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Xbox, not MS gaming. Also, Xbox surely by now DOES set the budget for marketing for Blizzard. Unless Blizzard as subsidiary company has more autonomy via contract.

I would disagree on that. Creating an account, downloading the game and paying a sub beyond lvl 20 isn’t that hard.

As for actually knowing how to play, that’s a different story.

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There is no more Xbox lol since the 90B spending spree daddy MS is in charge… before Xbox could do anything and not be noticed lol… Now well games are on PS…

Can you show me an Xbox advert anywhere… They stopped selling them in alot of EU countries lol…

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You do realize Xbox is literally Microsofts gaming division? They don’t do console anymore, yes. But that’s not the point. The Xbox Division is still in-house of Microsoft.

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Not entirely true, or atleast they’re not at that state yet
They are doing to the gaming industry what they did to the OS industry; monopolize

right now its all about having control. The money comes when they’re the only ones easily accessible left in the market, just like how it went for windows

Its just how microsoft has always worked

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You’re talking to an Xbox fan… So yeah I know… They now shutter studios and even try to kill the golden goose by firing CoD devs… Still doesn’t mean they do marketing… They want Sony to pay for CoD marketing again for a reason.

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I didn’t say it was “hard”, but friction matters a lot in marketing. Imagine some random guy scrolls their phone for 20 minutes. Blizzard’s youtube ad shows up. Let’s assume they like the game. What are the steps between watching the ad and playing the game? On another game, there’d be a “download now” button directly to appstore. With Blizzard it means switching device to go to your computer, downloading a separate client, making a new account, giving payment info to Blizzard (not via linked account for example), paying box price for a game, subscribing for the game you paid for. There are only very few companies, who can expect this from a customer like Playstation, but Blizzard would be foolish to expect people to go through this type of friction in 2025 in my opinion, when so many alternatives exist.

Let’s compare to genshin impact: You see direct gameplay on your phone in the ad, you click, you download the game already. Why do you think FF14 goes to mobile? I don’t know their reason, but I would expect that it’s unrealistic in today’s gaming market to expect customers to follow you around.

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  1. Download battle.net.
  2. Install World of Warcraft.
  3. Create an account.
  4. Set up a subscription plan.
  5. Decide whether or not to buy the latest expansion.
  6. Start playing the game.

When I’ve bought a game on Steam and it’s required me to install some launcher from Ubisoft or EA or whoever, it’s almost a deal breaker in itself.

The amount of initial setup it requires to play World of Warcraft is going to turn off every gamer who isn’t super determined to play the game.

Spontaneous or impulsive gamers trying WoW after seeing a cinematic at Gamescom? They’ll lose interest before getting to step 4 of the process.

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100%. Also, last time I saw the Diablo 4 reviews on XBOX a year ago, I noticed that a lot of people were very angry about having to make a Battlenet account to play. It’s really a gigantic disadvantage Blizzard creates for itself by insisting on their own ecosystem, while also refusing to innovate it.

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Applies to CoD and all GAAS why would WoW be the limit lol…

Take BF6… Buy on steam need an EA account sign in…

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Why don’t they just give an option to create an account automatically linked to steam/xbox/psn/etc. if you agree to it when launching the game? Would make things a lot easier.

Maybe they think that they hold players longer, if they make them go through some level of effort to play?

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Ok, it seems a few of you here are either misinformed or remember things wrong.

WoW has a trial mode. To actually “try it out”, you need to do the following steps:

  1. Download Battle.net
  2. Create Battle.net account
  3. Download WoW
  4. Play

Your Battle.net account is ALWAYS also your account for every Blizzard-owned game. For the Trial mode, you don’t need to pay.

So for trying out the game, the border is already quite low. The only additional 2 steps are:

  1. Pay subscription
  2. Buy current Expansion (or wait until it becomes part of the sub content)

And you surely know those people are being pendantic on a universal scale.

Also, the belief that mobile gaming is the future, is as disconnected from reality as believing in AI replacing all workers worldwide in the next year.

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It does. But at least Activision have acknowledged the value of having the game available on multiple platforms, so you can actually buy the game on Steam or play it on PlayStation or Xbox or GeForce Now or whatever.

The only place I can find WoW is here.