“Minimalistic”… CandyCrush could’ve been made within a week, MineCraft took a long time.
The first version of Minecraft was made in 6 days 
CandyCrush and King in particular is one of those few games/gaming companies I personally jusy flat out don’t play anything from and boycott and is a bit bothered by the fact that they are such heavy-hitters.
Primarily due to that even for the gaming industry, they stand out quite badly in terms of unethical practises. King pretty much standardize practise of bullying smaller companies for whatever reason with false lawsuits, direct threats and has on multiple times in various countries tried to claim copyright ownership of words such as “candy, saga” etc(As a whole, not just within the game industry).
They’ve also routinley demand their workers to fill out personal information forms(this can be somewhat common, but King specifically also asks for their sexual prefferences in partners, intimate personal details and other things that can potentially be used in some scummy way to hold leverage on them).
They stand out quite badly even among the big gaming industry who is already quite bad compared to other industries/corporations.
Absolute barebones, talking about a marketable product. Took 2 years for actual release.
Rewards should not be granted when customers are not happy. They deserve capital punishment for BFA 
Or maybe people are satisfied with BfA you know? Like every other expansion was worst expansion when it was current. Unfortunately for vocal minority it doesn’t work that way.
If the expansion will trully fail, blizzard pocket will get to feel it. That’s a pros for capitalism, you vote with money. But if product is not dying, it means other people are enjoying it and you are just in minority.
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Activision and Blizzard are one in the same.
It isn’t like Bungie where Destiny was exclusively published by Activision, and they decided after too much interfering (with Activision pressuring them for lootboxes and for Destiny 3) to self-publish.
A merger is where two existing companies (Vivendi and Activision) mutually make the decision to dissolve, then consolidate and combine assets in a newer company (Activision Blizzard Inc). Blizzard Entertainment was a former subsidiary of Vivendi, and equally, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard Inc.
A subsidiary buying out stakes owned by a holding company isn’t unheard of, but the only assets Blizzard Entertainment has that are worth anything are its IPs. Meaning it would have to crash its own market value by selling off Warcraft, StarCraft etc (if there isn’t already a clause forbidding them, then Activision Blizzard Inc. would certainly have right of first refusal and would buy them anyway).
TL;DR - Will never happen.
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yep…poorly worded as usual…trying to say that the customer should always come first, which in turn would make those shareholders happy…
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Without revealing too much (in the interests of client confidentiality) the large investment firms I have worked for, specifically ring fence the profits of those investment funds for re-investment within those same funds, they don’t pay out massive profits all at once just because of a few good years. It’s all about long term fiscal prudence… When times are good, the money is tucked away so that the fund can stay afloat and deliver smoothed returns when times are bad.
What we are seeing right now, is the CEO continually taking returns when times are good rather than building a strategic long term reserve, which is at odds with other industry CEO’s. I might not know the exact ins and outs of the boardroom, but I know enough about greed to tell you that the salary he is taking and overall the revenue that is coming from WoW is not conducive to a healthy lifespan.
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There is nothing to discuss about US CEO salaries. They are 250 times higher than in the EU and its not going to change if you dont like it. You can move to US and become CEO yourself if its not rocket science for you. What happends within WoW’s class design and system design has nothing to do with him.
Or maybe some people are satisfied with BFA but not the majority, that would make this expansion a success.
They were very quick to announce BFA as the fastest selling expansion, with over 3 million copies sold on the launch day.
I am yet expecting their record profit announcement, regarding this expansion.
Not my case.
I never stepped on the forum to complain about anything.
Do not confuse the voice of others, that complain all the time because they are never happy, only if their class is doing well, with people who are genuinely, disappointed as my case.
It always does.
In this matter, I loved Legion expansion, I played it I even wrote in this forum the reason I was leaving was being unavailable to play the game.
Apparently that wasn’t enough as they stated Legion wasn’t more successful as WoD.
Legion inherit WoD, one year lack of content and concequence subscribers drop, dark legacy.
One MVP even stated he passed on Legion because of that.
But sure, they think people forget about past experiences.
News flash: they do not.
I won’t forget the expansion that destroyed of what remained of Horde dignity.
I will probably miss SL launch and I have no idea if I am planning to purchasing it.
I am currently, just so burned out, with BFA that I might skip one expansion, in order to have fun with previous expansions.
I bet most people did.
And that’s why they came to public and stated: “We learned our lesson.”
Was that really necessary ?
How about listening to everyone that gave feedback, during the Alpha and Beta tests ?
WoW can have 400 000 players and still survive.
- Because that was Blizzard expectations back when they launched the game.
They didn’t expected to get millions of players. - Activision Blizzard can maintain WoW even if it’s not profitable. The IP is just way too famous.
They can have as many bad expansions they want, the people who are loyal to the game will still play it and purchase the merchandise.
I believe 400 000 whales can maintain this game.
But than, that also means you no longer have the most played MMOG in the market.
It’s not like titles as Red Alert or C&C studios, that EA shut down due to lack of profits.
But as always this is just my opinion.
I care about this game, as it’s the only game, I am playing, currently.
Without WoW I would just resume my RL activities.
They can either chose:
- Continue with their design philosophy and keep losing subscribers.
- Try to bring the word fun back to WoW.
Because that seems to be absent of this game lately, with all of this needless grind.
Example:
What was the purpose of Allied races exactly ?
Grinding for something that should be available, on your game since day one.
I will just wait for them to come free, as I have other stuff to do.
My time is limited and I am actually surprised how many things I had to blacklist in this expansion, to have fun.
Cheers.
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Wow, that video hit the nail right on the damn head… Thank you 
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I fail to see the issue.
CEO of a multi million dollar company gets paid an obscene amount of money, like pretty much EVERY SINGLE OTHER MULTI MILLION DOLLAR COMPANY but somehow because it’s Bobby Kotick, the favourite boogey man of the Video game Youtube creator/s and videogame websites like Kotaku it’s somehow different…
But lets all talk about the self righteous indignant for a bit, lets take Kotaku, who managed to fool everyone into thinking Randy Pitchford had conned all the developers of Borderlands 3 but were suddenly quiet when most of said developers replied with varying levels of "you wot mate?, or tried to make out that it was Bethesda (another favourite boogey man) who had messed up the soundtracks for Doom Eternal and forced the composer Mick Gordon to state he would never work with them again.
Except it was id who had messed up, and Mick Gordon in his tweet specifically mentioned id.
But that didn’t matter, as long as youtube and video game websites got a chance to have another go at Bethesda. Again.
And they’re doing it with Activision.
Again.
How tiresome and repetitive.
Just to simplify this:
He is earning 54,7k $ /day. This guy makes more money in a day than a average worker in a full year.
Welcome to capitalism.
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How is this wrong or controversial? Are you living in an area without internet or news?
Bobby Kotick is a greedy *** and I think just about everyone knows that he is one of the people chiefly responsible for Blizzard having started to nickle-and-dime their customers.
Blizzard wasn’t like this before that airhead got involved due to a merger performed by Vivendi 12 years ago.
They say he deserves it because he does a great job. I don’t think so - his leadership has very little to do with the success of Blizzard. They were even more successful before he showed up.
Prove me wrong.
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I’m sure most old players wish Blizz hadn’t merged with activision and that things would’ve been different.
Or that somehow ‘the evil corporate greed’ would not penetrate the righteous Blizzard!
They tasted insane success with WoW, they got greedy and decided they wanted to keep the cash flowing. Nothing could’ve stopped those guys from making the decisions they made, I bet if you were to ask them if they would do everything the same way all over again, realistically, they would not be willing to part with a single cent and not change 1 thing because they’re too scared of the ‘what if I had made 500k less dollars that year’ had I done this instead scenario.
TLDR - They taste success and it’s just a train to cash pump town from that point onward, calling for scapegoats or heads is a pointless endeavour. This is all a coordinated team effort.
And you’re right, their CEO DOES only speak revenue, that’s what he was hired to do, he isn’t a WoW developer, he won’t hug our WoW nerd bellies, you don’t expect a heart surgeon to be a criminal lawyer as well.
Oh that can already be proven as false because if majority would stop playing WoW would end. Like that.
Doesn’t matter, every expansion was branded worst on forums. Which literally doesn’t mean anything because vast majority of players don’t post on forums - this has been confirmed by blizzard.
And I hated legion with passion, for me it was the worst expansion ever. Does that mean much? Not really.
Yeah so we got tons of new stuff in BfA so I guess it worked. Also BfA has been fastest expansion ever to respond to problems. Like Azerite vendor was added 0.1 patch later while for legendaries vendor was available in like 0.3.
So yeah they learned a lot since WoD/Legion/MoP.
No it can’t, don’t delude yourself. We are at 4M+ MAUs at least.
Dropping to 1/10 amount of playerbase would mean dropping profits to 1/10.
Disagree.
Game had 10 million subscribers in vanilla, 12 millions in WoTLK.
It has less than half now.
Still they shouldn’t ignore forums.
People posting there are paying customers as well.
I don’t remember they came and state:
“We learned our lesson.” during Legion.
Actually that was stated in BFA not in Legion.
All they said about Legion was, it didn’t surpassed WoD.
Players complained about RNG and it still is there.
It seems more they are going around a problem they have no desire to remove.
Had this been true I wouldn’t miss any of those three expansions.
In fact pick any of those three and I will gladly replace for BFA.
Yes it can.
Each player pays about 10 euros.
If you have a player base that spends 100 euros per month like some mobile games, you don’t need a large player base.
In the end that’s what counts if you only take profits in to account.
It doesn’t matter how many are playing.
It only matters how much they are spending and that has no limitations, thanks to the store.
I can easily spend 100 euros per month just in tokens, race change, faction change and cosmetics.
Cheers.
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And not even 30% made it past 10 level:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/blizzard-70-percent-of-new-wow-players-dont-get-past-level-10_1
Forums are almost never agreed on something, so what did you expect? Listening to group A or B ?
Seems like you missed a lot of QA then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMKJ3LWDrKk&t=549s
Not to mention they regreted implementing legendaries in first place.
No new expansion will surpas previous ones because wow is getting stale, nothing blizzard will do will ever bring back players back to game to the point it will start growing.
Nothing will ever beat legiondaries RNG and legion titanforging. I farmed 800 raid bosses (including mythic and LFR) for 8 months to finally get the one I needed.
No such thing happened in BfA. Titanforging was nerfed, corruption got vendor.
Your personal feelings are irrelevant. I played all these expansion and they did improve a lot of stuff. Legion was new testing ground so they improved most of those issues since then.
No. Mobile games don’t require so much developers, community managers, servers etc. And none of services that blizzard provides are mandatory to play, or even giving any advantage. There is no P2W section in blizzard shop.