According to who?
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@Jizhi: I am sorry, but where I live, what you are suggesting is actually highly illegal. ALL income is relevant to the moment it is BILLED (or otherwise received). In fact, companies here are levied (several) taxes (mostly VAT) based on the bills they have dated, not the money they have actually received. So it is possible (under certain circumstances) to have billing even in the millions, but generate no or very little revenue for a specific month, quarter or (operating) year. In other words, the money Blizzard billed me in Q4 was from my view point billed (and paid for) in Q4. If you can point to a source, which states that France (and US and UK) operates differently than several other EU member states, I can reconsider, but until such time, I stand by what I said. IF French law functions specifically as you say, then I am wrong, but it is then purely due to my lack of knowledge concerning France specifically.
Furthermore, there is one highly relevant thing… The change in players and in revenue was very different in SuperData numbers. If what you say is true, the two percentages should be extmerely similar, yes? And it would in fact lead to a situation, where the subscription numbers would in theory be reverse-engineerable from the quarterly reports with fairly high accuracy. But then we would hit another point… WoW tokens do actually fall under subscription income (, which only partially makes sense as the Blizzard balance can be used to purchase non-WoW things and even within WoW non-subscription services, such as faction changes or battle pets, which are also included). Which leads to the end note a bit further down as closer reading revealed something interesting.
It is worth noting that deductions for large purchases do NOT function the same way (here). You are not allowed to deduct everything immediately, but need to spread that over time. So there are things that are spread, but income (here) is not one of them.
End note… I decided to check something, name Q3 and Q4 figures in the official reports and their definitions as published by Activision Blizzard.
Subscription, licensing, and other revenues = Subscription, licensing, and other revenues represent revenues from World of Warcraft subscriptions, licensing royalties from our products and franchises, downloadable content, microtransactions, and other miscellaneous revenues.
Q3: 1 546 million US dollars.
Q4: 1 547 million US dollars.
In other words, the change was minimal over that period. In the same time period quarterly MAUs for Blizzard portion went down from 30 to 29 million despite the launch of Shadowlands. It will be interesting to see how Q1 compares in those areas. On our topic, while the single number is not sufficiently detailed in terms of various portions, there actually is a tiny increase in quarterly revenue, even though Blizzard’s MAUs went down. However, since the revenue number is not sufficiently specifically separated into various subsections, it is by itself not sufficient evidence of me being right or wrong. In another section there was this note: “We monitor net bookings as a key operating metric in evaluating the performance of our business as it enables an analysis of performance based on the timingof actual transactions with our customers, along with providing a more timely indication of trends in our operating results. Net bookings is the net amount ofproducts and services sold digitally or sold-in physically in the period, and includes license fees, merchandise, and publisher incentives, among others, and isequal to net revenues excluding the impact from deferrals.” Those deferrals might be related to what you were talking about and if that is true, Activision Blizzard has on purpose (and obviously entirely legally, since it is in the public data) already excluded those deferrals from certain figures.
I have already written another wall, so I think that I will conclude with a note that we might be forced to agree to disagree in some areas and that it is perhaps better to simply leave certain things as they are and just conclude that our opinions do not match regarding them.
If Blizz know anything about account, and I assume a big company like that does, they will put 1/6 of what you paid in your 6 months subscription as revenue every month. Income is supposed to be taken as income in the same month the product/service is delivered or consumed. Their CASH FLOW didn’t change during those 3 months, but that is a totally different way of doing accounting than when doing revenue. If they had just closed of the entire game, 1 month after you paid your subscription, you would want your money back for the remining 5 months. Meaning Blizz would not gatherer any revenue from you those 5 months.
@Dida: Thank you for that additional note! Turns out there was a translation related issue and I and Jizhi were actually not discussing the exact same thing. It turned out after quite a bit of research that the word “revenue” has multiple translations in my native language and the end result was misleading. Depending on context “revenue” may mean “income”, “profit”, “(net) sales”, “turnover” and so on. This leads to a situation, where “revenue” actually is not the same as “revenue” all of the time. 
In other words, I was arguing that the incoming cash (“revenue”) can (and does) vary a lot month to month and can (and sometimes does) vary in a direction that does not correspond to a change in the number of customers. However, and this was Jizhi’s point, I think, the longer subscriptions create a liability (obligation to offer the service in full in this case) to the company, which is relevant in terms of bookkeeping and also relevant to what you said as directly below. The “revenue” in this sense is indeed much more “stable”, but even it could change (though by far smaller margins), if existing customers change to different subscription lengths. With zero change in customers, sudden increased favour of 3 and 6 month plans would make the future revenue a bit smaller, while the opposite change would slighly increase revenue. And when talking about (very) large amounts of people, it would be possible for the changes in plan lengths to cancel (parts of) the effect of customer gain or loss on revenue.
On your specific example, it would be likely that Blizzard would actually reimburse some Battle.net balance, not actual cash and make relevant changes to their bookkeeping.
What i do agree on is that with an outsourced company, and different ways to represent mau’s and different ways to handle them depending country and region, its impossible to tell the exact makup and therefore pure classic figures. Also even if we just look at recurring subscriptions only (and for ease only count the monthly, disregarding tokens or multi month discounts) even then its difficult to acertain the impact of Classic.
On the other hand we do have another guideline to go to. Usually the product which people cater to the most is displayed in marketing first. Hence when blizzonline started out with tbc, i was quite (pleasently) surprised. I expected a 45 min showcase of Shadowlands and 15 mins of TBC announcement instead of what we got.
Call me biased, but i think the classic (and in extention TBC) influence is / was much greater then they care to show.
Becoming ever apparent during the wait for the patch 9.1.
It can’t come soon enough.
Dungeon finder itself is not a bad QoL change from design perspective.
What killed social aspect are
- Cross-realm
- Instant teleport
What i want to see as i mentioned above is a Mythic+ version of GROUP FINDER, where u list your group or search for other listed groups for particular dungeon / battleground / quest / world activity WITHIN THE SAME SERVER, where u still have to manually invite ppl to party and manually travel to instance. I just want a clean solution to seek for ppl, the LFG spam on chat is crappy because the message is quickly overwritten by tons of other LFG messages, spam and boosting advertising.
Ofc Blizzard have to IMPOSE some rules on it, boosting advertisement etc HAS TO BE BANNED 
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no gtfo @OP
The ‘Group’ Finder Interface should be added, it’s so much better than spamming a macro in the Looking For Group chat channel. It’s cleaner, less time wasted, better for everyone organising the groups
‘Dungeon’ Finder is a horrifically bad introduction to the game. Absolutely not needed at all.
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