My question might seem a bit weird, but am I the only one who is worried about the total absence of normal classic realms now that the original 2019 worlds are leaving the classic trilogy? We had a version that had doubled boss healthbars and increased difficulty, we have a cataclysm version, a version where people die permanently, a version where tanking warlocks and healing mages exist, a version that is artificially frozen in time - forever locked in one patch with no realm evolution and without access to other patches’ features such as the qiraji mount or further expansions. But we have no regular classic realm that would evolve naturally from Vanilla to Wrath. There will also be no TBC or Wrath servers left as such soon. I do not mind at all the variety of WoWs we have at our disposal, but how come after Wrath is gone we will not have the most basic default version? I am sure there must be other people that do not want seasons, surprise changes, tanking rogues and other shenanigans. Can we please have just 1 realm in each region that would cycle normally through the classic content? If not, why?
They have been trying to keep us entertained until they finished up SoD, and now want to get us hooked on that. They have no real interest in keeping us long-term in a game they can’t add features, expansions to etc, otherwise they would at least have created an era fresh at some point. It’s just business.
I do not understand this logic at all. On the contrary, business-wise it is the most profitable decision to continue selling the game that requires no development/expansions. Just keep giving people the regular classic that they have been consuming so eagerly over the course of the last 5 years. Literally no development investment and free money from all the subscriptions
Depends what you mean by most profitable. Key point is number of subs to even make it interesting to them.
According to ironforge.pro, current raiding population is 23k - let’s say a generous global of 30k taking into account people not currently raiding (levelers, bots) (keep in my many raiders currently raid on multiple different chars, so that would easily drop the subs by a significant amount). But, for the sake of argument we say 30k subs. That’s a revenue of around 360,000 eur, if all subs were 12 eur, and 4.32 mil eur per year. In 2022, Activision Blizzard’s revenue was 7.53 billion eur.
As a rough estimate, classic era represents 0.0576% of Blizzard’s total revenue. Sure, running costs are low, but their aim is - as with any firm - to grow.
SoD is their attempt to bring people who stopped retail, people who left after classic, people who left era, and current era players all into one single game, that they can invest time and resources into growing. Of course, they also want to attract new players that never played the game at all - they aren’t joining a game that is practically 20 years old in every aspect.
They did comment on that in today’s interview. They know about it and it can happen at some point in the future. In the initial SoD Q&A they also said they don’t want to release fresh “often” just to get fresh tourist wave and death of a realm.
ERA revived and it’s quite a good option for base Classic.
Add in the inevitable token and store mounts too.
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