The game has become B2P like how GW2 works. The sub is only there to further increase actual game cost. So around 300€ if you play for 2 years inc the expansion (assuming heroic or epic edition). Jets and suits don’t run on money that spawns from the ether.
And with how everything is contracted these days there’s no way to change anything either. What you see is what you get. Hence why DF is so garbage whereas with SL they decided to cut corners. Imagine if SL had stayed the same from release. Now every new expansion is essentially a new major patch, while nothing gets retroactively fixed either like account wide rep for anything pre-11.0.
And yes, Metzen is just what Jim Ryan is to Sony, or whatshisface for Xbox or what Bowser was to Nintendo. Glorified mascots if you will. You can see them as manholes that says shut up and gimme your money, or as some sort of LARPing HCS saint that is there to fix anything and everything (nothing at all).
So they’re gonna get close to 700€ for 3 years for anyone that decided to pay for epic edition and stay subbed for the entire time. I’d say that’s easy money, but that’s just me. And if you think that’s crazy then let me remind you that… Yeah, I’ll just skip that part.
So… were talking 60E for premium pack every 1-2 years.
If you seriusly cannot afford that, im sorry. Leave the game and get your life toguether.
Or do you prefer F2P with P2W tactics? They have to get money from somewhere. Nothing on this world is free. And WoW is one of those things that gives the best bang for buck. Cause 12E subscription + 60 every 2 years is absolutely peanuts for the time we spend ingame.
I think the intention actually was to explain the story will be told throughout these upcoming three expansions, so it doesn’t seem like they’ll be rushing with it
Servers now are energy savers. You save more money by having modern servers as a form of TCO. The argument that the cost of the servers should rise with inflation when the cost of operating them has significantly decreased, along with the hardware being cheaper than ever vs performance, is stupid. Your subscription is worth more now than ever, even when we compare it to currency devaluation.
Then there is the box price, that’s fine to increase with inflation because in the UK it has, and it’s £40, which tracks with inflation fine since 2004, but as live services scale the ability to make content becomes significantly cheaper to make in larger quantities. The issue is that the additional content they are putting behind paywalls is not worth double the box price and it’s insulting to people whose wages haven’t risen with inflation just on the principle of it.
That’s not including the additional revenue due to MTX.
You can say this is how much it’s worth but if wages have stagnated because the very same companies refuse to pay their staff a modern wage then it doesn’t matter and people might as well just wait for the sale so they reduce the cost to its actual MSRP.
that’ not what they did . they’re trying to have a cohesion like the first three wow expansions. metzen is probably the mastermind behind this, trying the formula that players liked.
This game gets 5 million players for expansion launch. Then maybe keeps 300k players. Its irrelevent what the game overall makes.
Their given a budget based on how much money the game takes over periods. Not overall.
So if launch is booming their budgets get expanded.
When it dies in season 2 however their budgets continously decreased.
Theyre not gonna invest 700k dollars into a game which collects 100k in subs because nobodys playing anymore.
Dont confuse what BLIZZARD earn with what the WoW retail DEPARTMENT gets.
Its not a case of WoW not being profitable. Its a case of WoW isnt profitable enough for the COMPANY to give the department enough budget to develope content FAST enough.
Its cool saying “oh but they made 3 billion profits last year” yah they did. Cause they fired half their team working on the damn product.
We know WoW makes most of its product in the expansion launch quartrely, its consistent earnings are ALOT lower. Blizzard wont employ more people based on SPIKES of income. But what its consistently averaging.
So the fact the game prints billions during a expansion launch first aeason when the games booming. Isnt looked at, the fact for a year and a half the playerbase drops beneath half is whats seen.
No game is gonna increase costs based on micro transactions. Because their not garunteed and not reliable. They will base it on the consistent earnings, and trejectory of numbers.
WoW expansions commonly spike to 6 millipn upwards, and then drop to like 1 million by season 2, if the game loses 5 million players its considered low regardless of earnings prior and the budgets sre slashed on the product.
its not so much jumping to conclusions as it is diving head first off a cliff into the conclusion without a parachute logic or reasoning 10/10 nice bait
Power costs have spiked significantly, new kit was very hard to come by from 2020- 2022 (there’s still shortages in some areas) due to Covid. (Correction: server costs will still probably be down, but what percentage of WoW costs is that / was that?). Wages have increased significantly over the last couple of years in the US and Europe. Thats the dev team tech teams, cleaners, support staff, marketing dept, legal team etc etc
And prices aren’t just determined by costs. Shareholders will always be asking “but why are you keeping the price the same?” The finance department will be “but why are you keeping the price the same?”. New CEO will be “but why are you keeping the price the same”? Actiblizz revenues down in 2022. At the moment, the counter-argument is “people can’t afford to pay more because cost of living” but as soon as that eases, the internal pressure will be on to increase the sub.
Edit: I just looked at Xbox and PlayStation sub prices (I don’t sub to either rn) and see they went up this year. Both by more than 10%. That’s more pressure on ActiBlizz to put their sub price up.
To be honest, I know this format from Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 since the last 9 years and it works very well there from a conceptional PoV. And while Bungie last week basically killed itself and the majority of its Destiny community, the format is solid and easier to execute than cramming several story lines into a single 2-year expansion like BfA.
See it from this side… People always complain how the story is too vague, not focused and detailed enough. And now that we are getting such a focus and more detail one by one on those story lines, people complain?
I would gladly buy an expansion once a year, if it meant getting much faster arriving content and story. But I’m a 32 year old guy with 2 jobs, so I am not too mad about that aspect of these changes, since I can afford it.
Honestly, I think it is more important to focus on the many INCREDIBLE things they are giving us, rather than the WoW community doing what they do best… by filling up the forum with negative posts, that for some reason are blind to positive changes we are getting.
All this talk about length of patches, expansion and whatever. The last year I’ve seen much more discussion about evergreen content even in the awful leaks. This is what we should be demanding:
Improved content from earlier expacs i.e Warfronts, choregast(hate to say it) and I wish in other environments, Island Expeditions, Class Halls, Mage Tower
Year round relevance for raids, dungeons AT LEAST from Legion and onwards
No more content only relevant for a single patch cycle
Updated EK and Kalimdor
I’ve played since I was 12, I want Warcraft vibes back and I wish whenever I do have breaks and do come back that I come back to ALL the content I missed out on. Do I have to hit 40 before I see the effects 20 years of story had on the OG map?
Since we seems to be looking at about 1 year of x.2 dragonflight until the war within releases I doubt they are gonna put out 1 expansion per year.
If they are speeding the expansion releases up I am guessing 1,5 year per expansion, so no more x.3 patches.
So only up to x.2 and then we have some story added with the x.2.5 and x.2.7 patches leading up to prepatch.
But what I understood from the announcement was that they are speeding up the story so we can finally be done with the light, void, titans etc while we are still alive.
So we get 3 expansions completely focusing on this story.
Instead of expansions in between that explore other things or start off on something small and then blow up later.
WOD started with fighting the iron horde but evolved into burning legion.
BFA started as faction war but turned into old gods.
Starting on one theme and transitioning to another leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Now they don’t need to transition between themes and they don’t need to tip-toe around subjects to not spoil the upcoming plot.
I still remember how they tried to pretend that BFA was all about faction war and there were no old gods there…
But I’m a 32 year old guy with 2 jobs, so I am not too mad about that aspect of these changes, since I can afford it. 
