Where was the investor lawsuit when blizzard started intentionally dropping the quality of the game to place things into the cash shop, thereby reducing the long term value of their investment?
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Blizz is making more money from less subscribers.
Thats a good picture.
Businesses are complex, they have thousands of moving parts, you can’t isolate one and pretend its the only thing in existence to suit your narrative.
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See for yourself.
ATVI stock price growth under mr. Kotick
On July 25, 2013, Activision Blizzard announced the purchase of 429 million shares from owner Vivendi for $5.83 billion, dropping the shareholder from a 63% stake to 11.8% by the end of the deal in September.
At the conclusion of the deal, Vivendi was no longer Activision Blizzard’s parent company, and Activision Blizzard became an independent company as a majority of the shares became owned by the public. Bobby Kotick and Brian Kelly retained a 24.4% stake in the company overall. In addition, Kotick remained the president and CEO.
source
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Investors only care about the money thats being generated. Which Bobby delivered. A reason why his last bonus was paid in the end. Investors werent already happy because only 54% agreed to pay him in the end (despite Bobby more than just fulfilling his end of the bargain).
Right now they are going ham because Blizzard is in a very bad spot. Or rather a few of those going ham that werent happy with them in the first place or fear that Blizzards value may drop even further in the future. Potentially some investors are now going to take the risk and see how the new leadership acts.
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I really don’t think he did because that chart would likely be double what it currently is if they actually maintained the quality of the game.
Just because it was going up since he entered does not mean that it wouldn’t have risen anyway based upon the sheer popularity of the game and the profits it was already making.
all they needed to do was not make lazy changes like the mana bars, the stats and not removing focused will from the game and well who knows how high it would have gone.
All the shop has done is drastically increase the risk associated with any investment in blizzard.
If he didnt he wouldnt have been paid. The deal was from 2016. So Legion. And Legion was very successful.
The profit rose by a large margin. Yes WoW is popular and as such always generates money. But with Legion it was more of a constant up rather than the usual up and down ever since cataclysm.
Taste differs. Mana for DPS for instance was always a joke pretty much.
Cosmetics in shops are a main part in pretty much every game right now. They are being bought.
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Investors are like sharks, they come when they see food then leave when they destroyed the source.
When Blizzard has many thousands of whales buying 15+ WoW tokens each season for their curve achieve, M+/rated boosts etc they (Blizzard) seem inclined to keep things as is?
It’s short term profit, but some business plans are short sighted.
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Share holders care about income not the quality of the game. Because plebs buy tokens for boosts and store mounts Blizzard earned more in BFA than in Wrath. Sub no. doesn’t count but $ spent per person that is way higher.
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I know you wanted to come across all knowledgeable and stuff, but no, investors don’t care about “income”. As the most basic example possible, what happens when expenses are more than income?
Income is one of the many things they care about. What does income come from? Yea, good products.
Typical “me no like wow therefore investors bad men!” forum post.
“Where were the investors when quality fell?”
Is a good base for a lotr meme.
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Keeping mana bars in game and removing focused will = higher value per share?
Gonna have to help me out here chief.
This reads as a whole new take on the “makes the changes I want” post where you’re claiming through some strange financial forecasting ability that it is not the tried and tested methods like monetisation that would see the shares increase in value, but the gameplay changes you happen to personally want?
Based on what exactly? “It could be higher, you never know until you try ” is not the kinda of punchline one enters a shareholder meeting with. Shareholders and investors are in their very nature generally risk averse and making changes that don’t have a precedent on the promise “it may work but we don’t know” is the kind of thing that will usually make them back off. Particularly where you are swapping reliable revenue generators for it.
It’s similar to someone going to the bank for a mortgage loan, and when asked about their finances their plan is “to quit my steady job, because I have this idea that will make me money, trust me” and when asked for evidence the person can’t present it. I think we all know in this situation the bank is in all likelihood going to tell you to do one.
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Do you really think investors really care about your gamer feeling?
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He really does! And if they’d listened to him and not put something in the cash shop they’d be richer now! Honest…
Not to mention how it isn’t current income but expected future income that investors look at, which is why Blizzard not disclosing their workplace issues have a good amount of their investors furious. It’s a mix of both the stock taking a hit in its value, possibly long term, but also that some investors don’t simply invest in companies they think will be a net positive to them but that they also invest in companies from an ethical standpoint on top of that.
Doesn’t help that people tend to grasp a bit at straws in these threads, considering that while WoW is one of Blizzard’s biggest assets then they still have other income sources (games). This is on top of the Activision side of things.
Most probably don’t but investing does come with some expectation of growth and whales (the bigger spenders in the in-game shop in the case of WoW) can only sustain a MMO for so long if it keeps seeing a decline in player numbers due to dissatisfied players.
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Income doesn’t necessarily comes from a good product. It comes from in-game stare and overall monetisation. Why do you need a good product that makes more people play it if you get more income from people spending way more on tokens and in-game services. Stupid mount or pet equals 1 sub. Character boost 2,5.
Its based on all Acti products not just WoW.
Can you link an actual source on that please that would make an intresting read thank you .
You’re painting it as an “either or” when more players as a whole means more potential users of the store. Having a bad game that loses players more so than what’s expected from a patch cyclus is bad for business because it’s less income from both the subscription and potential users of the store.
Sure, they can make a game that relies solely on the whales to keep it running but even said whales are likely to drop out at some point. Even now a good portion of the subbed players are largely subbed because of the friends and communities they’ve formed or are a part of. The more of those friends that stop playing, the more will leave as well as they have to either form new friendships or leave for where their current friends are.
It will be very hard to find it was Kotaku or something like that about that record quater when they also sacked a lot of people. Let me check.
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All there needs to be said.
People think investors really give a crap about some feels - they look at the money and metrics. Thanks to various tricks and shticks WoW managed to improve sales (and by sales I mean everything including micros) and that’s all that mattered.
The chart reported above is also about the whole ActiBlizz business and WoW is far from their biggest hit there anyway. It’s just a small blip compared to COD and King’s mobile games.
The investor lawsuit now is not because “holy crap game bad” or “wow specifically dipped sales”, but because ActiBlizz did not put out a warning to investors about potential upcoming hit due to the lawsuit that was brewing that they knew about internally.
Nobody cares about game quality feels here.