Perhaps take off your rose tinted glasses? No matter the budget, Blizzard will never be able to replicate classic experience. And they have more budget than you give them credit for, the just choose it to spend elsewhere.
Also how are they losing money? Do you have any evidence to that? Of course not, you are just pulling that info from your fat hairy a**.
For real, it’s not even Friday yet and we get such posts…
lets say that average sub is 11 euro - lets be optimistic here and say “only” 3 mln left game since launch . thats 33 mln euro each month . x 12 months thats 396 mln euro “not gained” over span of 1 year.
each expansion lasts 2 years so that almost 800 mln euro/$ “lost”
dont know about you but if i lost mine company 800 mln $ because of my incompetent decisions i would have to look for new job .
and no - excuses like " its the customers fault that they dont like our product" dont count in any industry on this world.
and now imagine the “losses of potential money” if 6 mln left the game.
I’m pretty sure that’s not a game designers’ decision. I would guess there is some higher group making the decision of what direction they think is good for the game and which groups should have the most/best content. I could be completely wrong, but I would have thought the basic direction of the game is a decision that would be taken by the financial people.
That would mean more costs on the development side. The goal is to make a “minimum viable product” (that’s an actual term, and object of Bobby’s wet dreams) and milk whales dry in the shop which is the only part of the product which is actually innovated and expanded.
The entire game and everything in it is secondary.
And what has that to do with mythic raids and tuning? Also where are token sales and game sales in your math? Services sales? Where is Blizzards investment calculated relative to revenue?
25 peepo all in greens clearing MC? yeah ok, lets see a tank in full greens not get one shot every single time, maybe no consumes or world buffs either? How hard would MC be? it would make for interesting sweaty content since thats not doable.
Yes they increased overall. New players start playing at WoTLK but many older players has quit. Thats why WOTLK have such small player gain compared to TBC or Classic. If they would keep desing physolophi of TBC game would earn way way more players than 12M.
Higher ups usually do not care for details, they want easily understandable numbers.
“feature A will set us back X amount of moneys over Y amount of time, but will produce Z amount of moneys in revenue for a margin of OMG”. I might be wrong, but I think it is Ion’s job to sell design decisions to higher ups.
I don’t want to start the Ion bashing all over again, but wasn’t he involved in a high end guild known for meticulous number crunching to achieve the perfect stats and rotation way before simming was a thing? Since he has taken over the helm it seems the game has steered towards trying to keep the hardcore busy with mindless grinds for borrowed power levels and the optimal stat combination on loot.
Also there is still (corporate) Blizzard’s attempt at making any of their games a viable esports title in a possibly hopeless pursuit of StarCraft’s flash-in-a-pan success, while completely neglecting that most of their games have been successful due to their accessibility to casuals. But everything has to be highly competitive today, nothing can simply be “fun”.
And then on top of that the fact that Blizzard are indeed now a huge company with processes that make developing games a lot more rigid and less dynamic than before, thus increasing reaction times to problems by a lot.
I don’t think the issues can be pinned down to just one cause, I think it’s rather a combination of many contributing effects.
Edit:
I also do not think WoW could ever get back to the numbers it had in WotLK. That was a very special time in history, and I don’t think an MMO could be this successful in today’s environment. There are very few high profile MMOs left today… WoW, FFXIV and ESO. Not because the games are bad, but because this specific type of game is simply not as popular anymore.
Actually they can as long as more players start playing during that expansion than quit. We knew in 2014 that there have been more than 100 million WoW accounts created at that point so by mid MOP more than 90% of the playerbase had quit.
As for the opening post Vanilla and CLassic are easy by today’s standards but at the time they were anything but easy. I believe there was a quote that less than 5% of the playerbase saw the end boss of the expansion. The game was new and fresh at that point whereas now some of us have been playing on and off for over 15 years and the freshness has worn off.
Yes they can if more players start playing than quiting. There is that issue. If Blizzard would not change their phylosophi they would have less players quiting during wotlk and huge amouth of players joining game which would catapult WoW way higher than 12M.
This. He as a game director is responsible for all the activities in the game. Only thing that matters for higher-ups is if he is making enough money or not.
He’s becoming more and more arrogant though, because large casual playerbase tends to still buy expacs and subs even if completely neglected.
He should understand however that even with all the FOMO and sunk cost fallacy using current approach sooner or later he will lose huge chunk of these people.
