I am quite happy to interact and help without even talking to people. A random heal as I pass by, a ress, help taking down a phat mob they seem to be struggling with.
Trying to be friends with all those people? Exhausting. Whenever I go back to Classic my nostalgia is promptly ruined by the fact I have to fight my own faction for mobs etc unless I am fast enough to group up, which not everyone wants to do (self included).
GW2 set a good precedent in how to make a positive community without forcing it on anyone. You were rewarded for helping others, and that’s all they really need to do. Resource competition is not fun or positive. I was very happy that WoW seemed to copy some of their ideas.
Furthermore, I am not so much into MMOs these days for people as I am for the fact that the game continues for years with a steady stream of content vs an RPG. I have been in the WoW universe for 20 years, I could play almost everyday. Take something like Dragon Age in comparison… 4 games over the same sort of time period.
For all intents and purposes, Microsoft and Blizzard are the same. What pocket the money goes into is irrelevant, because it all ends up in the same piggybank by the end of the day.
Microsoft have already moved plenty of Activision Blizzard titles onto both Gamepass and Steam without passing any extra bill onto the consumers – because there is no extra bill.
The whole reason why Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard in the first place was to consolidate more development studios and games under the Xbox umbrella and beat their console competition (Sony & Nintendo) through sheer market force.
That strategy has since shifted – for different reasons – into a focus on Game Pass as a subscription service.
If World of Warcraft was to become part of Game Pass it would have zero consequences for people playing World of Warcraft, because the money you’re putting in Blizzard’s pocket every month is the same money you’d be putting in Microsoft’s pocket every month.
There is no loss of money for you, there is no loss of money for Blizzard, and there is no loss of money for Microsoft.
It’s the same money going to the same piggybank at the end of the day.
Any increase we may see from Blizzard with regards to microtransactions will never ever have anything to do with their chosen business platform. It has always been a matter of profit maximization through increased revenue in an effort to reach more ambitious financial targets. But that has nothing to do with Xbox’s Game Pass or Blizzard’s battle.net and everything to do with Microsoft’s shareholders (or the previous Activision Blizzard shareholders). And that’s not changing in the current environment regardless of whether WoW is available through battle.net or Game Pass.
If you want to pretend that the game could maintain what it currently does, without finding a way to make up for the lost income from the sub, then that’s your prerogative.
However Blizzard will be short the income. So I disagree.
If Blizzard Entertainment has 5 million subscribers in World of Warcraft, then Microsoft OWNS those 5 million subscribers.
If Blizzard Entertainment makes a multi-million dollar revenue and profit through World of Warcraft, then Microsoft OWNS that revenue and profit.
It doesn’t matter where the money comes from, so long as it ends up in Microsoft’s pocket.
It’s a purely strategic decision whether to have customers on Game Pass or battle.net. They’re both OWNED by Microsoft and they can use them – or not use them – however way they see fit.
Ah, yeah. Typing on the forums on mobile is sometimes a mess.
But in answer to your question, then yes, we’d still be able to subscribe normally.
I mean, there would be two options.
One would be that WoW would still be available on battle.net as now, as well as on Game Pass. And then you can choose however way you want to subscribe. And if you want to continue as normal, then you continue as normal.
The other option is that Microsoft moves WoW onto the Game Pass platform, in which case you’d be asked to set up a Game Pass account and subscribe through that whenever your current battle.net WoW subscription ran out. And that process would of course be made as smooth as possible because Blizzard/Microsoft wants to keep you as a customer and not have you run screaming for the hills. I guess an example of such a process would be Bungie with Destiny coming both on and off the battle.net platform and players managing those transitions just fine.
But again, for the foreseeable future at least, there’s nothing that indicates that WoW is coming to Game Pass.
That’s…not how moneyflow inside an enterprise and it’s devisions work.
And that “illustration” of yours depicts anything but what you try to describe. What it depicts is that one company throws one single product on the marked and gives it just different names and prices.
WoW’s money stays within Blizzard’s pockets, Blizzard is part of MS, yes, but the money it makes is needed by them to pay for everything and the excess is needed for growth plans, and the rest goes to MS’s shareholders, something like that, yes.
Moving WoW to gamepass WILL remove the money from subs from Blizzards accounts to MS’s accounts, it WILL impact Blizzards income negatively.
MS does not give money to Blizzard (besides big investments, which Blizzard can’t carry themselves like new departments/sites and the like), MS TAKES money from Blizzard.
A model with gamepass AND subscription for the player to choose won’t work, either. People with gamepass will cancel the sub, Blizzard looses money, and people with no need for game pass will not get it.
People who think about switching because there’s stuff on gamepass they’d be interested in but didn’t want to pay for something else next to WoW would be a loss for Blizzard, too.
Gamepass in any scenario is a loss for Blizzard, and Blizzard was never in any way even one reason for MS for having bought Activision Blizzard.
Meaning: MS does not want Blizzard to be needing money from MS at any point in the future because Blizzard can’t sustain WoW any longer in the same way they do at the moment because of the missing subs.
WoW is not at its Wrath of the Lich King 12 million subscribers anymore. Since Blizzard stopped announcing the total amount of subscribers many years ago it has slowly decayed and still is (no doomsaying intended).
With so many other Blizzard games failing due to obvious various reasons, their only hope to earn revenue is through WoW. And in order to keep up with what they want in revenue the prices has gone up for almost everything WoW-related, except the subscription cost which has been unchanged since WoW was first launched- which is good. This is why Blizzard are using different approaches such as more Store cosmetics. But it also goes hand-in hand with the fact that WoW is heading in the direction of low-budget MMORPGs such as Star Wars: The Old republic, by adding more cosmetics to the Store. Eventually the Store might as well be divided into two: One store for account-related purchases and another for cosmetics, as in this pace and direction it would not surprise me if there will be a full cosmetics store ingame for the future.
