"The news arrived with record fiscal 2018 revenues of $7.5 billion, up 7.1% year-over-year. Though revenue beat its outlook of $7.355 billion, net bookings—its metric for digital and sold-in physically sales—fell 3% short of its forecast at $7.26 billion. With the severing of its deal with Destiny 2 developer Bungie, Blizzard’s sparse 2019 release schedule and stagnant player counts for major franchises like Overwatch and Hearthstone, the company greatly lowered its 2019 outlook to $6 billion.
Activision Blizzard will boost by 20% the number of developers working on its major franchises—Call of Duty, Overwatch, Warcraft, Hearthstone, Diablo and Candy Crush—funding this move by cutting disappointing initiatives and employees layoffs."
So when its going good for them they decide to cut investments, i wonder what will happen to acti blizz after the lawsuit and the lose of large scale of the player base will hit them ? will they invest more ? no they not even investing during records year, bad service, bad choices, a dev team not learning by old misstakes and more and more frustrated player base looks to be the norm (and has been for some time already)
what do u think about WoW’s future ? it certainly feels that the wake up call havent hit yet
people talking about changes in future patches and putting hope in coming expansions will be verry dissapointed is my guess
the fact that they cant even deal bot issues getting ridiciolous at this point
I don’t even know what to say about blizz any more. I’m past annoyed, angry, fed up with the way they develop the game these days. I don’t get how we go from legion (yeah it wasn’t perfect and had issues), to Shadow lands and Korthia lol. How they can make an expansion worse at all is beyond me, should be constantly learning, growing and getting better.
Instead it’s been constantly going backwards, more time gated, more chores and obvious gimmicks for token sales. I mean you can’t even remotely compare Korthia to broken isles/nazj and mechagon. Awesome catch up gear, really easy to get and upgrade. That you could CHOOSE the items you want. I’m sick to death of trying to gear alts up in Korthia, the rep, currency and range is just beyond a joke at this stage.
For the first time in a decade I won’t be pre-ordering next expansion, and all my circle of friends won’t. Unless they release a proper quality game, that respects players time and doesn’t time gate everything to death. And suck all the fun out of what ever borrowed power we get next to make it an over the top chore. But they won’t, blizz love there cycle of Huge box sales with mega chores and time gates → lose a ton of players and relax all the restrictions and give the players what they want → rinse and repeat for years on end.
If you go to business school (a good one) the FIRST lesson you will learn is that the fundamental purpose of a business is the generation of profit and the generation of profit only.
Activision is not a charity; they WILL make the game worse if it brings more money; they will NOT care if it makes you suffer as long as that doesn’t reduce profits (according to them).
The “hopeful” theory I have is that the business people are often wrong; e.g. they chase profits for the next 3 months (e.g. with grinding); but that may kill their profits long term.
Activision Blizzard will lay off 8% of its staff of 9,600 employees, the video game company announced Tuesday during its fourth-quarter earnings call at market close. The nearly 800 employees will come from nondevelopment and administrative-related parts of the business.
There numbers are no where near WoTLK days. They used to post it all the time their big sub numbers, we ain’t seen that public posting for 7+ years.
Also there skinner box game design works to keep you wanting more as it is made to keep the dopamine hits small but many. So you don’t burn out or get satisfied and move on. Basic psychology used by a lot of games with money involved. They hire psychologists for this stuff. It’s to maximise profits without dev overheads since these skinner box systems don’t ask for comprehensive game design to keep players enthralled.
That means hooked players and not necessarily happy players.
U pay sub if the game is fun for ur needs and the changes they promise have continuty!
Otherwise unsub and bye!
Wow is worth playing right now from the perspective of 9.1.5 ; but thats not enough, people asked for those changes since Sl beta.
Si blizzard has to do a 360 and continue to listen to playerbase and do small and big changes positively and than make a rly good expansion without atupid gated content and system abusive grinds.
Only than and if they choose this path the game will truly revive.
Until than they are in a bad place and 9.1.5 shoudlnt trick players into the mindset blizzard are going good now!
If the changea are good-play
If not- massive unsub
No game is, especially 6 years after their game has released. So, going the whole “Because the game is not at the peak, it is therefore dying” is poor logic or whatever you’re trying to go with.
“I see through this content design, but I still continue to subscribe”
Yeah that’s very true and must make sense financially how they develop the game, even though it annoys a large amount of players.
The problem is they constantly go for short term gains, to boost quaterly reports. Instead of going for short term AND long term growth, which seems crazy to me. They make way more money from cash shop/token sales these days. Yet they design these short term goals that loses millions of players. I’ve got a business degree, I’ve ran multiple large businesses and it just doesn’t make sense to me at all the way Blizz run their company.
They will if people and subs will stay low, they made revenue with a bad product, if they cant keep making money with a bad product, they will improve the game to suit the players to make more revenue.not out of love for wow or respect for players.
WoTLK was 4 years after WoW’s release. WoTLK was when sub numbers peaked. Cataclysm was crap compared to it, many players agree. Game design does help.
Like with films, most people will say, number 2 was ok not like the original, or number 3 was a cash cow, awful. You ever heard that before?
WoTLK was a 3rd instalment and gained the most sub numbers!
So shove that up your demented logic. I’d say the game is stagnating at an incredible low in contrast to its WoTLK days.
Don’t go into trading, you’ll see every downward trend as ‘not dying’. Hah, superb logic!
