Following up on Blizzcon
I'm slow on the followup this time around! I want to reflect on some of what we saw at Blizzcon as it pertains to my thoughts pre-con. Legion So I…
I'm slow on the followup this time around! I want to reflect on some of what we saw at Blizzcon as it pertains to my thoughts pre-con. Legion So I…
Blizzcon's opening ceremony kicks off in exactly 4 hours from now, and I'm going to squeeze in here and drop a few predictions as well as what I hope to…
Building off of yesterday's post, along with a decline in subscriptions and purchasing Candy Crush for a bazillion dollars, Blizzard will no longer be releasing subscription numbers. As you can…
The news that Activision Blizzard purchased the Candy Crush devs (King Digital Entertainment) for $5.9B definitely gave me reason to raise an eyebrow. Just a few years ago, Disney purchased…
Tomorrow will bring some form of big announcement for Blizzard’s (and the industry’s) flagship title, World of Warcraft. We’re most likely to get news of some new expansion loaded with lots of new and rehashed features, but rampant speculation points toward the possibility of some F2P announcement. I’m pretty sure that one is still many years away.
The Change is Too Radical
Blizzard has made a business of keeping WoW’s course steady as she goes. WoW has been about raiding since 2005. They could have changed that model to try and attract more people, but they don’t. There’s no need to change a sure thing, even if your numbers are only making you 100M a month. The cash flow is still fantastic, and WoW’s subscription numbers will skyrocket once again. Even if the numbers grow to HALF of what they were in Q1, that represents ENORMOUS growth. When your product bounces back that well in the next iteration, you don’t change. You wait until it stops bouncing back — at least Blizzard can afford to wait when it still generates that much cash. Change of this magnitude is far too radical to make simply for the sake of change.
The changes to the game itself to accommodate F2P would alter the very essence of WoW, and that itself would ignite a loss in players. Players, especially WoW players, do not want change. They don’t. Again, that’s why WoW has stayed the same game and simply become easier over the years. You have the same game providing the same experience, and doing everything it can to continue to provide that same experience with the least amount of friction possible. (more…)
World of Warcraft has once again lost more "subscribers" in a few months than most (close to all) MMOs could ever dream of having. They dropped something like 3 million…
Hearthstone released for the iPhone just a couple of days ago, and I've already clocked 5+ hours.... all of which may or may not have been during the work day.…
Rumors are usually something best left alone, but when it comes to Blizzard rumors they might as well be true. The most recent rumors have made their way to Reddit…
I'm proud of myself. A WoW expansion is coming out and I'm not going to jump right in and play again. Every time an expansion comes out I think, "Ooooh!…
Only Blizzard can both excite and disappoint me at the same time. Only Blizzard can be unoriginal and draw this amount of hype. I wasn't expecting them to be original.…