Blizzard further hides revenues from World of Warcraft

[Eliseus]

I hope so.

It will be sad to see the persistent world MMO genre disappear.

The issue is a quality mmo, not that the genre is dying. Unless no quality mmo is ever made again. Truth is the MMO market is larger than ever. More countries involved more than ever. People spread everywhere.

[Forgottenone]

WoW is better than ever, but it is also older than ever and growing older with each day. Its time has come and gone, it is still a great and amazing MMO but it is going to roughly stay the small with subs or just decrease. Legion will give it some life, then it will come back to where it is now and continue to go lower. Focusing on Hearthstone and Overwatch is a great idea right now, especially Hearthstone this is where the money really is.

[Shudder]

Sunk cost fallacy. Your time is already wasted. It's gone. You can never, ever get it back. Spending more time lamenting it, moaning about it, or bashing the game is the true waste of time.

The game will eventually die, of course. Nothing lasts forever. Whether that is tomorrow or a decade from now, it will end, so do you feel it's a waste of time to have played it?

I'm just explaining why I feel the health of the game matters. It's the reason I won't start another mmo. Too much time invested into this one, achievements mounts titles etc. If the game is healthy I feel like it's not a waste, I feel like I'm not wasting my time even though I am. I feel like the game doesn't have to die, it could outlive me. It's all about what I see myself doing in the future. There is no point spending months downing that mythic raid to get that mount if I don't see myself riding it 4 years from now.

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This actually makes sense. I think WoW can maintain itself for several more years but you always want to have data to make reasonable conclusions about longevity.

Yep, look at the people who spent time working on their characters in a game like city of heroes. And to have to watch it die, and have your characters deleted. If you have a slight feeling that is where WoW is headed then it makes it harder to sit staring at a poundfist spawn for 14 hours.

[Deleted]

Because I've invested a lot of time and work into this game. I'd prefer it stay healthy, if it's about to die I feel like I wasted my time and probably shouldn't waste anymore.

Time is not a resource you can save or earn interest on. You use it. That's it. It's used. "Time invested" is a sunk cost fallacy, it has already been paid and cannot be recovered.

If you're concerned about wasting your time in a game, then stop playing immediately.

[clevin]

This is what frustrates me. The health of WoW is equivalent to how healthy the 30 subs closest to me are, so that I can raid. Whether it's 10 million or 1 million has little effect on my experience of the game.

Because if subs fall precipitously it's likely resources will be redeployed and we'll see fewer content patches, less substantial investment, etc. And those 30 people? When you need to recruit, the fewer subs the smaller the recruiting pool. If you're on a high pop server that might not matter for a long time but on a low or low-medium server? It may very well matter.

Did all of you who are upset about this also complain when posts were being made in TBC and LK about how subs were going UP?

[Uurdz]

You can do as much math as you want but you clearly seem to be missing the point of ease to use and clarity. Any company in any other industry would merge similar product revenues to eachother in quarterly / yearly reports to better illustrate their true turnover and gross / net profits. I've found it puzzling that Blizzard have posted reports on WoW alone untill now.

The subscription based revenue of WoW is significantly different to every single one of their other revenue streams bar Call of duty elite membership

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Of course you can. It's a reasonable expectation, to be honest.
They don't report the sub numbers anymore, so it's reasonable to expect people to stop discussing them.

The SEC filings are and have always been the important watermark though. If ATVI isn't doing well, then Blizzard isn't having good time either.

For the record, the company as a whole is doing really well.

[Deleted]

The subscription based revenue of WoW is significantly different to every single one of their other revenue streams bar Call of duty elite membership

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See I don't think you're particulary familiar with economical reports. The whole idea of a quarterly report is to show how well the company as a whole is doing and give a clear vision on how revenue is divided over certain parts of the year. There is always a section listing every revenue stream on their own but you are not obligated to make any of that public. As long as your full sectionwide revenue streams are combined and published you are free to handle the rest as you wish as long as you report it to the tax authotities.

This is why you never see any other companies publish their specific reports all you can get your hands on is their full turnover, gross profit and net profit.

[Uurdz]

The sub numbers were part of a financial health of the game when it was most of the source of revenue for Blizzard, like pretty much every single MMO. The problem is that they sparked so much controversy that Blizzard stopped reporting them. A slight dip led to rampant "WoW is dying!" threads.

Add in that Blizzard now has a lot of income from other sources than just WoW and the subs numbers stopped being important. On top of all of those things, sub numbers really were pretty worthless. Plenty of people subscribed and virtually never logged in during content lulls. A better metric is engagement in the content; how many people are currently raiding now? How many are clearing xx difficulty? What older raids are being run? When they do their bi-weekly bonus events, how many people are completing them? That tells them much, much more than just a static number of people currently paying to have a sub.



Why is it so important to know if other people dislike a game? I'll tell you: selfish, narcissistic validation. It seems to be mostly linked to WoW. When I've grown tired of other games or game series that have moved in a different direction, I don't spend my life combing forums to bitch and moan about it. There are other games out there to play. It's like spending all of your time following an ex on Facebook and writing mean-spirited posts about how awful they are for being happy.



Please, most people aren't speculating at all. It's pushing a lot of good people away from the forums because we don't get people speculating, posting positive threads, or even their own fan stuff any more, we just get a lot of "WoW is dying!", "WoW sucks!", "I hate WoW" threads.



Revenue and subscribers are not directly linked. Despite the decline, WoW has seen revenue climb. We're not going to see WoW end for years to come, at least, considering they're already working on the expansion after Legion and WoW is still a powerhouse of financial income.

What a load of nonsense. Subscription numbers are the best metric of the games health. All the other hints you listed are precursors to subscription numbers as the more engaged you are the more likely you are to stay subbed. from a management standpoint - sure I would focus on those precursors rather than sub numbers but we don't have any of that data so we use subscription numbers to measure the health of the game

It's as important as know that other people like the game. misery loves company but selfish narcissistic validation? Wow way to name call mate. I believe the game has gone downhill and it makes me really sad that it has. I have previously suggested ways of improving the games future (providing nostalgia experiences to maintain interest between patches) only to be shot down by people. So I'm a narcissist seeking validation. Cool, that's just great.

I can't say what other people are doing but one of the speculations of late has been legac or pristine servers. Many people state this would never happen, that wow is still going strong and that people should move on if they don't like the current game state. Well if sub numbers spell a different story than why people are trying to spin then that shuts that comment down. If nost had 5% of they player base wow current has then you can see more clearly why they took action!!!

Revenue and subscribers are directly linked because the higher number subscribers the higher your revenue. What you mean is that revenue is not exclusively driven by subscriptions and that other services can build revenue up like the instant level 100, realm transfers and gameshop purchases.

What does the end for WoW look like? A final expansion? Do remember that they will cancel future expansion investment if numbers get low enough and capital investment into other games like hearthstone become more attractive.

To be clear, I'm looking forward to legion and have taken time off work to play it when it comes out. I love wow, I don't love all of it as much as I used to, but I still want to see it succeed. What I don't want to see is people sitting in denial that it's in much poorer shape than it should among other silly things that people have stated over the last 4-8 weeks

[Deleted]

The company is doing extremely well, which is good.

But if WoW performs poorly or is not one of the major focus points for the company any more, that will probably mean that they will scale down work on it.
That is my main and only concern with WoW not really featuring in this report.

My gut tells me that if Legion does not perform as expected (which I think it will), then they are going to start redeploying resources to their focus games.

Or maybe, if Legion does not do well, they may decide to "fix" some of the mistakes they may perceive as being the reasons for it not doing so well as hoped.
That may be good for the game in the long run, if players and developers can agree on what those "mistakes" were

[Uurdz]

See I don't think you're particulary familiar with economical reports. The whole idea of a quarterly report is to show how well the company as a whole is doing and give a clear vision on how revenue is divided over certain parts of the year. There is always a section listing every revenue stream on their own but you are not obligated to make any of that public. As long as your full sectionwide revenue streams are combined and published you are free to handle the rest as you wish as long as you report it to the tax authotities.

This is why you never see any other companies publish their specific reports all you can get your hands on is their full turnover, gross profit and net profit.

They would have specifically mentioned it previously because of the specifically noted risks associated with that revenue stream.
In forecasting, you can expect stability in games sales suffering a normal product life cycle but subscriptions do no follow such a simple curve. They've stopped mentioning it because it looks bad and generates bad publicity.

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The company is doing extremely well, which is good.

But if WoW performs poorly or is not one of the major focus points for the company any more, that will probably mean that they will scale down work on it.
That is my main and only concern with WoW not really featuring in this report.

My gut tells me that if Legion does not perform as expected (which I think it will), then they are going to start redeploying resources to their focus games.

Or maybe, if Legion does not do well, they may decide to "fix" some of the mistakes they may perceive as being the reasons for it not doing so well as hoped.
That may be good for the game in the long run, if players and developers can agree on what those "mistakes" were

Thanks for your post, this was exactly the type of discussion I was hoping to encourage

[Deleted]

Financial analysts have already long since sailed on wow being a focal point of Activision-Blizzard revenue. It's barely even on the radar anymore when they look at it and they already think of it as end-of-life. They are far more interested now in COD, Destiny, HS, Overwatch, etc. It's *gamers* that are the only ones that still think of wow being 90% of Activision-Blizzard revenue still (and it's not). It's an important IP in the long run and potential for whatever in the wow universe Blizz does next, but they hardly think of wow when anymore it comes to revenue. The analysts are incredibly sharp folks that pour over the data, and they know full-well the stats were a steady line of decline since 2010/11 for wow. And they are primarily interested in future income, which explains why they barely think of wow as a blip in the portfolio anymore.

Vague words like 'blip in the portfolio' when the hard numbers tell another story and some anecdote blaming gamers for allegedly being grossly missinformed about the facts, that is just a completely reality detached bullshit shaming tactic, refuted by a multitiude of discussion held after every quarterly report for years where exactly those numbers have been rudimentary basics of well informed discussions. Of course whiteknights dragging that down as usual, with not few just jumping with ignorant venom at discussions containing inconvenient information borught to light by critical thinking people who have invested time into the subject to learn and bring it up in first place.

WoW alone was still 18% of Activision Blizzards total revenue and over 50% of Blizzards revenue in 2015. Even in the previous quarter it was 12% of the total and 40% of Blizzard revenue. These numbers have been in the reports for years, have been cited thousands of times and especially the proportional share of WoW was the most easy to read even for a layman with the math already done. Those numbers have not been much of an issue for years now and after reading thousands of these posts I never even heard one person come even close to this delusional '90% believe', so stop making up this shit.

Now on the contrary that is hardly a 'blip' in common tongue. We are still talking about a double digit percentage for a single game of Activision Blizzard and nearly half of Blizzard. Maybe its just you who are ignorant? Maybe you were missled by the income record PR hype. But revenue didn't grew all that much. Blizzards revenues are at a rather low point of the past 10 years very volatile up and down. Activision Blizzard just massively reduced costs for production and post peak of WoW online services with just minor increases in other cost factors that led to higher income. No speculation. The plain numbers for expenses in the tables show that. They gonefrom retail to digital and mobile. But its okay the PR is meant to delude layman.

And even if anyone insists that the reason WoWs numbers are gone because it was taken over by other more significant game like HS, then where are these other games numbers now? Broken down like WoW before. HS wasn't merged into Online and WoW taken out. HS didn't get listed extra. Wow simply got hidden inside the PC cake. Nothing more. That rationale goes beyond informed opinion.

This whole 'its just too insignificant and no one cares if you ignore the facts and reality and listen just to my ignorant opinions for a second' excuse, is in fact the far fetched excuse of pretentious but clueless (some just dishonest) whiteknights to deny the much simpler and completely plausible but emotionally hard to accept reason that Blizzard simply decided to hide the declining WoW figures, that are much more transparent than some /who list or server loads and turned from good into widely spoken bad PR for one of their still most significant money maker, because it outweights the open demand of investors to be reported about such details.

[Detritivores]

Because if subs fall precipitously it's likely resources will be redeployed and we'll see fewer content patches, less substantial investment, etc. And those 30 people? When you need to recruit, the fewer subs the smaller the recruiting pool. If you're on a high pop server that might not matter for a long time but on a low or low-medium server? It may very well matter.

Did all of you who are upset about this also complain when posts were being made in TBC and LK about how subs were going UP?

We already went 2 years with essentially no content patches. /shrug. Can't get much worse.

I'm on a small server and I very much understand the ramifications of server size.

I'm not complaining so much as I'm saying that the overall WoW sub number is irrelevant to me. Lot's of other things are relevant. Server sizes, raid formats, etc. But the overall sub number. Don't know don't care.

[Foj]

To be clear, while an outspoken pro legacy poster, I do not want this to be about legacy servers. There is another thread in there for that. I do want to open a discussion/speculation about the future for wow post legion and if blizzard may be considering another mmo or pulling out of the mmo business altogether.

Who the hell cares how Blizzard breaks down its earnings estimates? Companies generally only break down earnings in a way that highlights opportunities and risks to shareholders and potential investors. All it means when Blizzard stops detailing WoW earnings/profit is that WoW's earnings aren't "special" any more. Blizzard is obligated to report significant risks and is motivated to report areas of significant growth or opportunity. Apparently neither is the case where WoW is concerned.

You can read whatever you want into it, but this doesn't mean Blizzard doesn't care about WoW. It means that investors don't need to care about WoW. It doesn't mean that Blizzard doesn't want revenue from WoW either. It means that Blizzard doesn't expect revenue from WoW to be surprising one way or another.

The fact that WoW isn't special to Blizzard relative to other activities shouldn't be considered a big deal or come as a shock to anyone who is pondering the fact that it is a 12 year old game.

Additionally I've never seen any sign that Blizzard hasn't spent resources or effort or $$$ on WoW. The release/content scheduling seems to be constantly off, but that's always been the case, and apparently it won't change.

[Relapses]

If you look at the numbers for every expansion outside of WoD, the sub numbers tend to plateau towards the end of the expansion, jumping slightly right at the end in anticipation of the next expansion. It's pure speculation to think the numbers have continued to tank at the same rate leading up to the point Blizzard stopped publicly releasing the information. Now, I realize that it's equally speculative to say the numbers haven't changed but I think it might be more because Blizzard is trying to shift its total market strategy away from seeming as if all of its eggs are in the WoW basket and more into "hey, we've got a lot of other games which are creating revenue for us as well."

[gegalfo]

oh no 11 ish year old game does not have as many players as it once had. do you know how many 11ish year old mmos there are out there and how many do you think just have 1m subs left?

[Alyxanna]

What a load of nonsense. Subscription numbers are the best metric of the games health.

So tell me how healthy other similar MMO's are since none of them--zero--report subscription numbers. Zero. None. Nada. They don't do it. Your 'best metric' is gone. All that is left is guesswork.

[WowIsDead64]

Don't worry. They hide fails only - they'd gladly report success through.

[Uurdz]

So tell me how healthy other similar MMO's are since none of them--zero--report subscription numbers. Zero. None. Nada. They don't do it. Your 'best metric' is gone. All that is left is guesswork.

Yeah that's right, sorry what was your point here?

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oh no 11 ish year old game does not have as many players as it once had. do you know how many 11ish year old mmos there are out there and how many do you think just have 1m subs left?

Uh they had 10mil players as of December 2014 when the game was 10
So is the 10th year the killer?

[WowIsDead64]

Also it's possible, that Blizzard are trying to hide the fact, that Wow already formally gone F2P, cuz they artificially keep Token prices at reasonable level only to keep players playing the game and incur losses as the result.

Worst thing - Legion is already doomed to fail. It won't bring changes, that are required to save game from complete fail, and it's too late to implement them. Blizzard rely on ephemeral positive changes, like return of Legion, Demon Hunter class and Cashbringers to everyone, too much. Colourful wrapper won't help, if candy itself is rotten. Game itself is dead.

[Deleted]

Also it's possible, that Blizzard are trying to hide the fact, that Wow already formally gone F2P, cuz they artificially keep Token prices at reasonable level only to keep players playing the game and incur losses as the result.

Worst thing - Legion is already doomed to fail. It won't bring changes, that are required to save game from complete fail, and it's too late to implement them. Blizzard rely on ephemeral positive changes, like return of Legion, Demon Hunter class and Cashbringers to everyone, too much. Colourful wrapper won't help, if candy itself is rotten. Game itself is dead.

Do you really think anyone will listen to your opinion when your username is "WowIsDead64", haha. It's obvious you have an agenda. He's a suggestion, stop posting about a game you claim has died and find something more healthy to obsess over (join a gym or something).

Also Legion is looking great, sorry :P