Earnings Call, Feb 9 Hotfixes, Dev Communication Improvements, Blue Posts, WowCraft

[Igzorn]

What other sub MMO's are there.... Final Fantasy is the only one that might have a required sub.....

there is still eve online and even ultima online with sub´s

[Lightbull]

If they dont give out the actual sub numbers you can count on it they are low ... very low .

Their earnings imply that they are actually pretty high.

Otherwise they would brag , they just cant help themselves as they are a bunch of condecending stuck up twats .

I have no clue where you got this conclusion from.

[Murderdoll]

Their earnings imply that they are actually pretty high.

Thats bullshit.

Even when subs were at their lowest during WoD, profits were up due to microtransactions.

In fact, they even mention that in game transactions are massive.

Activision Blizzard revenues from in-game content reached a record $3.6 billion in 2016, more than double the $1.6 billion in 2015

Subs, havent been tied to good earnings in a very long time so just stop that nonsense.

The fact theyve changed the reporting metric and are using lots of inclusive reporting language is fairly telling.

WoW isnt dying, thats stupid. But theres some interesting numbers there.

[THEORACLE64]

This makes me wonder how many subs the game currently has, but its probably not something to brag about or they would've slipped it out somehow.

Well, no. They always used to report them, until it got to ridiculous levels of players thinking they were experts posting about them everywhere with every post just instantly derailing.

[ryanmahaffe]

There isn't. FF14 can hold a sub because Square Enix are funding it and it comes off of a well known franchise. Wildstar was the only other game that at launch required a sub and well that tanked hard. Hell FF11 is still using the sub model and the biggest server has 2k players.

Eso did as well. Tanked as well even with brand recognition.

Sub games don't work 99% of the time.

[Alki]

I am an investor and I can assure you, this call was acceptable in every essence of the word. Trying to discredit any of the games and/or comments regarding this call are misplaced, misguided and factually lacking.

Move along and let the adults talk, please.

[Deleted]

What other sub MMO's are there.... Final Fantasy is the only one that might have a required sub.....

plenty of mmos tried it, but had to go f2p, not really an argument in your favour

[Leadsop]

The reporting of /played is an interesting counter to sub numbers, which probably are increasingly hard to track with the WoW token. Makes sense to me (and seems to be good news that it is up substantially), although I'm sure the detractors will come at it from a different angle.

[Zyranthian]

Legion is not doing very well

Really? Sounds like its doing incredibly well, more time spent playing in the past quarter than any quarter in the past 4 years (excepting launch quarters).

[Leadsop]

yeah the earnings call and active users were mostly from overwatch and hearthstone

Bliz is doing great, WoW not so much

wow ain't gonna drop out of course but this means their new design direction has not been embraced and is actually chasing people away

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH

And then...

"World of Warcraft saw an increase in total play time for the quarter, surpassing the Q3 expansion launch quarter and all non-launch quarters in the last four years"

Oops, you're an idiot. Lol.

[FelPlague]

yeah the earnings call and active users were mostly from overwatch and hearthstone

Bliz is doing great, WoW not so much

wow ain't gonna drop out of course but this means their new design direction has not been embraced and is actually chasing people away

- - - Updated - - -



MoP actually had more than double. Go read up on it. Buncha comparisons already out there or you can easily compare number of raids, dungeons, scenarios, pet battles were added, faction hubs instead of re-using a city, flying as a feature instead of extreme late game useless unlock, 3 different isles added, more leveling zones, brawlers guild addition, addition of treasure and rare hunting, new class, new race, 3 new bg's, 2 new arenas, BIS pvp gear from pvp instead of pve, tons of alt shortcuts, reforging, legendary quests for everyone, spectacular visual effects on the legendary cloaks, tons of weapons for everyone instead of tiny amount of color swaps and appearances of the same weapon, etc etc

Just cuz you wanna flap your gums and say legion has tons of content doesn't make it so. Legion has about half of MoP and a lot of grinds that make it longer to get virtually everything, especially RNG. Thus the large amount of burnout and people quitting. They wasted a ton of dev time on the systems reboots, similar to how they wasted a ton of time on graphics/engine reboot for WoD.

Hopefully the next xpac actually delivers on content instead of mega grinds they HOPE you call content even though they are flat repetition of the same content over and over.

again... mop is a finished fucking expansion... legion isnt even half way done yet... comparing an expansion that had allmost 3 years in it, to one that isnt even 1 year old yet.... holy shit...

[FelPlague]

For Christ's sake, I know the knee-jerk reaction is to be as positive as possible and make WoW seem like the best thing from sliced bread but, they don't need you to enact typical fan PR spin.

And for some reason it's instantly been assumed I'm talking about it "dying" or being "close to it's final breath". I said nothing of the sort. I simply pointed out typical reactions to stuff from the earnings report. Your 2 posts are one of those typical reactions: "it has more subs than everything else!" (this is false btw, but I'm not getting into that shit show of a discussion again).

Activision Blizzard are making money. Good.

uhh what? where did you get
""it has more subs than everything else!" (this is false btw, but I'm not getting into that shit show of a discussion again)."

where is your proof?

[Dreammage]

This isn't accurate. They already said about a year ago that they were going to stop giving out subscriber numbers in Q reports.

If they dont give out the actual sub numbers you can count on it they are low ... very low .
Otherwise they would brag , they just cant help themselves as they are a bunch of condecending stuck up twats .
To cover up low numbers you see players from 20 different realms running arround in dalaran .
If the would not do that you would be able to shit in the street and none would see it .
Back in the day when subs nbrs were good it was on 1 realm .

[Relapses]

What's more irritating than the "Blizzard White Knights" are the so-called "realists" who smugly enter these threads and remind everybody that Blizzard is just utilizing "PR spin" to put lipstick on a pig.

Cool.

Legion is doing better than WoD. A/B is doing better than ever. The sky is not falling. WoW is not dead. There is no conspiracy to obscure information from consumers. We don't see subscriber numbers because they aren't important to us. The end.

[Chickat]

I'm not, and none of my friends are. If Blizzard claims this it must be true, right?
I tried killing the world boss in Aszuna yesterday, and I couldn't. No groups were up and the one I made consisted of 3 people after 10 mins of waiting. This was in prime time of gaming, around 18:00 in-game time.
Zones are as deserted as, well, a desert. Orgrimmar is overpopulated with peole though, which is nice, albeit it's people from different servers crammed in one city.

If people are in-game more now than at launch, where the hell are they? Idling in Silvermoon? 90% Alliance?

Your personal experience means nothing.

[Baneleaf]

I'm not, and none of my friends are. If Blizzard claims this it must be true, right?
I tried killing the world boss in Aszuna yesterday, and I couldn't. No groups were up and the one I made consisted of 3 people after 10 mins of waiting. This was in prime time of gaming, around 18:00 in-game time.
Zones are as deserted as, well, a desert. Orgrimmar is overpopulated with peole though, which is nice, albeit it's people from different servers crammed in one city.

If people are in-game more now than at launch, where the hell are they? Idling in Silvermoon? 90% Alliance?

I had both ends of this experience yesterday over the course of about an hour. I went to fight the world boss in Azuna on one toon, got in a group of 40 instantly and finished in a few minutes. About 45 minutes later I went out on an alt and could not find a group at all. I waited about an hour for the next wave of people to start up questing and finished up with no problem. I think you were probably in the same timeframe of early afternoon when people were still getting home from school/work.

[ImpTaimer]

Nobody cares about Earnings Call for WoW. Token and Cash shop / level boost pad earnings.

No subscription data = no fucks given.

As far as playtime numbers: There has never been more mandatory repeatable grind before in any expansion (TotC patch was pretty bad, but not entirely mandatory). There has also never been such repeatable access to high-level gear thanks to mythic+/keystones. You can play as long as there are keys.

Also devs lying about stealth patch/notes is laughable. Does anyone actually believe them anymore?

[Averrix]

Legion is not doing very well

last year 4th quarter was WoD and horrifically low numbers

Legion only increased active players by 20% over an incredibly low activity period. Normal xpacs increase activity by 100-200%, sometimes more.

Legion experienced massive drop off within a month as most returning players hated the reboots except for World Quests. RNG everything pissed everyone off and the death of the primary pvp reward system chased away tons and tons more.

Legion costs more than MoP yet contains less content by almost 50%. Legion has extra grinds but not content. Legion is where they made everything take longer to get.

Why can't wow just put out MoP level content every xpac instead of rebooting systems?

Are you kidding me? MoP levels of content? Did you not forget the year long drought of content from SoO release to the next xpac? Where were you doing that time? There is so much to do in Legion, it's silly. There are three raids out already, THREE. That's the entire total of raids that was in the entirety of WoD and that's two less than Mists. So I don't know what you are saying there is not enough content. You must be playing the wrong game.

[Roar-Powah]

World of Warcraft MAUs grew 10% in 2016 and over 20% year-over-year in the fourth quarter on the back of the successful third-quarter launch of Legion.

Means Legion is dead as well, if its only grown 10% from over WoD levels and looking at how many dead servers there is combined with the always on Cross Realm Zones being forced it's clear that WoW is at or under WoD levels for player numbers. And the main focus on Overwatch and the fact that WoW only made 20% of the overall profit for Blizzard isn't a good sign. ( 60% from Non World of Warcraft and 20% from non PC ) holy shit that is bad news. I think WoW is under WoD levels of player numbers.

Looks like Overwatch is the new cash cow for Blizzard, no wonder why all of a sudden the WoW team is trying to start up communication on their own forums. Too little too late.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

If the data provided doesn't support my wishful desires IT IS FAKE NEWS whreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

(I think that covers most people in this thread)