ACtivision/Blizzard Earnings Call - Legion "slightly" better than WoD...

[A dot Ham]

Saw this on the forums:

I don't think anyone claimed people were coming back in droves. All you have to do is look at recruitment for some of the more active guilds. They recruit for the same position for week.

"Looking for top notch rdps!"

Will you settle for mediocre... cuz I'm your guy!

The community feels about the size that it was during the release of Tanaan.

Honestly, I don't understand why people continue to try and revert measuring success into sub numbers. Except that it allows you to continue the narrative that WoW is dying and the developers don't know what they are doing.

However, assuming Legion is doing "slightly" better and the last known number was 5.5 million, so that new number is greater than 5.5 million, means that Blizzard has stopped the bleed, and that they are now sustaining a player base that is still double WoW's greatest competitors.

What is the point of this dialogue beyond the usual doom and gloom that comes with a quarter report. As soon as you see a year with a loss on the financial statements... then you can head for the lifeboats. But even that doesn't signify the end of a dynasty.

[Ielenia]

Saw this on the forums:

"Legion's overall performance is slightly ahead of the prior expansion."

Keyword: 'ahead'

So.. the game is getting better, not worse. Maybe that means subscriber numbers are going up instead of down (even if slightly), stopping the downward trend. Good news all around.

[Sencha]

With the way the gear treadmill works now it's not really surprising. It's the D3 phenomenon where you get better gear just for the sake of getting better gear, not for tackling new content. It's a very unrewarding and hollow way to design a MMORPG when after a while you start asking yourself why you are doing it.

Couldn't agree more with this. Getting better gear should be a consequence of overcoming difficult challenges not just spending some time in game.

Followers missions, daily/world quests, faceroll dungeons, LFR, etc. should NOT give any rewards.

[hyphnos]

"Legion's overall performance is slightly ahead of the prior expansion."

Keyword: 'ahead'

So.. the game is getting better, not worse. Maybe that means subscriber numbers are going up instead of down (even if slightly), stopping the downward trend. Good news all around.

Without a definition of "overall performance" they may as well have said nothing at all. They are essentially emphasizing hours played as their primary metric and it's hardly shocking that time played by remaining customers is up given the massive and flagrant time suck that is Legion.

[Relapses]

Yet more bullshit tinfoil hat theorycrafting from players who want nothing more than to prove to the world WoW is dying.

It's clear from this earnings report that Blizzard's current focus is time spent playing their games. This metric is important to investors because the more time spent on a Blizzard game, the more power their brand has. (Blizzard's goal is for their brand to be ubiquitous, like Pepsi or Coke.) Earnings reports half a decade ago focused primarily on WoW because that's all Blizzard had. Today, AB has many different streams of revenue and WoW performance quarter-over-quarter is far less intrinsic for their overall performance. WoW in general is a much different game but it's also a perfect reflection of the changes Blizzard has made to its business model over the years.

The issues arise because players want to pretend that WoW is supposed to exist in a vacuum where gaming trends never change and what worked five years ago absolutely has to work today. Players interpret Blizzard "hiding" subscriber levels as them being "embarrassed" when it's actually because the metric has very little importance to investors and even less importance to players. Sadly, the concept of a company adapting over time to a changing gaming landscape is far beyond the scope of the average WoW player. No, instead players have an insatiable urge to uphold the narrative that Blizzard hates its consumers and wants nothing more than to intentionally destroy their flagship property.

Thankfully, reality is far less jaded. It's clear WoW's market dominance is well in the past but until we begin to see mentions of "winding down" in these investor reports, I doubt WoW is going anywhere soon.

[MoanaLisa]

Yeah the number of customers a subscription based game has is irrelevant!

[/sarcasm]

It is irrelevant if revenues through other channels are healthy. Given development and maintenance costs it's not out-of-the-question that each expansion pays for itself in box or electronic sales. Subscriptions may simply be a very profitable bonus at this point. Not that that is bad or anything but the entire company is no longer relying on World of Warcraft to pay for everything they do as they did for some time. The gaming meta these days is not all that friendly to exclusive PC/Mac gaming much less paying $15/month steadily to have access to a game. If ACTV is happy with the game's performance then what anyone thinks about the importance of subscriptions is much of a factor.

Internally at Blizzard and one would presume Activision there are metrics and goals that the game should be meeting. We have no idea what those really are but if those goals for revenue and engagement are being met, what we think is totally irrelevant. Your goals and metrics likely aren't theirs and their's are the only ones that matter.

[Daffan]

With the way the gear treadmill works now it's not really surprising. It's the D3 phenomenon where you get better gear just for the sake of getting better gear, not for tackling new content. It's a very unrewarding and hollow way to design a MMORPG when after a while you start asking yourself why you are doing it.

Wow, finally someone who put it much more succinctly then I have been.

Average player has no reason to farm AP now when AK will boost them in 10 minutes 3 weeks later. Gear means nothing to them but a number because you can clear everything at 850ilvl for the average player anyway. Even if you farm like mad for 880 relinquished, all it does is make stuff you already do faster. I like to say WoW is 90% trivial garbage and 5-10% hard but that 5-10% requires a schedule and a fixed raid size most casuals/average player don't care about.

And then, people come back for patch - get welfare - leave after 2-3 weeks. Never had patch cycle up and down like this until they started boosting everyone's gear and progression automatically every patch back in late WOTLK/cata.

So not only does the content go over really fast for them, but it's really trivial and not fulfilling - Super apathy and futility sets in.

---

Let's not forget about the legendary disillusionment, WF/TF pushing people's gear way past the content they should be doing - making it trivial and a waste of time. All secondary problems to the main one for retention.

[MoanaLisa]

With the way the gear treadmill works now it's not really surprising. It's the D3 phenomenon where you get better gear just for the sake of getting better gear, not for tackling new content. It's a very unrewarding and hollow way to design a MMORPG when after a while you start asking yourself why you are doing it.

Not so very different than how it's always been really. Resets and catch-up stuff is more frequent is all. That at least, brings people back for new content for a while. But really, why bother when you can play for a month, unsubscribe until the next expansion and enjoy the full glory of people discarding their hard-won raid gear for some new boots they got moving 20 loads of poop from one place to another for some random farmer during leveling in the next expansion. It's going to be a problem when progression is based on what you wear instead of who you are and what you've accomplished.

[Thimagryn]

2) I seriously doubt there are ever SO many extra tokens in circulation that it would skew sub numbers in a significant way.

It's already a thing. Some people already have multiple tokens with subs extending out for months ahead of time. That is money that's gone to Blizzard regardless of whether the player intends to make use of that token time or not.

It may or may not affect sub numbers in a dramatic way. We don't have that data, but considering the amount of individual WoW players (anyone who has played WoW) is in the hundred millions, the token system could affect hundreds of thousands of players globally who may otherwise not be able to upkeep a sub. Goldselling was also a huge business within WoW from the very start, so we also have another factor of people who pour a lot of money into tokens on a regular basis. The sub numbers are absolutely skewed and it's not a 1:1 ratio of paying players to active subs, considering any F2P player with tons of gold can hoard tokens as well as a whale be able to buy countless tokens. Active sub rise and drops are heavily affected by this system, which means '100,000 active sub loss' could be caused by something as simple as a sudden depreciation of token-to-gold prices, causing whales to wait to buy tokens. Consider that just one casual token-buyer is able to support multiple F2P subs.

3) Sub numbers DO matter. Declining subs lead to abandoned realms, forcing those remaining to move (which Blizzard makes money from) to a populated one. It leads to guilds suffering with recruitment. It leads to longer queue times. Most importantly, as they demonstrated with WOD, declining sub numbers lead to cut content. I would think that is something EVERYONE would care about, even those who say they don't care about the players who left or what the current sub count is.

We haven't had sub numbers for a good few years now. Nothing has changed. Abandoned realms and transferring realms happened when we had sub numbers, and still happens after we no longer have them. Never has those numbers actually affected anyone on an individual level, because even at the height of WoW's popularity you could have been stuck on a low-pop server that no one was playing alts on (due to any number of factors like playing as Alliance on PVP realm with heavy Horde bias). The actual number of active subs is a number that will never affect how you play, only how you (falsely) perceive how successful the game is.

In all honesty, sub numbers is as useless as adding a 'Happiness meter' to the game. There's no tangible use for this information, because it is such a minor factor to how you play the game. I mean you might as well be asking for specific number of token buyers and people who sub with tokens... the information is absolutely irrelevant to you. Are you negatively impacted by the lack of knowledge on how many people are buying tokens or playing for free?

[dacoolist]

Every single person loves to take what a large massive sized company states - and turns it out to be such a big deal: but in reality - we are talking about a 12.5 year old game.. what, did you think people were just going to play it forever, lol?!

Why do you think blizz is putting sooooo much into OW, and Hearthstone, and even Hots.. because the WoW phase is just fading away.

Do I think WoW will continue to be successful beyond what the haters think: 100% yes. Do I think from here on out the game will continue to decline in subscription numbers (Which don't really matter as long as Blizzard is turning a MEGAmultimilliondollar profit): Sure- but ask yourself this... you're talking about a 12.5 year old game, on mmo-c.com ... who cares about the game? You do.

Keep up the good work

[Exeris]

With the way the gear treadmill works now it's not really surprising. It's the D3 phenomenon where you get better gear just for the sake of getting better gear, not for tackling new content. It's a very unrewarding and hollow way to design a MMORPG when after a while you start asking yourself why you are doing it.

You touched on the main problem I had with Diablo 3 and the reason I stopped playing, I really really liked the game but after a while it felt pointless. What was the point of grinding gear?

I enjoyed it when the difficulty settings was locked, unlocking those barriers was something I wanted to do and something that made me want to grind gear and keep playing.

[Ealyssa]

13 years after its death World of warcraft is still the biggest MMO out there. Quite an achievement, obviously blizzard are doing everything wrong.

[Deleted]

The term "slightly" should never even apear on a earnings report. Heck it should not even be mentioned on your gym member card.

[Deleted]

Right and this was a investors call, was it not?
So the information given in the call was for investors. And it was good news, right?

I don't know what we're arguing here.

For investors its good. Like I said, its not good for players.
But are you defending activision for being happy that people are spending money to get out of dead realms to continue playing?

If you are then gj defending anti-consumerism.

[Deleted]

For investors its good. Like I said, its not good for players.
But are you defending activision for being happy that people are spending money to get out of dead realms to continue playing?

If you are then gj defending anti-consumerism.

WTF are you on about??!? Defending..`?? whut?!

I said it was investors call, so it would be rather logical that the information that came out of it would be investor information, not player/game information.
And looking at that investor information presented on the call, it looked quite positive - and not negative like many seem to be trying to spin it in this thread.

You're rambling about consumerism and some other shit - which is not the topic of this thread. It says quite clearly in the topic this is about the earnings call.
So - again - wtf are you on about mate?

[Jerot]

Its not, and they aren't.

Subs stopped being a meaningful metric to measure profit years ago.

If that were true, they would drop the sub fee to expose as many people as possible to the shop, but they haven't. Clearly it's still a majority of their income or they would do what almost every other MMO on the planet has done and dropped the archaic sub-fee model in favor of premium features/cosmetics.

[Deleted]

If that were true, they would drop the sub fee to expose as many people as possible to the shop, but they haven't. Clearly it's still a majority of their income or they would do what almost every other MMO on the planet has done and dropped the archaic sub-fee model in favor of premium features/cosmetics.

I don't think the correlation between sub numbers and completely overhauling their business model is quite as trivial as you make it sound, but I think you're right about the sub fees still being a major part of their WoW related income. However, these days it's not only the sub fees - it's just one of several revenue streams so it does make a lot of sense to switch the metrics to something more relevant when presenting to investors.

[Maudib]

WOD lost over HALF of it's subs in the first 6 months... Yeah.. Legion is only slightly better.. it's easy to see peeps have left by the droves.

Demon hunters were the ONLY reason Legion did this well... and they have disappointed.

[Vorecien]

The game (and genre) need some fresh air. Whatever that means. Imagine: A new (better) engine is used to build the next expansion of World of Warcraft. Complete with flying in all blood elf and draenei-affiliated areas AND fully equipped with SCROLLABLE bags. I'd toss even more money at Blizzard.

I need a job at Blizzard. Be like, "Blizzard, baby, listen... hire me... give me a sandbox... and I will fix all of your problems. Just pay me 90k." The moral of this story is "dreams." We all have them, and this is the end of my senseless post... that includes some very awesome ideas for WoW. :3

- - - Updated - - -

WOD lost over HALF of it's subs in the first 6 months... Yeah.. Legion is only slightly better.. it's easy to see peeps have left by the droves.

Demon hunters were the ONLY reason Legion did this well... and they have disappointed.

*casts Polymorph: Potato* You're now a potato.

[Deleted]

Notice anything? They don't even mention WoW. If MAUs were up, or close to WoD, they would have put it in the report. They are simply hoping people gloss over this.

And by "people" you mean investors. (I hope)
They probably do. I don't think it much matters to them on the gameplay level - investors are probably happier to hear overall player engagement (time spent playing) numbers over several franchises - it gives them a better wibes about 'stability' and 'growth'