good evening fellas. My popcorn is ready. Lets get it oooooon!!!
Bring the sub numbers and the shitstorm!
Brace yourselves!!
From the #1 Cata review on Amazon.com: "Blizzard's greatest misstep was blaming players instead of admitting their mistakes.
They've convinced half of the population that the other half are unskilled whiners, causing a permanent rift in the community."
I don't care if WoW steals ideas from another game. I just wish they'd steal aoe looting.
Sorry but you are dead wrong, if it drops to 9 million it creates a major problem for Blizzard.
If you're running a business that loses 25% of it's customers in one year, that is a bigger loss than you think. That's 25% of steady revenue, 25% of the company. It's a big enough loss, where technically they have enough reason to downsize the wow department. Which in turn will either deliver content slower, or deliver more recycled crap. You can't look at it as "oh 9 million x $15 is still a boat load of money"... It is a shit ton of money, but that money has expenses, it has an overhead and it needs to be maintained in order to maintain the service.
If you're investing into a company that lost 25% of its customers in one year, you would be thinking "oh shit, i'm pulling my money out". And you can bet your ass that's whats going on. Especially since Kotick saw it coming and sold 45% of his shares.
Or basically they're not going to even mention D3 sales until the game comes out. Why bother talking about D3 potential losses when the game's not even out yet?
Also, this is a conference call to INVESTORS. Trust me, Blizzard is going to try to steer the goal of this call to a positive future... this call isn't for pleasing the players. :P
Also, your "shady" theory has another angle too - the RMAH. instead of talking about overall shelf sales... they'll talk about how much money the RMAH brought in. :P
Lastly, I believe they'll have the downloaded version of the game to players count towards "The total number of units SHIPPED". WHich is often a clever tactic of skirting around the real question of "how many units were actually SOLD to consumers."
doesn't matter if they lose 1 million, 4 million or gained 6 million, the stock will barely move as WoW will still be 100% pure profit.
Apply blizzards model to any other subscription service,you'd be outraged:
Netflix adds no new movies for a year, you click a new movie, there's a $5 fee.
You're in an accident, click your onstar button, but there's an addition $20 fee for them to help.
You turn on your tv only to find all you get are the infomercial channels. Every other show is pay per view.
See how dumb that model is?
WoW has roughly 5.2M EU+US subscribers (mmodata.net). The rest are asian accounts, mainly chinese who don't pay for a subscripton. so yea, the 11-12M numbers have to be read into.
L-O-LThing is.. people who whine on forums are not gonna quit WoW. It's like with suicide, people who really intend to kill themself just do it, they don't talk about it. People who talk about it are crying out for help.
Of all the conceited, retarded analogies i've seen, this has to top them all. And thats saying a lot. Quite an impressive signature i have to say.
Pretty much this.
You got to remember, thanks to WoW sending them cartloads of money - Blizzard is probably 10x larger than it used to be than when it was first developing WoW. Back in the original days prior to WoW, Blizzard just focused on ONE game, and maybe ONE expansion for said game and that was it. Then they'd switch to another game. The only unique situation they got in was with Diablo's case - sign a contract with a different dev house and have them develop that one.
Right now - Blizz has Titan, Pandaria, whatever expansion five is, Diablo III, Diablo III expansion, SCII: Heart of the swarm, and probably the third SCII expansion + WCIII in development. That's at LEAST 7 titles minimum that they're working on RIGHT NOW. One of those titles specifically is probably on the same level of complexity and staff-size as World of Warcraft.
Blizzard are no longer like Bethesda or the developers of GW2. They aren't just focusing on 1 game every now and again. EQ and GW2 can turn an easy profit simply because their expenses are ridiculously low. Blizz has now grown to the point where they're doing massive press tours and conventions and making a BUNCH of titles. And all of that is currently funded via one basket of eggs...
"Man is his own star. His acts are his angels, good or ill, While his fatal shadows walk silently beside him."-Rhyme of the Primeval Paradine AFC 54
You know a community is bad when moderators lock a thread because "...this isnt the place to talk about it either seeing as it will get trolled..."
Not expecting much difference since I think the people locked in on Annual Passes will offset the losses...plus there's always a jump when a new patch hits
That said, Blizz is setting themselves up for a horrible loss come October when those annual passes end....that to me is the date to watch for
And the sad part is that person isn't tranaslating things properly. People aren't just ragequitting and vocalizing on the forums for attention - they're ragequitting and vocalizing on the forums IN HOPES TO GET THE GAME CHANGED!
If you look at my history of posts, I often complained about why I quit WoW a year ago over he horrible horrible designs implemente from Cataclysm. About how my fun-filled Wrath-heroics turned into hour+ long CC snorefests.
Then they announced Pandaria, and a slew of potential changes - specifically sighting things I said I hated about the difficulty of dungeons. Got me interested...
Then 4.3 came out and they actually IMPLEMENTED some of those changes. That, to me, makes my vocalization on the forms 100% worth it. And now I'm back playing as it's much more enjoyable than it was at Cataclysm's launch. Granted, it's still not Wrath-level... but it's enough to get me back. :P
Well my prediction was a drop of around 200 000 this Q and another 500 000 next Q
there so many information on blizzards working orders and processes to be found in a forum from a fansite, its unbelieveable!
very educational!(?) mvallas must be an industrial spie among their midst!
anywho, if the subs drop im gonna be like "so what?!" and if they dont drop im gonna be like "in your FACE bitches!"
Titan is coming in a year or 2 and Blizzard will do fine. Nuff said!