Realms are less relevant than they used to be but still provide a frame for larger populations of players. Apart from that there are groups that center around friends and family, different sorts of guilds and a lot of people who like to go it alone, sometimes with a friend or two. If you desire a 'community' experience it won't be the realm level except possibly on some RPG realms.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
I did actually read their SEC filings from the time before Hearthstone when it was still possible to make sense of their "digital sales channels" reporting.
They made an absolute killing with the services. I can't imagine it being any different these these days - the ROI from the development has been earned long time ago, now it just makes them free money by flipping couple of bits in the DB.
There's also additional evidence - The Instance podcast mentioned that there was considerable internal push against implementing the token and battle net balance because the digital services make them so much money. It's totally anecdotal of course, but those guys are fairly well connected to Blizzard people.
I think it was at lowest reported subs of MoP that the report announced that services offset sub losses and again during the roughly three million subscription drop in WoD. Services continued to hold WoW up throughout WoD all before the introduction of tokens. I have not payed attention this expansion though.
If you compare cyclical income from subscriptions to what they make from server transfers, it's a drop in the bucket. Even with a conservative approximation of 1% of the playerbase transferring every month, the profit margin is extremely low. Blizzard isn't sitting around laughing at people who cannot "afford" server transferring, the service has a cost to give the act of moving your server have a more tangible impact than just pressing a button and waiting to move.
Honestly we have the technology to make one single realm like ESO now. We 'don'"t need realms anymore. Make this a poll!
Hearthstone is a very different beast than WoW. That game sustains itself with microtransactions where WoW obviously utilizes a subscription model. I just don't see server transferring -- a completely opt-in optional service -- is somehow even remotely comparable to what they surely make from subscription fees.
I don't think connected realms are the worst solution but I think Blizzard envisioned them to be a way to solve this issue in concept but in execution found it to be much less well-received. If you read the initial announcement for connected realms it was pretty positive but by the time they'd actually been rolled out it was much less so. And the fact that they haven't further connected realms in the two- to three-year period since leads me to believe they likely don't view it as the best way to tackle this problem.
Yes, realms are still important.
First, I like being on a smaller realm. Its not a dead realm, but its far from being a highly populated one. It has many benefits.
I know a lot of the guilds on my realm, some of them for years. I know people from those different guilds. People know my guild, since it has been around for years (and will be for years to come). There is a nice, friendly competetion going on with regards to progress. Recruitment is a bit harder, but we still manage to get good people. The AH is better.
You know the people on your realm who really excel in their class.
And the trade and general chat are crowded, but you can actually read them. I once had an alt on a crowded server, and those channels were a nightmare. I don't like it if they scroll so fast that I can barely read anything.
And I never have to deal with "Realm is full, XXX In queue".
You misunderstand. I said reports before Hearthstone existed. These days it's very hard to know how that "Digital channel" actually breaks down - but if you go read the reports from 2008 or so, you can get a better "guess" - they're on the ATVI investor site - have a look.
Also - as mentioned above, during MoP/WoD they actually reported that services helped to offset the subloss revenue. I'm quite sure the money they make from services is a non-negligible amount. The fact that value-added services are even mentioned separately in the Q-filings is a very good indication of how important revenue stream it is. All the evidence I've seen points to it being important part of WoW revenue stream. Most of the evidence is freely available in their quarterly reports.
I'm not sure what you base your argument on as you seem to think the opposite? Care to elaborate with some sources?
They have a clear strategy around it. This is why they've been so slow to implement things like virtual/connected realms.
Last edited by mmoc0e47cbaaf5; 2017-03-27 at 07:54 AM.
That would require a game design that diffuses the players much more widely in the content. Today's design forces everyone into the same, small piece of content, which wouldn't scale to mega realms. But if they did figure out a way to make all content relevant all the time - thus spreading the players across the entire world - mega realms would be awesome.
Yes, realms are still important.
First, I like being on a smaller realm. Its not a dead realm, but its far from being a highly populated one. It has many benefits.
I know a lot of the guilds on my realm, some of them for years. I know people from those different guilds. People know my guild, since it has been around for years (and will be for years to come). There is a nice, friendly competetion going on with regards to progress. Recruitment is a bit harder, but we still manage to get good people. The AH is better.
You know the people on your realm who really excel in their class.
And the trade and general chat are crowded, but you can actually read them. I once had an alt on a crowded server, and those channels were a nightmare. I don't like it if they scroll so fast that I can barely read anything.
And I never have to deal with "Realm is full, XXX In queue".
People wanting to play on dead realms should be ignored and big population worlds should be the objective. That kind of competition is something you have to cope with in an MMO.
Yes, some players would complain. It's Blizzard's job to ignore complains of people who don't know how to make a fun game and would rather see it butchered by low difficulty and no interaction whatsoever with other players.
Ah, my bad. I try to avoid talking about the investor reports because nothing in them is relevant to us on a consumer level. If we knew exactly how much server transfers in particular contributed to Blizzard's bottom line, I'd say otherwise. But since this information isn't shared with us for very obvious reasons, all we're doing is trying to make correlation/causation arguments over information we'll never get the chance to see. You say that Blizzard dragging their feet means they have a financial motivation behind it; I see it that they don't have a good solution for it and leaving it the way we have it has less impact than opening the floodgates.
Last edited by Relapses; 2017-03-27 at 08:05 AM.
Realm transfers are a way for blizzard to make money whilst doing fuck all. It's why they put the prices up recently.
We should be down to four servers per language per region with modern tech (PvE, PvP, RP, RPPvP) but blizzard won't sacrifice their baby cash cow like that.
Last edited by Aeula; 2017-03-27 at 08:11 AM.