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

[Deleted]

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?

I'm used to people over here defending blizzard to their last breath - so I assumed you were saying its good for game and blizzard that people spend money on faction/server transfers

[Kardagh]

WoW continues to be the milk that powers the other games, yes you can have F2P MOBA, FPS and Card Games with Blizzard but they're all riding on the revenue that WoW brings in. It's a sorry thing to see the greatest MMO ever made be turned into a cow to be milked by vampire shareholders like this.

I wonder how long it will last until they realise there won't be enough milk to support the other games? I imagine it will be when more stuff to buy becomes available in OW or Hearthstone

[Akka]

They're talking overall Q1 performance, which means they're likely comparing a variety of factors (I would assume chiefly player engagement, but also microtransactions and subscriptions) to where Warlords of Draenor was during the same timeframe relative to launch (AKA months 5 through 8).

Nope. It's written black on white : "Y/Y performance". That means they are comparing numbers with Q1 2016, when WoD was already on the respirator.
Gotta love these positive spin right ?

WoD didn't really have a fast decline until slightly past the half way point.

What's this stupid BS ? WoD crashed and lost ONE THIRD of its fucking playerbase in the very second quarter. That's "half way point" for you ?

[beelgers]

Nope. It's written black on white : "Y/Y performance". That means they are comparing numbers with Q1 2016, when WoD was already on the respirator.
Gotta love these positive spin right ?

What's this stupid BS ? WoD crashed and lost ONE THIRD of its fucking playerbase in the very second quarter. That's "half way point" for you ?

To be fair, half the expansion's content was in fact out by then :P

[Thimagryn]

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.

You're ignoring the elephant in the room: Tokens.

Their income is still reliant on subscriptions, but not on individual subscribers. Token system and 'F2P' gold providers fuel the current system in a way that is incomparable to the old 1:1 Subscriber system. No one said the shop is their primary source of income. We're saying individual sub numbers don't matter, considering the system's changed completely. It's more akin to how the numbers of people in theatres is irrelevant to movie profit and box office listings.

[Eon Drache]

I would say that's highly unlikely. The (3rd party) data we have available as well as reading "between the lines" from the 2 earnings reports so far would indicate a healthy start to Legion followed by almost the identical player exodus WOD experienced.

Source and if you link that wowcensus crap I'm just going to laugh my ass off.

[Gadzooks]

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.

The message to investors was: We have a lot of people engaging, our add on shops are highly profitable, and Overwatch is making us mountains of cash, so if you invest with us, your money is safe. Oh, yeah, we sell World of Warcraft, too.

That's all that matters to investors. These calls are intended for people who are risking their money investing in the company, not the players. NOT YOU. You can argue about the death or whatever of WoW, but the investors just got a thumbs up from Morheime for the next fiscal quarter. Mission: accomplished. Everything else discussed in this thread, the good or bad of Legion, et. al., is irrelevant.

Activison-Blizzard stocks = good. WoW - who cares? Overwatch is now the Blizzard flagship, and it's poised to take the company another decade without breaking a sweat.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm used to people over here defending blizzard to their last breath - so I assumed you were saying its good for game and blizzard that people spend money on faction/server transfers

From a business perspective? Of course it is. Blizzard isn't a charity or non-profit. If they make significant amounts of profit from services like realm transfers and boosts, of course they should sell as many as the market demands. Whatever keeps the lease paid is good. Go run a small business for a couple of years, and see how your attitude changes. If you open up a coffee shop but you sell more cookies and are making a fortune, you keep selling cookies and coffee. It's basic business - no, it's even more basic than that, it's common fucking sense.

[Emerald Archer]

What's this stupid BS ? WoD crashed and lost ONE THIRD of its fucking playerbase in the very second quarter. That's "half way point" for you ?

That's the normal crash after an expansion comes out. Xpac comes out, a shit ton of people come back, and then a huge portion of them leave.

This literally happens every expansion, sure in the earlier ones the drop was less, but with each expansion, more will leave each time.

Because overtime, more people will quit, but most of them will come back during the next expansion, because more have quit each time, that leaves more who leave earlier.

WoDs crashed harder than MoP, but also harder than Legion, because legion did pretty well at holding onto players. But either way, no real comparrison can be made till the next quarter, and if it's still only "slightly" "better" than wod, i'll concede they've clearly fucked up what could have potentially been amazing.

[Schattenlied]

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.

This... We sorely need to go back to the old ways... WotLK was the most popular expansion WoW ever had for a reason, and subs dropped off sharply after Cata launched for a reason.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

You're ignoring the elephant in the room: Tokens.

Their income is still reliant on subscriptions, but not on individual subscribers. Token system and 'F2P' gold providers fuel the current system in a way that is incomparable to the old 1:1 Subscriber system. No one said the shop is their primary source of income. We're saying individual sub numbers don't matter, considering the system's changed completely. It's more akin to how the numbers of people in theatres is irrelevant to movie profit and box office listings.

This is a very solid perspective. I mean what Blizzard did was find a way to more or less get others topay for other people's subs at a higher rate. So one person can have the buying strength of 2, 5, or 10 a month. Then add in transfers, race changes, and all that stuff. This is all money generated by next to no work minus computer transactions.

Blizzard stopped trying to maintain 10 million plus subs a long time ago. Instead they turned more to figuring out how to maximize profits from those that remain. It is pretty obvious it has worked financially. Some could argue that it might have been the path to the selling of the "soul" but that's a different debate. As far as cold hard cash it's worked.

[Kallisto]

This... We sorely need to go back to the old ways... WotLK was the most popular expansion WoW ever had for a reason

Arthas and the culmination of the WC3 story arc

and subs dropped off sharply after Cata launched for a reason.

End of WC3 pull
Very few knew who DW was
Waah heroics too hard.

[Gadzooks]

This... We sorely need to go back to the old ways... WotLK was the most popular expansion WoW ever had for a reason, and subs dropped off sharply after Cata launched for a reason.

Wrath will never come back. You can't recreate the past. Number one, Metzen is gone, one of the main driving forces of Wrath, long with some VERY influential devs who no longer work for Blizzard, or don't work on WoW anymore. Two, you don't have the story. Three, you don't have the meteoric rise of vanilla and TBC to build off of, and the popularity among mainstream people.

Just face it, the game is on the long slide towards maintenance mode. It's got life left in it, but it's on the wrong side of middle age. It's starting to get AARP stuff in the mail.

[Schattenlied]

Arthas and the culmination of the WC3 story arc



End of WC3 pull
Very few knew who DW was
Waah heroics too hard.

Had very little to do with the story, and a lot to do with PvP balance being arguably the best it's ever been, and a great balance between the ubercasualization we have now and the more hardcore of the time before... That balance appealed to a very large audience.

Wrath will never come back. You can't recreate the past. Number one, Metzen is gone, one of the main driving forces of Wrath, long with some VERY influential devs who no longer work for Blizzard, or don't work on WoW anymore.

He and many of those devs were present for the trainwreck expansions that followed WotLK, so, they aren't really relevant here.

Two, you don't have the story.

Don't need it.



They CAN go back to the game design philosophy they had in the past, they don't need "the story" or the exact same devs to do it, they just need to want to do it.

[Chickat]

Remove the rng from Legion, and mix the best systems from MoP. Perfect expansion imo.

[Gsara]

Has nothing to do with subs, its about revenue. Even wod made money hand over fist and grew in revenue with lower subs.

[Tharkkun]

Saw this on the forums:

5.5 was at the end of the expansion. This article has no context specifying at what point in the expansion they are referring to. Warlords was quite high on subs for the first year up until BRF even through HFC.

[Wildpantz]

That means over 5.5 mil which is awesome . Blizz is guting them selfs with ow and hs being super succes.

[Deleted]

I'm honestly not surprised by these news, I'm also wondering how Blizzard manages to feed their employees, the office has been growing tremedously as the game expanded, yet the numbers have been going down efficiently.

[Tharkkun]

I'm honestly not surprised by these news, I'm also wondering how Blizzard manages to feed their employees, the office has been growing tremedously as the game expanded, yet the numbers have been going down efficiently.

Profit has continued to be steady for WoW even with the sub losses. The rest of their games are making shit tons of money.

[Akka]

That's the normal crash after an expansion comes out. Xpac comes out, a shit ton of people come back, and then a huge portion of them leave.

This literally happens every expansion, sure in the earlier ones the drop was less, but with each expansion, more will leave each time.

Pure BS again, there was an increase in TBC, a pleateau in WotLK, and Cata and MoP saw only marginal drops in the second quarter, and took years to see the huge drop that WoD got right after being released.
You're ridiculous.

5.5 was at the end of the expansion. This article has no context specifying at what point in the expansion they are referring to. Warlords was quite high on subs for the first year up until BRF even through HFC.

FFS are you guys for real ?
5,5 was one year after the release of the expansion (because they stopped releasing sub numbers after that) and WoD was very low on sub because it crashed extremely rapidly.

Are you all deluded or just actually blind ?

Anyone posting on MMO-Champ should be familiar with this :



But it seems you need to actually have it shown to you again so you can actually get some facts instead of your fantasy world.
You're welcome to show how "sub crashes after every expansion" (lol) or how "5,5 was the end of WoD" or how "WoD didn't crash".