The trick of selling a FFA-PvP MMO is creating the illusion among gankers that they are respectable fighters while protecting them from respectable fights, as their less skilled half would be massacred and quit instead of “HTFU” as they claim.
(The bold part most importantly)
This, I just wanted to point out so badly. Unlike small companies, where massive income fluxes can mean their success or doom, this isn't the same for Blizzard. Thanks to the shared money bag at Activision-Blizzard, they'll not experience fluxing income where a deep wave can suddenly mean turning the key. They might feel a stretched budget when they get low enough (which I have a feeling, they haven't yet) where they then have to start developing side projects to assist as well as, expand.
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As long as 1 player buys a token, there's 2 players payment. Just, throwing that out there.
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Even if they did turn the key on development, Blizzard is a company that doesn't stop the heart beat, they would most likely start a brand new project while the servers would be buzzing on their last beats.
FOMO: "Fear Of Missing Out", also commonly known as people with a mental issue of managing time and activities, many expecting others to fit into their schedule so they don't miss out on things to come. If FOMO becomes a problem for you, do seek help, it can be a very unhealthy lifestyle..
as many mentiined here, ofc that will not happen in reality. but i slightly agree from the folowing point of view:
this conspiracy dont exists by blizzards managers, etc. but since years i have a strong feeling that the developers at blizzard HATE wow.
because it is made with c++, build as a monolithic pile in 2005, build without modern (or any) sw architecture in mind, horrible bad extendable, and so on. or in short: no developer want to work with this giant pile of shit.
you can literally see how all the developers want to code in c# with unity and such things. all the devs want to be in ther HS team, the Overwatch team, etc. Literally noone wants to be in the wow team. as sw dev i am in the same boat and can totally understand this. and i know how much of a problem this can be. so, as a sw dev, you can feel this happening at blizz very strong.
so, when a conspiracy exists, then at the sw dev base, which wanna see wow dying to have the ability to work with the cool new shit instead that old giant pile of shit.
so, in some way, i agree to the conspiracy.
I don't believe they are purposely trying to kill the game. Although sometimes, when I ponder some of their choices and overall direction, I think maybe they do want WOW six feet under.
Wow's decline started when activision and blizzard merged during WOTLK. Around the same time, Blizzard introduced LFG and the Blizz store popped into existence. This is the same time when Blizzard started making decisions about features and direction based on $$$ and not what is innovative and fun. This is when they started catering and tweaking the game for casuals and as a result WOW's substance and complexity weened away. Some of the good changes had unforeseen negative results and some of the bad changes had unforeseen positive results. Every new feature whether good or bad, fun or boring comes with a long time counter result. For example: BC flying - awesome new feature. Long term counter result - the world seems much smaller and less grandiose.
Blizzard used to heavily consider these consequences and now they just don't give a fuck. Wow is still a huge $$$ cow, but it's not something they're willing to put a lot of time and effort into fixing. They could've gone in the direction of upgrading WOWs game engine long ago. Instead they decided to be smart and develop new titles like HOTS, Hearthstone and Overwatch. Diversity proved to be the right direction from a business standpoint.
And here's why: Wow's game engine is over 15 years old. It starts with the original Alpha, not the initial launch. If you owned a 15 year old car with 300K miles on it that's worth maybe $2K and the transmission goes kaput will you replace the transmission if it costs $3K to fix or buy another car?
They would get a angry community that would quit supporting there company.
Also before that time the game will first go free to play and alot of items will get on the online story to make sure they can keep making content for wow and keep the funding going. When at that point the game will not generate profit anymore they stop content dev for it but servers will keep running for years to come.
People seem to keep missing the modern economic dynamics of WoW, even though a lot of the gaming industry already operates on similar patterns.
WoW is not kept afloat by individuals paying money for their own subscriptions. WoW is kept afloat by whales, players with an excess of money they're willing to pump into game tokens, which are then bought for gold by a lot of "active subscribers", as well as into fluff items in the game shop. Just the other day, we had a thread either on mmo or on the official forums where some guy was whining that something Blizzard was doing with tokens was going to (paraphrasing) "stop eastern european players from playing the game", because of how widespread the "gold for subs" thing is in eastern europe - according to that guy, in any case.
There are a lot more individuals playing the game than there are individuals paying real-life money into the game, and that means that at the end of the day, Blizzard only needs to keep pandering to those whales to keep their bottom-line. This is the same across most of the industry, tbh, even if it doesn't reach the ridiculous levels it does in the mobile market where teams of marketers will hunt through the facebook, twitter and other social media profiles of their whales to find ways to milk them for more money.
Death to WOW, Rise to stacraft mmo
I'll never abandon world of warcraft ever.. also im sure blizzard has plans to pass the torches to the next generation opportunists eager young kids turning young adults ready to get the next generation of the mmo and keep it going for many years to come... so yeah it won't be kille doff die some but never killed off totally.
You can't take what ya can't see... *rolls d20* You rolled a natural 20* The skill of stealth is successful.
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