Blizzard's Evolution

[Deleted]

I cannot believe people still whine on Blizzard being greedy, do not people understand that a largely growing company needs to make more money? To get out all the epic new features and content they need to hire more staff and make more PR for their games. Still, they have never raised the monthly fee or made things that make your character better purchaseable.

I would rather say that Blizzard is one of the companies who value their consuments the very most. They dont mass out games (HINT FIFA 07,08,09,10 etc etc. The changes made to these games in order to ship a new one would be called "minor patches" in WoW if not for the graphical changes) just to max out their profit.
They hold Blizzcon once a year just to be able to meet and interact with their consument peers IRL.
Mike Morhaime got the question this year that since the tickets to Blizzcon sold out so fast, wouldnt it be time to start expanding? He answered that it would be good because more fans would be able to come, but bad because the "cosy" feeling would be gone, and many fans would not have the chance to even meet employees of the company.

I am actually amazed how much epic content Blizzard can get out WITHOUT being greedy. For all you haters out there, stop playing the game or reconsider. A big SHAME ON YOU ALL.

Thank you.

The thread ended here. Listen to this (wo)man, for (s)he knows what (s)he is talking about!
To quote a wise (wo)man "A big SHAME ON YOU ALL."

Blizzard aint forcing no one to buy some stupid vanity pets from their store, I haven't and im just as good as any player that did buy it. Besides alot of the profit they made from that retarded horse went to charity so. Instead of giving even more of their monthly profit which they need to keep servers / maintenance / employees up, they put up a really ugly horse and some vanity pets, got a huge cashflow and sent lots of the profit to charity.
How is this greedy?

[sciarc]

They no longer seek to profit by simply making an awesome game...

How do you explain Cataclysm then? Seems pretty awesome to me so far, maybe better than WoW has ever been.

[Peroxide]

Actually he/she is correct. I was not referring to anything giving an advantage.

Then what does it matter? They're selling electronic merchandise. If it gave an advantage that would be greedy, otherwise the only way they are making money off of these little vanity pets is if people buy them.

If you don't want it, don't buy it.

[Stroglin]

See: Female goblin animations, Gilneas accessible in the shattering but with no NPCs (quite nonsensical), overly buggy patches (more so than past years), lore slip ups, etc.

Most of these, I believe, is due to the staff being so freaking rushed. I always get this picture in my mind of a big horrible demon in an Activision shirt standing behind Metzen and Alex with a whip.

Um you don't think these errors had anything to do with say maybe, it was 3 times larger than any expansion they had previously done including the creation of the original game, and the fact they did it in the "expansion every 2 years" promise they made us. Frankly I am amazed it is as awesome as it is. Activision gave them the ability to fund gigantic projects like this and if they want to increase their bottom line while making large charitable contributions by selling vanity pets or just increase their bottom line by selling race/faction changes and transfers, i say they have every right too. QQ if you want but the quality of Blizz's content continues to improve and if you can't see that you have to be blind.

---------- Post added 2010-11-30 at 10:53 PM ----------

They haven't raised the rates but across the board subscription rates have dropped in the market. So blizz's keeping the same is actually raising the price compared to some other game. that "party" you cite isn't a party, it's a trade show so they don't have to go and release things at other conventions. Blizzard is in a unique position, it no longer needs to market heavily (though the commercials are really getting annoying now a days, since they're not as good as the Wrath or bc ones), it gets 15$ x 12million players a MONTH (which is so far above their operation costs it's not even funny) with little to no work [they create content that is designed to induce a skinner box-like addiction just to get that one piece of gear, this allows them to keep players playing while giving them a large amount of downtime]

Ok so you believe that by keeping rates the same Blizzard has really increased their prices. May I recommend you take a course in economics. You see the other IPs you are talking about were what we fondly refer to as "fail" They could not sustain a subscriber base at the rates they were charging, so they offer a facade called "free2play" which entices you into the game and then says give us money to improve your experience. They didnt do this out of kindness to their player base, they did it for the same reason a drug dealer gives folks a taste, hoping it will draw them in hit the right corde and suck them into sinking money into it. Blizz has been successful and have no reson to resort to that to survive. Our 15 bucks a month goes to maintain server banks with amounts and complexity of info that would rival any large computer system in the country. It goes to pay large teams of designers to roll out an expansion in 2 years that has more data than the original game and expansions combined. And honestly it is freaking awesome so far.

[Tyberes]

Interesting. The capitalist model depends on greed to function, yet greed is something we call consider a terrible character trait, however if you were ever to criticise capitalism you would have a hoarde of people blindly defending it as a part of "freedom" while being labelled a communist at the same time.

hilarious; isn't it?