World of Warcraft Subscriber Trends Revealed at GDC 2024

Originally Posted by Gempalm

We're all soo on cope, we're pretending this reflects Modern World of Warcraft when it's really like 5 or 6 Warcraft games spinoffs combined. Modern WoW has never been worse, never had lowest subs, as there has been no effort to repair the bait and switch that was Shadowlands. I can absolutely see Microsoft shutting this isht down as they're just not making a single great game that stands on it's merits anymore.

Did you really have to necro a thread with a post that contains unsubstantiated speculation? To paraphrase a great line from a movie: “everything you just said is bullshit”

Originally Posted by McNeil

Didn't John High get in trouble showing this which lost him his job at Blizzard?

Pure speculation but the timeline checks out. /shrug

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Originally Posted by Shadowferal

Pfft...Microsoft to cut 650 more gaming jobs [Update]

It's the second big round of cuts at the Xbox-maker this year following its purchase of Activision Blizzard

Microsoft will lay off approximately 650 people from its gaming team, the company’s head of gaming, Phil Spencer, told employees in an email to team members this morning.

Spencer framed them in the context of Microsoft’s October 2023 $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.

The majority of the cuts will impact people in those corporate and support roles at Activision Blizzard, according to a source familiar with the matter.

This is the second round of major cuts at Microsoft’s gaming division this year. In January, the company said it would be laying off 1,900 workers across Xbox, ZeniMax/Bethesda and, most heavily, Activision Blizzard.

Those cuts also included the cancellation of at least one game project at Blizzard.

Update - 5:15pm, Sept. 12 - While the majority of the layoffs were in Activision Blizzard corporate and support roles, a source familiar with the matter tells Game File that there are also cuts involving teams of two Activision Blizzard mobile games. Some layoffs are impacting the Warcraft Rumble team, which will continue to be available but is moving from launch to live-ops. Others will impact workers on Call of Duty Warzone Mobile, one of two Call of Duty mobile titles. That game will also continue, but its team is being scaled down. The Mobile version of Warzone launched in March, after Activision announced it had 50 million pre-registrations. These cuts, according to the source, were not tied to the merger and were what Spencer was referring to when he mentioned needing to “adapt to shifting priorities and manage the lifecycle and performance of games.” Mobile has been a priority for Microsoft and was cited by Spencer and others as a major reason to buy ABK. But, across the industry, game publishers have been pulling back from mobile games tied to even the biggest franchises, as they find the market harder to thrive in than expected.

Dated SEP 12, 2024

Warcraft Rumble = / = WoW. It was obvious from Day 0 that Rumble failed to be the Warcraft IP-themed mobile success that Diablo: Immortal was. And while I will never celebrate people losing their jobs, it's factually incorrect to use these lay-offs as proof that MS is hedging the WoW dev team. WoW is one of the only games in the entire industry that's operating with some level of success.