The Sky Witch Pack - New Battle.net Shop Bundle

Originally Posted by VMSmith

Eh, people like spending money on their hobbies. And it doesn't seem to matter if that money is spent on tangible, physical hobbies or purely digital, vaporous hobbies. It's not like WoW and Blizzard are some outlier in the gaming industry, nearly every game squeezes pennies from its players in some way and the ones that don't stop receiving support.

I mean, that's just capitalism and consumerism for you. If anything, Blizzard doesn't monetize WoW enough compared to the rest of the industry.

Barring Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, the rest of the industry doesn't use a subscription model so I'd be careful parsing the idea that Blizzard doesn't monetize the game enough. That said, no corporation on earth will ever take the opportunity to make less money so it would be correct to say that they will never decrease monetization.

Originally Posted by VMSmith

Eh, people like spending money on their hobbies. And it doesn't seem to matter if that money is spent on tangible, physical hobbies or purely digital, vaporous hobbies. It's not like WoW and Blizzard are some outlier in the gaming industry, nearly every game squeezes pennies from its players in some way and the ones that don't stop receiving support.

I mean, that's just capitalism and consumerism for you. If anything, Blizzard doesn't monetize WoW enough compared to the rest of the industry.

You have a point. I use to play Star Wars: The Old Republic and they had a store that sold things. FFXIV did the same thing. I even played Rift and they had a store as well. I guess it is fine as long as they don't put anything on the store that increases DPS or healing and then that makes players scamper to buy said product so they can compete competitively in raids and/or PvP.

Originally Posted by Relapses

Barring Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, the rest of the industry doesn't use a subscription model so I'd be careful parsing the idea that Blizzard doesn't monetize the game enough. That said, no corporation on earth will ever take the opportunity to make less money so it would be correct to say that they will never decrease monetization.

I don't like subscriptions, but I do feel like they are a relatively fair style of monetization. Beyond that, I really believe that WoW doesn't have much in the way of egregious monetization. I mean, sure, Brutosaur for $90 seems ridiculous ... but I mostly play Marvel Snap nowadays and that game charges $100 for a single series 5 card plus some currency, and that's blatant p2w because the cards you can buy increase your ability to make better performing decks. And nearly all of WoW's "micro"transactions are in the $30 or less range and, at least from my PoV, not particularly desirable anyway.

I see your point, but still feel like Blizzard has done a mostly good job of not going crazy with their monetization of WoW, especially when compared to most of the rest of the industry. Again using Marvel Snap as an example, we get multiple bundles priced anywhere from $15-$100 on a weekly basis and when those bundles are gone so is your ability to get the card variant they offered, so it's some HUGE FOMO. Blizzard adds new things to the shop maybe once or twice a month and they usually stay for a reasonable amount of time in the shop.

WoW and Hearthstone monetisations are out of this world. I guess Microsoft needs to earn all that money back somehow, and its not like Blizzard is capable of making new (good) games.

Originally Posted by Shadowferal

A "small indy company?"

It was tongue in cheek sarcasm dude