More money spent on WoW than ever

[Vynestra]

This seems to have gone un-noticed by most, here was the Q3 investors call transcript: http://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/blog...017-transcript

If this was already posted my bad, but I couldn't find it.

Here was one particular question and answer that peaked my interest:

Can you discuss in a little more detail recent performance, and trends you are seeing across World of Warcraft and Hearthstone; and how you are thinking about the pace of investments for these franchises going forward?

Morhaime: So we continue to be very happy with both of those. With the strength of both of those franchises; and I would tell you on the World of Warcraft side, we are investing more than ever.

The team has been hard at work delivering on our commitment to the community to deliver more content, more consistently between expansions, that has been going really well. Since Legion was launched in August of last year, we have added multiple content updates, and the updates have been really well received by the community.

We have seen engagement up versus last year, when you look at time spent per player, and also frequency of play.

[FelPlague]

This seems to have gone un-noticed by most, here was the Q3 investors call transcript: http://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/blog...017-transcript

If this was already posted my bad, but I couldn't find it.

Here was one particular question and answer that peaked my interest:

Can you discuss in a little more detail recent performance, and trends you are seeing across World of Warcraft and Hearthstone; and how you are thinking about the pace of investments for these franchises going forward?

Morhaime: So we continue to be very happy with both of those. With the strength of both of those franchises; and I would tell you on the World of Warcraft side, we are investing more than ever.

The team has been hard at work delivering on our commitment to the community to deliver more content, more consistently between expansions, that has been going really well. Since Legion was launched in August of last year, we have added multiple content updates, and the updates have been really well received by the community.

We have seen engagement up versus last year, when you look at time spent per player, and also frequency of play.

Game development costs more and more every year.
Making these better and better models, these larger battles, more mechanics and more balance, it all requires far more devs, and far more time, all meaning more money.

The amount of time spent on a boss, spent on a zone, spent on a small corner of the map, spent on a model, spent on balance, is far more then was 10 years ago.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

Game development costs more and more every year.
Making these better and better models, these larger battles, more mechanics and more balance, it all requires far more devs, and far more time, all meaning more money.

The amount of time spent on a boss, spent on a zone, spent on a small corner of the map, spent on a model, spent on balance, is far more then was 10 years ago.

Also, on top of all that, they are also working on Classic Servers. While obviously that isn't going to take anywhere near as much development as a new expansion...It is a bit more money on top of an already huge pile of money.

[seta-san]

Also, on top of all that, they are also working on Classic Servers. While obviously that isn't going to take anywhere near as much development as a new expansion...It is a bit more money on top of an already huge pile of money.

depends. are they just going to have us using an old version of wow or are they going to rebuild old wow with all the new assets?

[Kithelle]

Damn he beat me to it it ^

They have to recruit a whole new team for classic...despite how cheap and easy the vanilla pack claimed it would be.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

depends. are they just going to have us using an old version of wow or are they going to rebuild old wow with all the new assets?

They haven't said (though i would not expect a complete rebuild)....only that they are working on it and that it's going to take longer than people expect to come out.

[Shelly]

Not sure I understand if you think there's a controversy or something.

WoW remains the Blizzard flagship product, everything feeds off it to some degree and it's the cheapest and widest reaching marketing tool they have at their disposal as well.

It totally makes sense that they would continue to devote development resources to WoW and that they'd continue to spend more.

[seta-san]

They haven't said (though i would not expect a complete rebuild)....only that they are working on it and that it's going to take longer than people expect to come out.

using the new assets for the world wouldn't be that hard. they would have to undo the cata damage. resituatate NPCs and attach quests and scripts to them. but all of that could be automated pulling that sort of information directly from the old version. also never underestimate exactly how much of the old assets remains in the data files. if they actually cleared out the clutter of the things you can't access in the modern from these files the games would probably be 10gigs less installed.

[Elfezen]

This is good because it opens more job positions and grows the gaming industry even larger

[Priestiality]

They're not rebuilding classic. They said during one of the Q&As that it's going to BE vanilla WoW. They were asked about implementing things like buffs being raid wide instead of having to individually buff raid members and they said something along the lines of "for better or worse it's going to be the exact same experience".

[Kathranis]

They've definitely grown the Warcraft team substantially, and I think for the first time it really showed during Blizzcon 2017. Obviously we know that they started growing the team quite a while ago, but there were major growing pains and setbacks with Warlords of Draenor and the transition into Legion.

It's not that they're introducing any groundbreaking features or anything, but if you watch the art panels in particular, you can just tell from the scope and quality of the content they're working on that they have way more people on staff. There's way more stuff being done simultaneously than I've ever seen; lots of new NPC and creature models, creature model revamps, animation revamps, effects revamps, NPC animation revamps, six allied races, two new cities with completely new architectural styles, ten new dungeons at launch, a bunch of islands for the expeditions, and so on.

Just from the way they were discussing the art creation process and what kind of new things they're working on, you can tell that there's a lot of fresh new talent coming in, that they're streamlining their pipelines and assigning new staff to things that they weren't able to prioritize before.

At the same time, they're putting out more content at more regular intervals than we've seen in a very long time.

I mean, I think a lot of people will overlook a lot of that stuff, and certainly a lot of people didn't watch any of the panels so they can't really see it for themselves, or will say that Blizzard is being lazy because the specific things they want aren't the team's top priority... but still, it's plain to see if you actually look at it and listen to them talk about the development of the new expansion.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

using the new assets for the world wouldn't be that hard. they would have to undo the cata damage. resituatate NPCs and attach quests and scripts to them. but all of that could be automated pulling that sort of information directly from the old version. also never underestimate exactly how much of the old assets remains in the data files. if they actually cleared out the clutter of the things you can't access in the modern from these files the games would probably be 10gigs less installed.

I didn't say it would be hard...I said I wouldn't count on them doing it. There's not really anything for them to gain from it....many of the people that want Classic Servers (and lets not forget we're dealing with a small but very vocal minority) want the game to be exactly as it was.

[Charge me Doctor]

using the new assets for the world wouldn't be that hard. they would have to undo the cata damage. resituatate NPCs and attach quests and scripts to them. but all of that could be automated pulling that sort of information directly from the old version. also never underestimate exactly how much of the old assets remains in the data files. if they actually cleared out the clutter of the things you can't access in the modern from these files the games would probably be 10gigs less installed.

I cringe literally every time when someone at work says shit like that to me. "um, can you move these things to this place? i think it looks nicer. Also remember the very first draft? I want bars from that draft, can you just undo things you did in 4 days of work and bring them back, move to this spot, and also please integrate it into our bullshit system we use and haven't told you about from the start". Shit fuck. I bet you anything, if it would be as easy as you, obliviously, make it sound to be, it would be done already. The sheer fact that blizzard states that they "invest more into WoW than ever" says that huge chunk of this investment are classic servers, because it's the only different in the years before, there is no other reason for their investment to spike like that

[Kathranis]

Damn he beat me to it it ^

They have to recruit a whole new team for classic...despite how cheap and easy the vanilla pack claimed it would be.

Well, if they just wanted to throw up a cloned private server set to patch 1.12 and take no responsibility for the game, it would be pretty easy to do.

The issue is that they're an actual company and they need to provide a quality product with good customer service that gives users a positive experience. It also has to be retrofitted to work with their modern server and distribution infrastructure, made compatible with their modern battle.net account and billing systems, and integrated into their modern version control systems. Oh, and adding proper support for Windows 10, 64-bit operating systems, DX11, and other stuff like that is probably also a good idea.

Beyond that, there's a serious discussion to be had about what elements of Classic they need to preserve and which should be improved. At the very least they will probably want to provide a more stable experience from a technical standpoint by preventing exploits, crashes, latency, and other such issues that plagued the game. There are also problems that arise from which version of the game they want to have as the base experience, and they need to decide if they'll use a progression server system with periodic content rollouts.

[Vynestra]

Also, on top of all that, they are also working on Classic Servers. While obviously that isn't going to take anywhere near as much development as a new expansion...It is a bit more money on top of an already huge pile of money.

Classic servers will have their own investments more than likely.

Just because it's wow related doesn't mean it's under the same financial roof.

[Merryck]

I can believe that - the art gets better every year, the gameplay gets smoother, raids get more advanced, complicated systems etc.