Classic servers are the END of wow

[Deficineiron]

one interesting thing is I wonder if the spikes in MOP and WOD where actually caused by people returning to the game just to check it out and then leaving quickly. perhaps they where caused by the delayed release in china? just a guess maybe not likely. they do look like its people just popping in for a quick level and then leave.

i think mop and wod likely had the same or nearly-same release date as in china. the spikes were certainly folks returning, checking it out, and leaving. wod in particular was themed to specifically make former players want to come back and check 'outland' out.

the company that came up with that little gimmick, by the way, is the same one much of this thread trusts to give us authentic classic.

[Gavll]

Remember, whatever garbage Blizz puts out for retail, I'd wager it still makes more money than every other mmo combined.

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one interesting thing is I wonder if the spikes in MOP and WOD where actually caused by people returning to the game just to check it out and then leaving quickly. perhaps they where caused by the delayed release in china? just a guess maybe not likely. they do look like its people just popping in for a quick level and then leave.

This is exactly what I've done since Cata. Buy expac, level to cap. Don't enjoy it. Quit for 2 years. Except I skipped MoP because pandas.

[He-man]

https://www.mmo-champion.com/content...er-at-Blizzcon

apparently Legion spiked back to 10.1mil shortly after launch as well. but it might have dropped just as fast as WOD

[Deleted]

This shit again

[Raziella]

ROFLMAO.
first: you claim wow classic will kill wow? yeah not gonna happen.

and you are starting a wow is dying thread claiming wow will end soon. roflmao

you are delusional if you think classic will ever get 8mill players or more (and I am not even talking about holding them)


#1 you dont JUST bring out an mmo. mmos take a lot of time to prepare
#2 no, you are wrong
#3 you wrong WoW is making them BILLIONS so there is no reason to stop doing xpacs.


sorry mr straw but this is bullshit. they release classic to shut a vocal minority up.
thats like claiming the invention of the car made no one ever use a bike again.

It's more like saying that bikes becoming more popular again means people will stop using cars, tbh. And equally ridiculous.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

I see it as the complete opposite. They have been trending wow back towards early design philosophies that might resemble classic and tbc more than wod or cata.
They are releasing classic due to popular demand but also because they know many many people will return to it even though they won't end up sticking around. When they leave blizzard will get them into bfa and they will find it's a remarkably better product than what the game looked like when they left and it actually resembles the game they returned for more than they expected.

If anything this marks the start of the future of wow, especially with how successful the esports scene has been for blizzard due in no small part to the MDI.

The current version of wow is more like mop or a polished cataclysm than classic.

[He-man]

blizzards going to announce a new mmo at E3 and BFA will be last expansion and classic will be last major wow release.

[Calfredd]

blizzards going to announce a new mmo at E3 and BFA will be last expansion and classic will be last major wow release.

Hey! Hey buddy! Check out my signature before making those fun claims.

[Soon-TM]

blizzards going to announce a new mmo at E3 and BFA will be last expansion and classic will be last major wow release.

Could that be the long-rumored Diablo MMO that Blizz was -presumably- hiring for?

[He-man]

Could that be the long-rumored Diablo MMO that Blizz was -presumably- hiring for?

doubt it Diablo brand is ruined imo next diablo will be darksouls style game.

[Deficineiron]

blizzards going to announce a new mmo at E3 and BFA will be last expansion and classic will be last major wow release.

expansions are a huge revenue event for blizzard. no way they stop them.

[Alex1312]

When people will remind how shitty classic was, they'll return in a big number to the current expanshion, i think this is the plan. Give people a bit of old shit to taste it just to prove you're current shit taste better.

[Soon-TM]

When people will remind how shitty classic was, they'll return in a big number to the current expanshion, i think this is the plan. Give people a bit of old shit to taste it just to prove you're current shit taste better.

Typical retailer hubris. To think that his game is just better in every possible way, and completely dismissing that there are people who may think otherwise.

[Sencha]

Classic and other remastered games is the perfect pot of gold for Blizzard. Small development costs and they only need a fraction of players to cover the costs.

[Kubaal]

Im still on the fence if Ill even dedicate much time to classic. I recall alot of the pains involved. Now if they made a TBC server, Im all in.

[Cedon]

OK so I would say the general consensus is that blizzard caved to the demands and announced classic for popular approval because so many people where talking about them for about a year prior to the announcement.

No, they're doing it to protect it. With the rise of the pirate servers, having an active version of Vanilla gives them even more leverage in any trademark/copyright/piracy action they take. Especially since one could feasibly consider classic WoW to have been abandoned.

I think this just isn't the case. They have released re-mastered or updated patches for all their old games to make them work on current systems and I really do think classic was announced to mark a end of wow development.

WoW Classic is going to be a separate team. You have to remember that the cry for Classic WoW has been going on since the BC days. It got louder with Cataclysm because a lot of people felt that the original Azeroth should be preserved.

But the thing back then was Blizzard didn't have the revenue stream to bring on a separate development team to maintain a second set of code. Because they knew if they just stuck Patch 1.12 WoW on some servers as-is and just left it there would be people demanding that they fix bugs, etc. That costs time and money and since both the StarCraft and Diablo franchises were actually taking money from WoW, the crunch was even more. And WoW isn't cheap to develop. A blue posted in the old forum system from the BC/Wrath days that the Black Temple Raid, Patch 2.1, cost about $6,000,000 or so to make and a lot of people didn't see the raid (hence why LFR is a thing and will *NEVER* go away).

Fast forward to today and we see cosmetic things in WoW that give it a tiny revenue stream beyond subscriptions. StarCraft has a modest income stream from cosmetic things too. But they now have Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch with they loot box income that have relatively low overhead compared to WarCraft/Diablo/StarCraft. So now Blizzard is flush with cash coming in from every franchise but Diablo at this point. They can now afford to have a new development team to take over WoW 1.x and such.

Heck, we still don't know if WoW Classic will be bundled with a WoW subscription or be another subscription fee.

[Deficineiron]

No, they're doing it to protect it. With the rise of the pirate servers, having an active version of Vanilla gives them even more leverage in any trademark/copyright/piracy action they take. Especially since one could feasibly consider classic WoW to have been abandoned.

WoW Classic is going to be a separate team. You have to remember that the cry for Classic WoW has been going on since the BC days. It got louder with Cataclysm because a lot of people felt that the original Azeroth should be preserved.

But the thing back then was Blizzard didn't have the revenue stream to bring on a separate development team to maintain a second set of code. Because they knew if they just stuck Patch 1.12 WoW on some servers as-is and just left it there would be people demanding that they fix bugs, etc. That costs time and money and since both the StarCraft and Diablo franchises were actually taking money from WoW, the crunch was even more. And WoW isn't cheap to develop. A blue posted in the old forum system from the BC/Wrath days that the Black Temple Raid, Patch 2.1, cost about $6,000,000 or so to make and a lot of people didn't see the raid (hence why LFR is a thing and will *NEVER* go away).

Fast forward to today and we see cosmetic things in WoW that give it a tiny revenue stream beyond subscriptions. StarCraft has a modest income stream from cosmetic things too. But they now have Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch with they loot box income that have relatively low overhead compared to WarCraft/Diablo/StarCraft. So now Blizzard is flush with cash coming in from every franchise but Diablo at this point. They can now afford to have a new development team to take over WoW 1.x and such.

Heck, we still don't know if WoW Classic will be bundled with a WoW subscription or be another subscription fee.

I don't think this is true. the time you describe was peak revenue for wow. when they went black on info, wow revenue was down ~35% from this period.

[Alex1312]

Typical retailer hubris. To think that his game is just better in every possible way, and completely dismissing that there are people who may think otherwise.

I don't think my game is just bettter in every possible way, i know it, it's a FACT. Becouse i actually played vanilla and i did NOT forgot that infernal grind, exploits, 1 spell 1 shot pvp, lack of decent specs and/or classes(bcs a lot of specs where just unplayable, even for the best of the bests). I did not forget the time consuming grind just to buy a fucking mount, i did NOT forget those times where if you don't play 7-8 hours/day you fall behind asf. You guys tend to remind just the good things about it(which exist) but there are more negative things than good things.

[Cedon]

I don't think this is true. the time you describe was peak revenue for wow. when they went black on info, wow revenue was down ~35% from this period.

You're talking gross revenue, not net income. Unless you've got copies of Blizzard books somewhere, you're missing half the picture. Diablo III and StarCraft II were draining money. Diablo III especially considering development started in 2001 when Blizzard North still existed. It took WoW only 4 years to cost $200,000,000 in operating costs as well.

And chances are your figure is off because a) currency conversion rates were not 1:1 so some countries, e.g. Latin America, were paying less when converted to dollars. Players in China didn't have subscriptions up until last year. They bought play time like you buy minutes on a Pre-Paid Cellphone.

And speaking of China, it is there that most of the subscriber loss happened because the market is radically different in Asia. Someone over there farts and a new game is released so they have plenty of new things to try. But more importantly, as Forbes noted in an article back in 2013, the Chinese market was moving away from games like WoW and MMOs in general because they were starting to not like games that took a lot of investment and were free-to-play. Why do you think they developed Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm? So Blizzard could enter this market and compete.

[Deficineiron]

You're talking gross revenue, not net income. Unless you've got copies of Blizzard books somewhere, you're missing half the picture. Diablo III and StarCraft II were draining money. Diablo III especially considering development started in 2001 when Blizzard North still existed. It took WoW only 4 years to cost $200,000,000 in operating costs as well.

And chances are your figure is off because a) currency conversion rates were not 1:1 so some countries, e.g. Latin America, were paying less when converted to dollars. Players in China didn't have subscriptions up until last year. They bought play time like you buy minutes on a Pre-Paid Cellphone.

And speaking of China, it is there that most of the subscriber loss happened because the market is radically different in Asia. Someone over there farts and a new game is released so they have plenty of new things to try. But more importantly, as Forbes noted in an article back in 2013, the Chinese market was moving away from games like WoW and MMOs in general because they were starting to not like games that took a lot of investment and were free-to-play. Why do you think they developed Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm? So Blizzard could enter this market and compete.

has blizzard stated that net sub loss since 2009~ is greater in china as a % of sub base proportion? have they been exact? my experience is they use china losses to deflect from much higher-value western losses. when they used to report wow revenue it told a more complete picture. now they can say 'most of our losses where in china (they have actually said just that sometimes) and you cannot go look at wow revenue and realize yeah, maybe so but you lost a lot of western subs too.

figures come from 10q/10k's so any issue with currency conversion with latin america (what % is that, 2% of revenue?) would be trivial, and assumes a/b hasn't got an auditor that understands this sort of thing.

are you saying 10k/10q numbers are 'off?' do you know how big an issue that would be? It is becoming common on these threads to say a/b is lying in their 10q/10ks but i swear no one has a clue as to the level of scandal and crime that would be. You really shouldn't make or imply stuff like that on message boards without some proof.

china the9/netease revenue is lumped into 'online' in old filings regardless of structure. also netease pays an actual royalty as well iir the language in original pr. very little in way of details has ever been shared regarding their arrangement. it is not clear this represents a very big revenue gain for blizzard (the conversion to subs vs time-cards). it has never been clear, netease is listed but they say nothing ever.

most likely in early activision years game was too similar to 1.x to justify running two version - would jsut be classic part of wotlk with tighter tuning and shorter talent trees/abilities. game has diverged enough now there is a clear distinction.