Retail wow suffering because of classic?

[Kokolums]

While I admire people who can back up their words when contested, which you did beautifully and brilliantly in almost academic-like manner, I can't help to think about how much spare time you have on your hands simply debunking some guy on the forums

Blizzard has some interesting history. It has a strange link to Napoleon!

On December 14th, 1853, Napoleon III, ruler of France, issued an imperial decree creating a public water company, the Compagnie Générale des Eaux. It supplied water to Paris and Lyon. It did this for over 100 years until in 1980, it began to diversify. They got into waste management, construction, property, etc. In 1998, GCE renamed itself to Vivendi and diversified into entertainment. Also in 1998, they bought a gaming company named Blizzard Entertainment.

Vivendi spun off most of its other diversifications under a new name - Veolia. If you ever look closely at your local garbage truck, you might see Veolia written on the side with a logo. That's because Veolia went global as a spin-off from Vivendi.

So your local garbage truck, emperor Napoleon III, and World of Warcraft are all linked in history.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision_Blizzard

https://gamerant.com/activision-bliz...dence-vivendi/

[Temp name]

Also it was Bobby Kotick that killed the Starcraft MMO in favor of Overwatch. Kotick took one look at the Overwatch lineup of heroes, pretty much saw a massive potential payday from marketing those heroes as action figures, and told them to scrap the SC MMO and make Overwatch instead.

Oops...

Kotick should NOT have been in charge of such decisions. That move alone may ultimately have doomed the entire company.

Wat..? Let's just assume that Kotick made that decision (I don't know if he did or not). Overwatch makes a shiiiiiiit ton of money. How does focusing on a product that makes a shit ton of money doom a company?

[Exkrementor]

Retail is suffering because of Blizzard.

Even if the classic team was more than like 3 people, Blizzard has unlimited resources and they could make the greatest game ever. But they are greedy beancounters so fuck the players and just make a new storemount.

[WowIsDead64]

First off I’m not a classic hater and I think its cool but I like retail and am paying for a subscription for it and the dlcs so my question is. Does anyone one else feel like because of all the classic hype we are losing content and a-lot of blizzards resources are going to classic projects?

Not directly, but may be it's the same situation, as when SC2 was released - 9.1 is delayed not to be released at the same time with TBC Classic. Retail is suffering due to other reasons, like stubborn developers, who don't listen for feedback and don't understand their players, and greedy CEOs, who think about money only , not players.

[justandulas]

It's the other way around. They aren't delaying 9.1 because they have to push classic tbc first. They're pushing classic tbc to the forefront because they're still deep in the reeds with pants down when it comes to 9.1.

this. They'd have pushed out 9.1 first, if they could, but they are still months out. August is realistic, july optimistic, and september possible.

Instead of crapping or blaming classic for retail's mistakes, the retail crowd should be on their knees kissing the feet of WoW classic for propping up the corpse that is WoW currently.

I want you to imagine BFA and SL taking the exact paths they have to this moment... but in a world without classic wow or classic TBC.

WoW would be on life support, and classic is legit funding retail currently.

Instead of having animosity towards classic because friends, family, or other players choose that... maybe have gratitude that this dinosaur version of WoW is so much more popular that it is arguably saving the corpse of retail.

In a world without classic, this community would be hopelessly lost currently.

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Wat..? Let's just assume that Kotick made that decision (I don't know if he did or not). Overwatch makes a shiiiiiiit ton of money. How does focusing on a product that makes a shit ton of money doom a company?

I don't think that's accurate TBH.

Overwatch was built out of the corpse of project titan, including the characters map and art. That is NOT starcraft.

There has never been any actual evidence of a starcraft MMO, and project titan was an MMORPG using Overwatch characters as classes that were eventually trimmed down to become OW. OW was the pvp mode of project titan and was the only thing worth salvaging.

There has never been a starcraft MMORPG. The only starcraft project of renown that was cancelled was Starcraft ghost like 2 decades ago

[hulkgor]

Also it was Bobby Kotick that killed the Starcraft MMO in favor of Overwatch. Kotick took one look at the Overwatch lineup of heroes, pretty much saw a massive potential payday from marketing those heroes as action figures, and told them to scrap the SC MMO and make Overwatch instead.

Oops...

Kotick should NOT have been in charge of such decisions. That move alone may ultimately have doomed the entire company.

How is green-lighting what turned out to be a hugely commercial success "doom a company"?

Big fumble man, you should really think about what you write. This just comes across as laughable.

[froschhure]

Retail WoW is suffering because of retail WoW. Classic is a symptom of the disease at best.

Holy carrot, I love that view

[Schmilblick]

Classic was created because of Retail sufferings.

[Hellobolis]

First off I’m not a classic hater and I think its cool but I like retail and am paying for a subscription for it and the dlcs so my question is. Does anyone one else feel like because of all the classic hype we are losing content and a-lot of blizzards resources are going to classic projects?

that has zero effect.

the game has a very very healthy profit margin. i'd be surprised if it was lower than 60% but for a cash cow game it's probably closer to 80%.

the profit margin across the entire company is something like 30% (bit low for a company called greedy tbh, you often see gaming companies do 40%).

whenever the profit margin goes above 20% you gotto ask yourself why that is: are they having an unexpected success? have they simply reached diminishing returns on further investments? are they prioritizing something other than re-investing profits (aka shareholders?). there could be many reasons.

tldr: they have penty of money to invest a lot more into both retail and classic if they wanted too, but for some (probably mostly legit) reason they don't.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Naw, the game is suffering because they cannot release content at any sort of reasonable pace and when they do usually for the .0, 0.5, .1, .1.5, and .2 patches of the expansion its basically a beta test. Around .3 / .4 of an expansion you get what the game probably should have been and then you get to reset it back to the beta version of the game for .0 of the cycle. Mostly because alpha and beta is just marketing anymore. So the youtuber and streamers can talk about how the game is different, fresh, and better because that is what is pulling in the views and clicks. Then once the real release comes out they can go back to honesty and say it is broken, ruined, what is going on stuff because that is where the clicks are.

[glowpipe]

the main reason retail is suffering is because blizzard makes the majority of the money from selling new expansions. They make so much more money on pre-orders and day 1 then they do the rest of the expansion. So why keep making content they only make a measly sub on, when they can half ass it and sell another expansion and make hundreds of millions of euro. Last time this was calculated it was estimated that blizzard need around 15 million subs for 1 month, or 7.5m subs for 2 months to cover just day 1(+ pre-orders) of legion, bfa and SL, respectively. Which obviously never happens

So its in blizzards best interrest in making shorter expansions and sell more of them. Atleast for the short term. As they can't keep releasing shitty expansion and expexting people to keep buying them. It worked for SL after BFA, but it will be harder to sell the next one after SL, if SL is just another bfa, which it looks like it is at this moment

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

More like retail WoW suffering because it sucks.

[Queen of Hamsters]

They have separate teams.

And Retail is suffering just fine under its own team, no need to blame Classic.

[Thelxi]

I think classic boosts normal WoW if there is much of a relationship to begin with.

[Eazy]

We haven't had a real content drought since Siege of Orgrimmar.

i think that we have one right now.



People who had to kill Mythic Sire already did, people who wanted to get gladiator already did, people who wanted to have fully upgraded covenant sanctum already did etc.

[Thage]

Most of the work that goes into Classic is engineering and bug fixing. I'd go so far as to argue that's all the work that goes into Classic, since the art assets and coding are already there, barring the deluxe edition mount which took an existing art asset and added a saddle, bit and bridle, and some armor to it (and don't quote me on this but I think the additional bits are also existing art assets reused for the mount, possibly from Gladiator netherdrakes?).

Very little resource allocation is being 'taken away' from WoW, if any; more likely, these resources simply wouldn't have been allocated for development and would have gone toward profits if Classic didn't exist, because there's an upper limit on throwing money at a problem from a development standpoint (if anything, what Blizzard needs is a better project management pipeline and to bulk up their QA team again).

[justandulas]

i think that we have one right now.



People who had to kill Mythic Sire already did, people who wanted to get gladiator already did, people who wanted to have fully upgraded covenant sanctum already did etc.

this is easily, and by a wide margin, the longest content drought to start an expansion of all time.

By the time we get a 9.1, using the same time frame, we'd be 2-3 patches into Legion

[Souflikar]

Well let’s be honest, if it wasn’t for classic and TBCC, Wow would have a lot less subs now. So perhaps the two classic expansions are helping to save the Wow universe(including retail) and jobs, for that matter.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

No, what they're currently screwing up on retail is just due to incompetence and poor core system design. There is plenty of content, they just keep screwing up the reward structure for much of it (ie. many things are either completely unrewarding/minimally rewarding, and anything that comes close to being properly rewarding is subsequently nerfed).

Torghast quickly becomes useless from a player power perspective, once you've got the few legendaries you need for each spec+area of the game you play you can completely ignore it. PvP used to provide the best time-efficiency rewards when they nerfed raiding to be worse than M+, and now they've nerfed PvP rewards outside of PvP/world content. Raiding is...not particularly rewarding either, and a lot of that is the fault of everyone being forced into PL (PL is fine for pugs, but terrible for properly organized guilds).

[crusadernero]

First off I’m not a classic hater and I think its cool but I like retail and am paying for a subscription for it and the dlcs so my question is. Does anyone one else feel like because of all the classic hype we are losing content and a-lot of blizzards resources are going to classic projects?

I dont think retail is losing content over it, but I bet its a sweet safenet for Blizzard. Months delayed with xpac/patch? cool, just release something for classic/BC. Blizzard operates on quartely profit and the goal is always more profit than previously. So its in theyre own best interest not to make to good content and release it at the same time.

Right now its perfect for them with pre patch & BC release. Buys them time to finish 9.1.

That said - I believe the content delivered on retail would be the same with our without classic/BC.

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True, but that is also making the devs and writers become lazy. They think they can drop a turd and call it expansion, with even less features than Legion, BFA and MOP...and people are going to buy it anyways. That is the reason the game is so bad right now.

I really hope, that many people stop playing TBC and move to another game, just for the sake of teaching Blizzard a lesson.

While I agree with you, the numbers show that they are raking in alot of money on the turd(s) they release. So in a way, it tells them they dont need to provide to-notch over the moon xpacs. Atleast not for several years.

For the coming years they have retail+bc+WotLK stuff. No reason for them to deliver high quality content on retail.