How healthy is World of Warcraft's future?

[Maruka]

I think they have one more XP worth of crap content and they are done. Classic draw will soon be over once they hit WOTLK so that will stop so retail will have to either pick up the slack or fail.

[pahbi]

Doubtful in the case of New World. I wish them the best and have been fooling around with it. I don't think an MMO that leans toward PVP is going to be that much of a threat and if I'm being 100% honest the questing is pretty boring so far. A lot of Kill X of these things, check X number of chests, and other gathering things. It's worth remembering that Rift, Star Wars and even poor Wildstar got off to first month starts that had everyone going "OH MAN, WOW IS IN TROUBLE NOW!!!"

I like MMO's so I hope all the new ones do well but as a practical thing I don't see New World really making much of a dent over the long run. Check back in a few months.

What's scarier for Blizzard is no new games for over five years.

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Long ago. There were signs of it at the end of Wrath. Many people who passionately cared about the story and lore thought that it was done with the killing of the Lich King. There have been bumps up and down since then but the mistakes made with Cataclysm confirmed that the days of continual growth were done and that the vast majority of people were letting go and moving on. As we have seen there will always be a few stalker types that can't leave it alone and care more about getting some attention than anything about the game itself which most are not playing.

WoW shows every sign of having a very long tail and a pretty profitable one at that. It pays for itself just with expansion purchases and the vast number of those stay for 30-60 days and then move on until the next. Those players likely know nothing whatsoever about what's going on now with the game changes and won't even notice when they come back for the next one since they'll be mostly playing in the new content (and not examining paintings on the walls).

This is some echo chamber here but please believe me when I say that it's a very limited group that cares one way or another or is even aware of any of this.

If I had to bet I would bet that we're in for at least another half dozen years of people forecasting that WoW is dead, dying or will be turning off their servers sometime in the next few months.

I believe WoW has crested the top of the hill and is starting to decline.

The reason, in my opinion, is more related to the WoW engine. No matter how hard the devs try, I just don't think there is much innovation left in the current game engine. Without innovation, things stagnate and expansions just end up being little more than a fresh coat of paint on the same ole same ole. WoW is running more on nostalgia than actual excitement.

Thats not necessarily a bad thing in terms of a business. I'm sure there are decades left of money to be made. Heck, I think even Ultima Online and EverQuest are still online and making $$$.

[terminaltrip421]

I don't see it going anywhere but I do see it getting worse and worse while it dies its slow death. less and less content included in the base price more and more shop stuff.

[Hitei]

What sort of mental gymnastics must one employ to believe not giving a BUSINESS money is an empty signal? The irony is the people still subbed are the same people protesting in-game - as if Blizzard give a single fuck about that. The only way you can hurt them is by taking away their motivation - which is entirely financial.

Enjoying something is not justification to consume it if it means supporting evil people - I want to play wow - but I do not want to give money to abusers and people who shelter them. If you are comfortable with that that's your moral compass, not mine.

It's empty because you continue to give money to a hundred other, worse companies, corporations, organizations and game developers while going about your daily life, but can't be bothered to not support them because it's convenient to use those products and services. You don't actually give a shit about the issues at hand, you already weren't interested in continuing to play the game and now have the opportunity to pat yourself on the back and insist that it's somehow because you're a good person and won't support a "bad company" rather than just not liking the game.

It's empty because to begin with, you're sending zero signals about Blizzard's current "malevolence", or how they "support abusers" since you stopped playing

after the first month of SL

And it's empty because you childishly conceive of """Blizzard""" as some monolithic entity with a single moral compass that you're going to punish and correct by not being subbed (though again, as above, you don't actually give a shit about the malevolence or how despicable they are, you just want to fellate yourself by conflating current issues with the fact that you already quit playing a video game)--when the reality is that your best case scenario here is that a non-existent mass boycotting gets the game shut down and Blizzard somehow goes bankrupt, and a couple/few thousand low-level employees who had nothing to do supporting abuse, since most of those people are already gone and the ones left are largely even more outraged and disappointed than the armchair activists doing fuck all, get let go and now have to find a new job; shareholders (the majority of whom are investment firms or banking groups) see an insignificant, minor drop in profit that they don't equate to anything because they don't really give a shit about why the company's profits went down and like you they're supporting way worse things; and world keeps on turning with literally nothing having been actually accomplished with regards to abuse or criminality, while a bunch of idiots shake hands and congratulate themselves on """stopping an evil company""", and then go buy games from a bunch of similar companies doing the exact same shit.

[Itisamuh]

I think the game is most likely in the exact same boat it has been in for several years now, clearly past its peak but still fine and in no danger of going anywhere. People have been crying doomsday for several expansions by now, saying if they fail to turn it around right away then the next expansion will be the last, some new game is going to kill it and so on and so forth. The vast majority of players could not care less about a lawsuit within the company, nor do they care what some random streamer has to say about it.

[Lochton]

I also hope he's never had a kitkat, or a nespresso, or a hot pocket! Nestle be all up in that killing people game.

Naw, as long as they aren't thirsty, we good.

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Well for me it’s been down hill for a while. If you are not end game raiding and spamming m+ what is there?

That is the sad part of it. Not enough content for the average player, BFA rates much better than Shadowlands for me.

[Drusin]

Well for me it’s been down hill for a while. If you are not end game raiding and spamming m+ what is there?

Collecting!

https://www.dataforazeroth.com/leade...mpletion-score

All I need Blizz to do each xpac is add shit for me to collect

[Lochton]

New World being a big hit & Endwalker coming next month, it's going to be a scary time for WoW.
Blizzard's current response of censoring content isn't winning anyone back, they need to make some good content for the game & fast.

New World is.. Not a big hit yet, it is hyped and cheered for, but you don't win a race with a ball and chain around your ankle. As for Endwalker, it is FFXIV, they have more or less each their own setup without striking the same category. Each game has gems, and each has rotten apples. A lot of people went to FFXIV due to the recent drama without knowing, Square Enix has a ton of those issues too, just not as public as Blizzard's, and others went there for a new home, and I hope they find themselves such. Blizzard should not worry about the current games but instead, get their crew and shit together to finalize products that people crave.

[Drusin]

Classic draw will soon be over once they hit WOTLK

You mean MoP

[Lochton]

Collecting!

https://www.dataforazeroth.com/leade...mpletion-score

All I need Blizz to do each xpac is add shit for me to collect

For me it is collecting, achievements, world content (sadly, World PvP is scarce due to the layout of the game, not so easy to get around), and roleplaying. I am a casual raider with 2'ish nights a week in heroic and a few mythic bosses.

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I think they have one more XP worth of crap content and they are done. Classic draw will soon be over once they hit WOTLK so that will stop so retail will have to either pick up the slack or fail.

We can already guess that they won't stop at Wrath of the Lich King, the box is opened and now nostalgia can be fed upon.

As for the real game, progression servers, I bet they have more content available than for one expansion, as well, they have things they hardly touched, and systems they could contemplate.

[TomGreen]

One thing I can think of that would possibly breathe new life into the game is a wow sandbox mode something akin to steam workshop. Over watch has one and the players come up with real neat game modes.

I would really like to see a server dedicated to this it would be great fun.

[Depakote]

It's not healthy at all.

[Osperand]

They are so wrapped up in this "scandal" that the best people have already left, you now have people employed who tick the right boxes and say the right politically correct things but they do not have the skills to make the game great again. If they were sexually harassed why no criminal charges? What is classed as sexual harassment is ridiculous, even my wife says the same. He touched my shoulder without consent, really! get a life.

I stopped supporting companies like this and never will support them again.

[Lolites]

Sales numbers were manipulated since they started doing Online pre-sales. Those most sales in a day records are PR spin bullshit. That day was almost a year long

which is a thing since what, cata or pandaria? so still sold more copies than few previous expansions, including legion which is one of the most popular...

btw not sure how much of "manipulation" it is since they literaly always write that day1 sales include preorders... maybe its manipulation towards people who cant be arsed to read ALL information available

[Sialina]

It's not just removing Emotes, its changing item/quest/NPC/region names, removing any semblance of "adult" humour, removing any semblance of female sexuality.

It's puritan bullshit and literally anyone that doesn't see that is braindead anyway.

This 100% I wouldn't go as far as calling people braindead, but some people think the outrage is about emotes very few use, it's not, it's about removing things in the past showing where the future is headed. With things like innuendo, female sexuality, adult and childish humor and historical terms like consorts being taken out, it narrows the path the story can take.
It's such a strange thing to watch as well, most people would agree with the following

No violence possible makes for a boring story, too much violence makes for a boring story

No blood makes for boring visuals, buckets of blood spraying everywhere makes for excessive visuals.

No humor makes a story very bleak, and tension is never relieved, a joke every 5 seconds makes the story hard to take seriously

Why is it so hard to accept that no sexy outfits, occasional adult jokes/paintings and a plot where it's possible for a female to be interested in a male (and possibly use attractiveness to try to get his attention) makes for a more bland story? Noone is asking for NPCs doing the horizontal tango all over the place, and noone wants that, but we also don't want to be sent to kindergarten when we go to the virtual world of Azeroth.

As with everything, the golden ratio is somewhere closer to the middle, not at either extreme.

[varren]

Big trouble. This is the first time we have ever had two awful expansions back to back. Not to mention the MMO market starting to make a bit of a comeback with FFXIV getting popular and the release of New World, competition we haven't seen since the late 00s/early 10s with all the WoW clones flooding the market.

[Kralljin]

Man, once Rift, Age of Conan, the Warhammer MMO, Star Trek Online, the Star Wars MMO, and Wildstar hit, nobody's going to play WoW. Who's going to want to play that tired old thing when there's all this new stuff on the horizon?

Yeah, let's just disregard the fact that some of those games had serious flaws themselves or launched during what can be considered the prime of WoW, at least subscriber wise.

Time's have changed, i'm not saying New World will surpass WoW or anything, but if you think WoW will now just brush aside any competition like it did during its prime, it's just damn ignorant.

[Thelxi]

The game has been in trouble for a while now, but I don't think that removing jokes and NPCs really matters one way or the other here. The legal problems have done much more damage to their reputation. I think it is customer disillusionment that is the new and quite significant factor that Blizzard will have to deal with now.

They've been cooking the numbers for years already, upheaving every aspect of their years-long design philosophy in the name of a quick buck, and gearing the game squarely towards the most lucrative target groups while dropping everyone else without second thought. They have never had to deal with disillusioned customers before though, at least not on this scale. We shall see if they can still manage to make the numbers looking decent.

[Airlick]

WoW will most likely survive, but it won't get new players untill it goes F2P. And if they wanted to bring back people they needed to act fast, so people didn't had time to level something else in a different MMO.
9.1.5 was a desperate move, but the sheer panic showed with their Heartstone cross event in order to increase MAU.

WoW will never go F2P, since Blizzard would need to start a ton of new servers to accomodate the initial surge of F2Ps. And then those F2Ps would quit, and probably sooner than later, without dropping enough money for the investment to pay off. Tokens are as far as they will ever go. I sincerely doubt Blizzard even cares about getting new players, they are fine milking the existing playerbase while cutting costs. And at the moment the game stops being profitable, they will shut it down rather than go F2P.

[Geckoo]

I don't believe that the game is close to maintenance mode, but is the option that best fits my thoughts. Basically when it happens it will not be all of a sudden, i would say that they are more likely to explore new ways to deliver and monetize content before going into maintenance mode and a change of the whole monetizing model might happen at some point, but the day in which they no longer release any content and just keep a few servers open? that's far far away, even older MMORPG's are still going and realase content now and then.

I chose that option because i do not believe that the game, or any change to it, has the capacity to resucitate an almost 20 year old game with his almost 20 year old core systems. They do a great job when it comes to keep it visually pleasing, but what lies underneath is an old fashioned MMORPG that barely has any capacity to attract fresh new players and their potential playerbase keeps shrinking. Even if they manage to make a great expansion after shadowlands, the aging factor will still be there and their potential playerbase will still be an shrinking number of returning players.

With that said, the whole lawsuit and the puritan overreaction that followed are just speeding things up, the game has been on this path for a long time before all of this happened. It's just natural, no one expects the game to last forever and despite the flashy 'wow killer' term often used, wow's death has always been something that will happen of old age and after a bunch of years of being irrelevant for the majority of the gaming industry.