The store is extra money for them, and they deserve it. Why suggest going F2P when theyve earned what theyve made.
The store is extra money for them, and they deserve it. Why suggest going F2P when theyve earned what theyve made.
It's like you have no business sense.
Blizzard makes millions of dollars from their subscription and you're seriously suggesting they throw that away so they can make significantly less by being F2P ?
You're fired from what ever business you own now, may own in the future or work for.
They probably make around a 1 billion from subs...so even though this number is huge...it's only around 1/5th of what they make off subs. They're not going to go F2P anytime soon.
Like what exactly?
There over 250 mounts in the game.
There are nearly 600 pets in the game.
There are thousands of helm models in the game for transmog.
Not saying they should stop adding new mounts, pets and armour models, just pointing out that I don't think they withheld any in game rewards for the shop items.
It would likely also lose them a ton of core subs who have been paying them for years.
I know a lot of people who retch at the thought of playing f2p mmo's, simply because of the reduced focus on fun gameplay and increased focus on monetization and incentive to buy in.
i rather pay my sub and have blizz create content i like, expansions etc. Without them having to go to a great deal of analytics, in order to implement a monetization model that will pay for the content, and future content.
SWTOR hasn't had a real expansion in 3 years now. It's simply not financially responsible in a f2p framework, you cant be sure that your massive amount of work will turn into $$$.
Subscriptions are stable. If you can develop an expansion solely from subs. You can release that expansion without having to monetize it further, or rely on x amount of players to buy x amount of xp potions, gear packs or whatever.
Pretty sure I've spent more $$ in LoL last year then I have in wow over the past 4 years.
the store is fairly limited in what is available. say they double or triple the items available, how much more would they be able to make?
is there a delicate balance in releasing store items over time, or all at once? i am sure they have people mathing it all out. blizz min/maxing profits like we min/max stats. ironic almost.
Hi
I don't think it's in their interest to flood the shop with stuff. What they'll want to do is try and slowly ramp it up as their subscription revenues drop. Steady cashflow is the name of the game. Huge profits one year, followed by 50% reduction in the next is generally not a good business strategy to instill investor confidence.
Please read their financial report for end of 2013.
Please.
It is illuminating.
http://investor.activision.com/reports.cfm
There is no need for napkin math, these are their own official (if unaudited) figures.
Read it, all of it.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...cn=Revolutions
BATTLEMASTER (After 3.3.5 nerf) REVOLUTIONS REPORTING IN.
Wielder of The Scepter of Shifting Sands, Hand of Ragnaros, and Shadowmourne. Bringer of 66 minute kings.
WoW releases one raid every 6-12 months and people are worried about quality loss at going free to play. That is amazing to me. It can't get any worse quality-wise than it is now and you're paying 15/month.
You're not attacking them ergo I can't be defending them. Blizzard will continue to make money or not regardless of what our opinions are. You seem to have an inflated sense of your opinion's importance. Just because I disagree with you on the correct course of action the company should take does not make me a "Blizzard defender."
The comment I was responding to indicated that server changes, race changes, and name changes don't cost Blizzard a dime and are therefore pure profit. It said nothing about their in-game store, nor did I mean to imply that microtransactions aren't profitable. There's a difference between costs being relatively small and costs being non-existent. Mounts are far less intrusive than any of their services because the code to enable mounts or pets is exercised every single day by a significant portion of the player population. You don't need an extra computer to manage those because it's as simple as updating a single field in a player database. The Blizzard store is also an extension of the existing battle.net account management infrastructure. Neither of those things can be said for those paid services that I was talking about. If you're going to dismiss my statements as naive please don't change the context in which they were made.