It's official- Overwatch has overtaken WoW as the flagship/darling of Blizzard

[bryroo]

That's a sign of the times.

Multiplayer games are all 20 to 30 minute matches and RPGs are single player

Mmos just aren't as popular anymore. People don't have the time to sit on their ass for 8 hours straight like they use to

[Tic Tacs]

So a game generates over a billion dollars from in-game revenue from just this quarter and you think its total box sales is the majority of it's profits.

dansfuckinggame.

Did you read the financial report? The entire PC category had just over $500 million last quarter of this year which includes many other Activision Blizzard games, what are you talking about? Keep in mind this is revenues, not profits.

WoW is their cash cow because it provides essentially free revenue through subs. Cash cows is not really about which product makes the most money, but more about the fact that it gives you a steady stream of revenue with little to no extra investments, which essentially is a subscription.

If say an expansion is 2 years, and they have 5,4 million stable subs, that means besides the purchase of the game/expansion, they essentially get $1,683 billion revenue for which they don't really have to invest a lot for (it's estimated that an expansion costs around $70 million on average (including wages)).

The thing with overwatch is, sure it's selling a lot right now, but it heavily declines on a monthly basis, and eventually they aren't going to have any income besides those box sales and even those decline over time due to most ppl will have farmed them over the span of 2 years.

The picture you linked there's a steady decline for their console division and that's only going to drop more, compared to PC revenue which has been going up steadily for a long time.

Do you know what licensing is, right?

[Al Gorefiend]

That's significantly less than WoW makes in a year.

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Not from in-game revenue. Learn to read. The billion is all revenues, sales of game plus sales of in-game stuff.

If you also learn to count, you will see that the absolute most of that billion reported for the first year came from sales of game.

But don't we factor in upkeep costs and costs to produce new expansions? Y'know Gross income vs. total income?

If WoW makes 1b+ annually, but it costs 700m+ annually to keep servers up, keep the 200+ staff paid, produce new expacs.. and HS makes $400m+ annually but costs like 10m annually to produce content.

I'm not arguing with you, I just don't know if you're factoring costs

[rda]

But don't we factor in upkeep costs and costs to produce new expansions? Y'know Gross income vs. total income?

If WoW makes 1b+ annually, but it costs 700m+ annually to keep servers up, keep the 200+ staff paid, produce new expacs.. and HS makes $400m+ annually but costs like 10m annually to produce content.

I'm not arguing with you, I just don't know if you're factoring costs

No, I was not factoring in costs (estimates of them, because they don't publish them).

If we do factor in costs, then yes, HS will quite likely win, at least proportionally.

I would say though that costs for WoW have perhaps been declining, they have been spending less effort on it. Although nothing approaching HS levels, of course, that's just different leagues of effort.

[Deleted]

Did you read the financial report? The entire PC category had just over $500 million last quarter of this year which includes many other Activision Blizzard games, what are you talking about? Keep in mind this is revenues, not profits.





Do you know what licensing is, right?

PC increased by 23%
Console decreased by 13%

Not to mention Activision console games are quite expensive, most of them cost €59/69 in my country, the pc version around €50.

It would be quite pathetic if the console market couldn't out revenue the PC market.

[Chemii]

That's significantly less than WoW makes in a year.

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Not from in-game revenue. Learn to read. The billion is all revenues, sales of game plus sales of in-game stuff.

If you also learn to count, you will see that the absolute most of that billion reported for the first year came from sales of game.

Learn to read my own post

Activision (ATVI, +1.86%) said on Thursday it delivered nearly $1 billion of in-game revenues in the quarter.

The company delivered nearly $1 billion of in-game revenue in the quarter.

I realise you might not understand that all the sales of Overwatch since launch adds up to about $2.1 billion but we are talking about 1 quarter of in-game revenue, not box sales.

A quarter refers to one-fourth of a year and is typically expressed as "Q." The four quarters that make up the year are: January, February and March (Q1); April, May and June (Q2); July, August and September (Q3); and October, November and December (Q4).

Bye.

[Deleted]

Okay? So? This doesn't change my view of Overwatch being lesser than WoW to me. Sure its okay but its not the gem of Blizzard to me.

You need to let Bliz know so that they can quickly reprioritise.

[agentsi]

I really wish people who create threads like this, would get banned. OP provided no substance, only conjecture. Because an icon, is in front of another icon, that is the basis for his argument. How idiotic.

[Deleted]

But don't we factor in upkeep costs and costs to produce new expansions? Y'know Gross income vs. total income?

If WoW makes 1b+ annually, but it costs 700m+ annually to keep servers up, keep the 200+ staff paid, produce new expacs.. and HS makes $400m+ annually but costs like 10m annually to produce content.

I'm not arguing with you, I just don't know if you're factoring costs

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/0...t_upkeep_200m/

Adjusted to inflation, that would be around $57 million per year.

Let's say it's 100M per year for running costs, and 50M additional costs to create an expansion, and let's say 100M for marketing/publicity/events.

Let's say WoW has 5,4 million average subs over a 2 year window, that would mean that their running cost is 350M per expansion cycle (2years), is paid of in just 5 months, and the other 19 months are essentially free months where blizzard will make a lot of profit.

Edit : In 2011 blizzard was spending $137K per day for running the servers, around $50M per year.

[Kaleredar]

This is not the case at all. Or, rather, this is only true if you count, say, instances 20 times for Legion based on there being normals + heroics + mythics and, say, 17 more mythic+, and 2-3 times for previous expansions (normals + heroics + sometimes challenge modes).

Legion contains less original content than previous expansions, but it organizes it into multiple near-infinite grinds which are longer and have more steps than before. That's it. A big part of Legion's "content" doesn't have any original content behind it. Eg, artifact power. That's "content" that piggy-backs on other content and is, in an of itself, just an experience bar.

So then you're ignoring the new dungeons, raids, zones, and dozens of quests introduced in each patch so far?

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You forgot the part about unending RNG-fest, Korean hamster wheel grinding, herding players into unwanted PvE, not to mention really no new PvP content while killing rated PvP, and turning WoW into a quasi-MOBA (templates, pruning). It doesn't do much good to have content if you fuck up genre-specific systems because you're measuring profit by time logged in, not sub numbers.

And those systems are different from BC... how exactly? "RNG legendaries?" How did that 1% drop on twin Glaives serve you? "Hamster wheel grinding?" Please, illucidate to me how perfect grinding coilfang armaments or rep grinding dungeons for attunememts was. And you had to do ALL of that before you could even begin to think about raiding.

Oh wait, I know how they're different. They're far more varied, interesting, and dependable in legion.

[rda]

Learn to read my own post

"Activision (ATVI, +1.86%) said on Thursday it delivered nearly $1 billion of in-game revenues in the quarter."

"The company delivered nearly $1 billion of in-game revenue in the quarter."

I realise you might not understand that all the sales of Overwatch since launch adds up to about $2.1 billion but we are talking about 1 quarter of in-game revenue, not box sales.

Bye.

Dear, you continue to amaze everyone with your brilliant logic and reading skills.

The $1 billion of in-game revenues is for all games, not for Overwatch.

You have been falling into holes every single post. All that to avoid saying "I was wrong". Pathetic.

[RobertMugabe]

Well both Overwatch and Hearthstone make way more money then WoW. It hasn't been the flag ship for awhile now.

WoW still makes the most money and is still one of the most profitable games ever (AFAIK it was the most profitable game ever just until recently). HS and OW however have simply a broader and "fresh" audience, while WoW isn't gaining many new players anymore and has become pretty outdated overall.

[rda]

So then you're ignoring the new dungeons, raids, zones, and dozens of quests introduced in each patch so far?

No, that's exactly with counting all of them. There's just not a lot of them. The "Legion has a lot of content" is all about the numerous difficulty modes / several big grinds on top of relatively small amount of original content. For real.

[Eapoe]

Imagine that, middle of an xpac and Blizzard would possibly want other titles to get more attention. Shocking!

[Akta]

SHOCKING and groundbreaking

[Deleted]

I'm confused. Did people legitimately not know this already?

this... 10chars

[Caolela]

LMAO. Have you ever played ION? It was one of the most grindy games all time, and Legion doesn't even remotely come close to it.

PvP is side content, it never was important, and it never going to be important. It's always has been a PvE game, and even in it's peak there was barely any PvP participation to begin with when you directly compared it to PvE participation (Yes, I enjoy doing PvP, but let's not delude ourselves any longer pls).

Sure the game has been simplified, but comparing it to a 5 button moba? Pls.

Ofc there are worse grinds than WoW, but WoW is ridiculously grindly and RNG-fest since Legion after it had gone away from that in the past few xpacs.

Kagthul had some stats in a thread on the PvP forum that I won't bother to dig up, that showed around 45% of players play or had played PvP on a regular basis, and/or had obtained their Conquest limit, various PvP titles, and such. It is a substantial number which clearly showed that PvP is not just a "mini-game".

So let's stop with the bullshit kiddie memes and get real. Blizz is in this for one thing only: more profit. The problem is the arrogant bastards got too fucking greedy with Legion and shot themselves in the foot.

And yes, it's basically a glorified MOBA now with the Legion templates and pruning. Get off the Blizz love train and face facts.

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So then you're ignoring the new dungeons, raids, zones, and dozens of quests introduced in each patch so far?

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And those systems are different from BC... how exactly? "RNG legendaries?" How did that 1% drop on twin Glaives serve you? "Hamster wheel grinding?" Please, illucidate to me how perfect grinding coilfang armaments or rep grinding dungeons for attunememts was. And you had to do ALL of that before you could even begin to think about raiding.

Oh wait, I know how they're different. They're far more varied, interesting, and dependable in legion.

No. They're far more everywhere and everything in Legion of Hamster Wheel RNG. BC and attunements were nothing compared to the open-ended grind of Legion. At least back in those days you knew when the grind would be over. In Legion it never is.

[Deleted]

regardless , blizzard will always been known by being the creators of wow, its such a big history, at least for the foreseeable future. When wow dies, and there is a seperate generation of gamers, overwatch will prob be the frontline while wow will be remebered like we remember wracraft 2 and diablo 2 lol.

[Gorgodeus]

And? That means it is doing well? LOL

Considering the cost per team starts at $20 million and goes up, I would say that it is doing well enough to attract multiple teams at a considerable cost.

[Hyrja]

Nah WoW is still their main game