[Speculation] Why did Blizzard change its mind?

[Relapses]

Outside of the obvious answer, it likely has a lot to do with Blizzard's shift away from counting subscriber levels as a revenue-generating benchmark. If you look at any of the recent quarterly reports, they're not talking about how much money WoW makes from subscribers; instead, they're talking about hours spent playing the game. I believe that the reason this is important for investors (and Blizzard) as it reinforces the popularity of the brand. The more time people spend playing the game, the more likely they are to purchase merchandise or microtransactions. With Vanilla WoW being a massive timesink as it is, this is likely exactly why Blizzard decided to change their minds.

As long as people are playing WoW (in some official Blizzard-sanctioned capacity), the game is viewed as successful in the eyes of its investors.

[garfeeld]

the funny thing is , they never said outright no ever to making legacy servers, all it boils down to is they finally figured it was worth it enough to do it and they felt better about the long term financial viability.

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2 years ago there wasn't a petition signed by hundreds of thousands of unique people. Its very easy to say "they couldn't see it 2 years ago" without realizing the amount of people talking about it 2 years ago was less than 5 thousand. There's also a thing called the corporate ladder, just because the Devs saw potential or even Mike Morhaime himself, the final call is down to Activision and if they saw enough profit in it to justify the investment and upkeep.

well there still hasnt been a petition like that,lol, the only 100% true thing you can say from that petition is that is helped show there was more a few people interested.

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My guess would be:
Even with a strongly supported expansion like legion and new content every 77 days, they noticed a huge chunk of players leaving in the first 2 month of an expansion. Meanwhile private servers get more and more players. After wod they thought it was because wod was such a mess, but with the same effect in legion they now know that the new expansions simply dont cater anymore to many players.
Getting back these players seems to be worth for them.

Pservers dont hold onto their players any better than live does, only a small number maintain an appreciable amount.

[tuesday the paladin]

My guess is that an official vanilla server would help squash private servers. You don't really see any private server versions of the release game, mostly just the old expansions which leads one to believe if it's easier to pay a few bucks a month people are going to go for the official thing and not risk the servers getting taken down or w/e. Rather than spend more money and energy playing wack-a-mole with them it's easier to just make them legitimate customers.

[Relapses]

My guess is that an official vanilla server would help squash private servers. You don't really see any private server versions of the release game, mostly just the old expansions which leads one to believe if it's easier to pay a few bucks a month people are going to go for the official thing and not risk the servers getting taken down or w/e. Rather than spend more money and energy playing wack-a-mole with them it's easier to just make them legitimate customers.

To be completely honest, I doubt official Legacy is going to convert many private server players. There's a minority here who say they'll jump ship immediately but the real issue is that these are the same people who also demand a "completely authentic Vanilla experience" -- a murky, nebulous concept which seems to vary depending on who you ask. If these players don't feel like they're getting what they want for whatever arbitrary contrived reason they have, they can just as easily go back to playing on their free pirate server.

Legacy is being introduced to help shore additional tertiary (somewhat low-effort) income for Blizzard; and, as I said earlier, increase the number of hours played for the IP.

[chairmanmao]

I'm like 90% sure I either read or watched an interview where they stated that classic servers are mainly happening because they finally figured out how to run the vanilla game on modern hardware/battlenet.

[rda]

Hey there, guys/girls. For starters, I am going to say that I'm still (pleasantly) surprised about Blizz's officially announced Classic servers, which I intend to fully enjoy.

But still I can't stop wondering about the reasons for the bigwigs at Blizzard to undertake such a remarkable 180 degrees turnaround. For years the issue was outright ignored, or even worse, ridiculed. Does the "pristine servers" meme ring a bell? In the meantime, Blizzard was happy with turning the blind eye to most private servers, except those scummy (and moronic) enough to charge actual money for playing.

However, the whole Nostalrius affair was a sort of turning point, moreso when its head figures were invited to Blizzard's HQs. What happened? Was the bad PR enough to make Brack & Co. change their minds? Or was that they realised that there was (is) an untapped market? Maybe they got tired of long, sterile struggling in foreign courts against private servers, and they are trying another approach on the subject? One of the alleged reasons against Vanilla/Classic servers was that they would "splinter the community", or something like that. Did they realise that it was just BS, or is it that there isn't much of a community left to splinter? Is it just an attempt to recapture the many people that have left the game, for reasons mostly unknown? Just a few questions that I wanted to share with you.

I think they changed their mind because someone on the engineering team had a feasible idea of how to implement it that they didn't have before.

Ie, before, they were thinking that in order to do classic properly they'd need to mix the old code with the new (porting either forward or backward - both difficult), and then it occurred to someone that they could keep the old code unchanged and change things around it. Then they did a feasibility study and it turned out that yes, things click and this is indeed possible. Hence the change.

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I'm like 90% sure I either read or watched an interview where they stated that classic servers are mainly happening because they finally figured out how to run the vanilla game on modern hardware/battlenet.

Basically, this. I got the same impression.

[Doomchicken]

This really blows my mind.... not aiming straight at you Budong, because i don't remember seing you in the middle of the pack of wolfs, but for years the classic threads in this forum were full of legacy haters saying "not going to happen" along with the reason "not profitable", and now, suddenly, it seems to be a concensus that they decided doing it because apparently it's all about the $$$$$$... i don't get it...

It's almost like demand changes over time or something.

[Sorcath]

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

This. A lot of people want to ignore this as the most obvious because of contributing factors 1.) They didn't like vanilla 2.) They don't think there's enough player base to support it 3.) They want it to fail


Hell, over 1 million subs is still more than a lot of other MMOs get. At 15/per account, that's pocket money to a huge company but still a rather large check to run something that's essentially built on linken logs and bubble gum in this era of tech.

[Mirishka]

Probably because the end of normal WoW development is in sight and they wanted a way to keep WoW alive.

[taliey]

Money, subs, shotsfired, eliminate a segment of the competition

The move is basically a checkmate for nostalgia fans.

[Raptar]

In Argus and the ending of Legion the void has a big influence and gets heavily mentioned everywhere. The story gets told like we are going to face it in the next expansion and that it will be the main antagonist. Well, clearly it doesn't: in BfA it will be all about the Horde and Alliance again.

Overall it heavily feels like they are preparing us for something with the Void story, and maybe not for something on the short term. Maybe they want to start a WoW 2 with a whole new start: the Void as the big enemy. We will go into the universe and we continuously explore different worlds. Way more design options for the team and more versatile. I love Azeroth, but they are pretty bound to it with WoW. I think we won't leave it permanently in WoW 2, but it won't play a key role as it does now.

So they are doing the Classic servers for people who don't like the new WoW and are all about nostalgia and constantly talking about the old Azeroth and old WoW? Well, they can't complain if there are classic servers and they can go back to it. However, I really like it that they are doing the Classic thing. Hope it will not take too long.

[Deleted]

u mean lose its mind ?
this pandering is gonna bite em in the long run

[Nomads]

u mean lose its mind ?
this pandering is gonna bite em in the long run

They've been pandering since the end of Vanilla. How do you think WoW got from Vanilla to Legion? Pandering to casuals, trying to stop the tide to diminishing subs, only to push more players away in the process.

This isn't pandering. It's getting back to it's roots.

[RobertMugabe]

If you rewatch blizzcon during one of the first interviews they try to talk about the newly announced classic servers, but the blizz guy was visibly agitated about the mention. I got the feeling that maybe somehow they were being forced to do it? Idk complete speculation on my part, but it was very odd how dismissive and agitated he looked in the interview. I'll try to find it

it was one of the video interviews in that megathread if anybody remembers that

ay lmao...

or maybe it's because they're just early in development?

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I don't either because in reality there aren't that many people that want classic servers in the grand scheme of things (even though they like to imagine they are the majority). Maybe they found a way to run it at a super low overhead cost compared to live? Maybe Activision stepped in and voluntold them to do it? Or maybe they just said fk it let's see what happens.

I still can't forget that interview although I can't find it to save my life. I think it was j Allen? I distinctly remember seeing him look really agitated to talk about classic servers during the interview at blizzcon. Maybe internal split decision?

In reality you don't know what Blizzard knows and in reality you don't know how many people want classic.

[Altariaz]

This really blows my mind.... not aiming straight at you Budong, because i don't remember seing you in the middle of the pack of wolfs, but for years the classic threads in this forum were full of legacy haters saying "not going to happen" along with the reason "not profitable", and now, suddenly, it seems to be a concensus that they decided doing it because apparently it's all about the $$$$$$... i don't get it...

Exactly. It is amazing how many individuals claimed a classic server would not be profitable, who are now claiming that the reason Bliz is going to release a classic server is because it will be profitable.

[Super Kami Dende]

Likely to shut people up.

[MoanaLisa]

They saw what was going on and there have been a number of questions about it over the years. In-house they've never been shy about not wanting to do it but they didn't have any idea how to resurrect it easily and cheaply. Someone thought about it, came up with an idea that will work and they've changed their minds.

I don't think WoW is ending or anything nonsense like that. I think they just figured it out how they could get it launched and going without anything like the work they had originally imagined.

[khalltusk]

I think its partly due to the vocal outcry as blizzard has a track record of changing their mind due to enough vocal feedback.

Another part is after meeting with nost and their own internal work they found they could get the old game to work on more modern systems and it was not too difficult to do so. This is where cost comes in. If you can get it working with not that much effort in comparison to making it from scratch etc, then the cost goes down dramatically. With that issue proven to be cleared they can go ahead and bring it in as they can make something available to fans for little cost now. Before they believed it would be too expensive to re-develop and bring out.

Since they proved it actually isn't and with the vocal demand for it they gathered its worth a go and they most likely anticipate some solid uptake on classic which would justify the expense.

[rda]

^^ Nost team proved nothing. They were following a completely unsurprising and well-known route of reverse-engineered server with logic restored from old logs / videos / player testimonies. This was a complete no go for Blizzard.

Something changed much later. (And I think it was the idea to do it a different way.)

[khalltusk]

^^ Nost team proved nothing. They were following a completely unsurprising and well-known route of reverse-engineered server with logic restored from old logs / videos / player testimonies. This was a complete no go for Blizzard.

Something changed much later. (And I think it was the idea to do it a different way.)

Yeh this is what I think as well, The nost meeting was just one thing that put interest in the idea of classic servers and most likely someone on the team had an idea after that meeting and maybe did a proof of concept to pitch it to the guys higher up.