Activision Blizzard Q4 2020 Investor Call

[DarkAmbient]

Without hard numbers from subscriptions and/or concurrent players these investor calls are virtually worthless for determining the size of the playerbase.

[mbit]

Got a link to the methodology or any further info then just this graph?

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment..._google_trend/

[Kolvarg]

This is a delay of years we’re talking about and unless you want to argue that the people googling were seeing the future and losing interest you would expect said delay to carry on through wrath as the actual numbers were going up only dropping after a grace period where players started to leave, the chart doesn’t reflect that in any way.

Said delay would also effect subs from launch-peak where we can see multiple dips in google trends yet not a single dip in sub count.

Not necessarily. The fact that there is a delay does not mean that delay will always exist, or will always be the same. You're comparing very different stages of WoW's life cycle.

If you see it as a direct correlation between google interest and total sub numbers, sure. But that's not what this is, it's certainly not what I'm defending. If the correlation is primarily between google interest and new/returning subscribers, then the story is different.

As I've said before, the total number of subscribers is the result of continuous subscriptions + new/returning subscriptions - cancelled subscriptions.

What this means is that if you have point A with 10M subs and point B with 12M subs - it's not really realistic to say "between A and B, 2M new people subscribed". We only know the totals for the data points they released, we don't know how many people were subscribing and how many canceling. It's possible, even if unlikely, that 0 people unsubscribed and 2M subscribed. It's also possible that, for instance, 2.5M subscribed, and 0.5M unsubscribed. The only thing we know for sure is that between those points there was a higher total number of new subscribers than of cancellations.

Thinking of it abstractly - it's entirely normal to expect the income of subscribers to be highest when and soon after the game is released, and slowly lower over time. The more people try the game, the smaller the pool of potential new people to try the game is. Concurrently, it's also normal to expect the outgoing of subscribers (relative to the income) to increase over time, as the novelty wears off, people get tired of the game, other games are released, other genres become more fashionable, etc (too many reasons).


Why is this relevant? If the trends line correlates more to number of incoming subscribers, rather than the number of ongoing subscribers, it makes sense that there was a big delay that doesn't exist anymore now that the game has matured and the playerbase settled a lot more.


And again, that's not even taking in consideration the staggered releases of expansions and patches in Eastern regions through WoW's growth period which certainly helped in maintaining a much cleaner and less peak-y look than it is able to show in its maturity.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Why is this relevant? If the trends line correlates more to number of incoming subscribers, rather than the number of ongoing subscribers, it makes sense that there was a big delay that doesn't exist anymore now that the game has matured and the playerbase settled a lot more.

It would make sense for it to work this way but said delay would still be there in wrath.

For example we know from an old interview that 75% or so of new players never made it past lvl 10 in wrath. Even if half of those were subs instead of trial accounts you would still see an uptick in search’s even if it didn’t translate to subs but instead the search’s went down.

[bloodykiller86]

Blizzard literally goes out of their way to describe Classic and Retail as two different things for a reason and it isn't "because so many people play them both" as you say.

Likewise, Shadowlands has lots of gripes, just because you choose to fanboy ignore them doesn't mean they're not there and rather significant. Balance, Covenants feeling forced for some specs, lack of gear from M+, anima being extremely slow to gain especially outside of WQs; those are all valid complaints that exist right now and haven't had much in the way of communication from Blizzard on.

Balance is an ever going issue, impossible to ever balance a game but theyre taking good steps, you will always have a min max meta and it is your choice to choose, lack of gear was already discussed and they'll probably be adding a TR or badge system in 9.1, anima is useless anyways but they'll probably increase that as well for cosmetic shit

[Lorgar Aurelian]

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment..._google_trend/

Mabye it’s because I don’t use Reddit so have no idea how to see if there’s further info but the methodology used to make this chart seems rather flawed unless there is a greater break down.

I took all the available data points from the quarterly reports and did a correlation search. A few keywords came up highly correlated (~.96), such as "play wow", "shadow priest", "wow guide", etc. It's very interesting to see that even the smallest local peaks (e.g. patch releases) are highly correlated across those keywords.

I then trained a regression SVM using all the keyword trends. The reported error is over a 5-fold cross validation.

Unless keywords were adjusted with each expan and it’s added content you would get results that would be way out of whack.

But there really isn’t enough info to say rather the methodology was flawed or not.

[Sluvs]

It's a pretty simple explanation in 3 parts. 1, there is nothing else to do in Classic but raid. By contrast you have M+, LFR, PvP, and raiding in Retail.

2, less than 3% of the WoW population at the time set foot into Naxx 40. So there is a draw there to see it in it's original form, not the ez mode WotLK version.

3, classic Naxx requires 40 players, Retail raiding needs a minimum of 10.

but still, the difference is in the millions, it is super weird

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Imagine believing Kotick's data manipulation and lies. Acti-Blizz is stronger than ever, pinky swear fellow kids!

Imagine believing Activision Blizzard is doing badly.

Lol

[SirBeef]

but still, the difference is in the millions, it is super weird

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Imagine believing Activision Blizzard is doing badly.

Lol

There is o accounting for heroic or normal, or even LFR. 4 difficulties of raiding plus M+ that draws away from it, let's get numbers from LFR and the other difficulties.

Nit sure how those parses work but how many are using multiple characters per run as well? But regardless, that just shows the only difficulty of a raid no one saw in its original iteration against the last accessible raid difficulty.

[dope_danny]

"We are going to report MAU for the whole company instead of WoW sub numbers so it looks better!"

"But what happens if you dont support anything but WoW and the rest all decline?"

"......No negativity in the dojo"

[Big Thanks]

What i dont understand is how Blizzard made more money from Oct-Dec of 2019 compared to Oct-Dec of 2020

In Oct-Dec of 2019 they made 100 MILLION dollars more than this year

How the hell is that possible? The only thing that happened there was Blizzcon? Is Blizzcon 100 M dollars more profitable? (>_<)

BUT

Even though Oct-Dec was more profitable in 2019....2020 they made a shit ton more money in total.
229 Million more dollars than last year in total

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edit: UPS i forgot Classic WoW. That explains the 100 million more dollars in 2019

[Truhan]

On mobile, the first stage of regional testing for Diablo Immortal in December and January was met with very positive feedback and strong engagement metrics.

I hope people weren't fooled by this. "Engagement" just means people either hated or loved something. It's just like how youtube's algorithm rewards videos with massive dislikes by recommending them more.

A few things up their sleeve with remastered content that will be unveiled in due course.

What the hell is this? How about you finish Warcraft 3 first? You know, the damn game that came out over a year ago, and still doesn't have ranked ladder, something the unforged version had. Shit, WC3R hasn't even been patched since OCTOBER and they haven't made a news post since AUGUST. Starcraft 2 has gotten patched more recently, and they openly admitted that game is done and is just in maintenance mode.

What the hell can they remaster anyways? Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 1 already got the treatment, Warcraft 1 and 2 and Diablo 1 all got put on GOG, so I have to imagine those are out of the question. They keep squashing rumors of Diablo 2 being remastered and the source code is supposedly lost anyways (and, honestly, I'd rather have a remake on 4's new engine instead of a remaster, there are enough mods and private ladders for D2 already that do a better job "remastering" than Blizzard would do). Overwatch has come out somewhat recently and Overwatch 2 is gonna be better than 1 in every imaginable way. And HotS is dead (competitively at least). That would pretty much just leave remastering Burning Crusade (possible), Starcraft 2 (impossible, since they just announced it's going into maintenance mode and they seem very hostile to the RTS genre in general right now), or Lost Vikings/Rock n Roll Racing (dear god yes please).

Oh, and apparently, they disbanded the Classic Games team (not WoW Classic mind), so who would even make a remaster? And it would have to be started from scratch at this point.

[kranur]

It's a pretty simple explanation in 3 parts. 1, there is nothing else to do in Classic but raid. By contrast you have M+, LFR, PvP, and raiding in Retail.

2, less than 3% of the WoW population at the time set foot into Naxx 40. So there is a draw there to see it in it's original form, not the ez mode WotLK version.

3, classic Naxx requires 40 players, Retail raiding needs a minimum of 10.

You have pvp in classic too though. And lfr is just a dumb version of raiding.

[cparle87]

You have no business claiming you know anything about the topic if you weren't already aware of that graph.

What are you "right" about anyway? That Cata technically had a slightly higher sub point than Wrath at one point?

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Shift goal posts? Man you're defensive, I haven't been talking to you at all.

If the argument is, which it was, which expansion had the highest ever sub count, then that is factually Cataclysm. And yes, you've been goalpost moving.

[Akutare]

If the argument is, which it was, which expansion had the highest ever sub count, then that is factually Cataclysm. And yes, you've been goalpost moving.

But what's more important to take away is that growth was steady up until WotLK. WotLK kept it's good will pretty consistently through the expac. Cataclysm may have gotten a good boost at the start from that good will, but it quickly burnt through it and began the time of decline. People gave Cata a chance because they appreciated WotLK, not so much on its own merit, as healers were very stressed out at the start from the changes that were made and that trickled into impacting dps and tanks because of lack of healers.

BFA likely got a boost in interest at the start because people overall enjoyed Legion, but people didn't like BFA. Also in the decline era people generally would show up in high numbers at the start to give it a chance again, and then dip out in short order. Whatever lightning in a bottle WotLK had that kept it so stable was not something easily replicated.

[SirBeef]

You have pvp in classic too though. And lfr is just a dumb version of raiding.

Doesn't matter. The pathway to gear in LFR and PvP is much better in Retail and has definately pulled people away from organized raiding. If you cannot see that you are wilfully ignorant. The mere fact that DS LFR saw nearly 59% of the playerbase participate from 15% before LFR should tell you all you need to know about why there is a discrepancy innthe numbers.

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But what's more important to take away is that growth was steady up until WotLK. WotLK kept it's good will pretty consistently through the expac. Cataclysm may have gotten a good boost at the start from that good will, but it quickly burnt through it and began the time of decline. People gave Cata a chance because they appreciated WotLK, not so much on its own merit, as healers were very stressed out at the start from the changes that were made and that trickled into impacting dps and tanks because of lack of healers.

BFA likely got a boost in interest at the start because people overall enjoyed Legion, but people didn't like BFA. Also in the decline era people generally would show up in high numbers at the start to give it a chance again, and then dip out in short order. Whatever lightning in a bottle WotLK had that kept it so stable was not something easily replicated.

WotLK had practically no growth. WoW gre from 2004-2008 then peaked. All those number say is the amount of people leaving were equal to the amount of people joining. Vanilla and TBC were fra better at bringing people in. Wrath was basically a nothingburger in regards to subs and growth.

[HitRefresh]

I hope people weren't fooled by this. "Engagement" just means people either hated or loved something. It's just like how youtube's algorithm rewards videos with massive dislikes by recommending them more.



What the hell is this? How about you finish Warcraft 3 first? You know, the damn game that came out over a year ago, and still doesn't have ranked ladder, something the unforged version had. Shit, WC3R hasn't even been patched since OCTOBER and they haven't made a news post since AUGUST. Starcraft 2 has gotten patched more recently, and they openly admitted that game is done and is just in maintenance mode.

What the hell can they remaster anyways? Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 1 already got the treatment, Warcraft 1 and 2 and Diablo 1 all got put on GOG, so I have to imagine those are out of the question. They keep squashing rumors of Diablo 2 being remastered and the source code is supposedly lost anyways (and, honestly, I'd rather have a remake on 4's new engine instead of a remaster, there are enough mods and private ladders for D2 already that do a better job "remastering" than Blizzard would do). Overwatch has come out somewhat recently and Overwatch 2 is gonna be better than 1 in every imaginable way. And HotS is dead (competitively at least). That would pretty much just leave remastering Burning Crusade (possible), Starcraft 2 (impossible, since they just announced it's going into maintenance mode and they seem very hostile to the RTS genre in general right now), or Lost Vikings/Rock n Roll Racing (dear god yes please).

Oh, and apparently, they disbanded the Classic Games team (not WoW Classic mind), so who would even make a remaster? And it would have to be started from scratch at this point.

It's referring to Diablo 2 remake made by Vicarious Visions, who did the remakes of Crash Bandicoot and THPS recently. VV was recently merged with Blizzard. So they don't need their classic team to make it, and it will probably be better than Blizzard's attempts, given their track record with remakes so far.

[cparle87]

But what's more important to take away is that growth was steady up until WotLK. WotLK kept it's good will pretty consistently through the expac. Cataclysm may have gotten a good boost at the start from that good will, but it quickly burnt through it and began the time of decline. People gave Cata a chance because they appreciated WotLK, not so much on its own merit, as healers were very stressed out at the start from the changes that were made and that trickled into impacting dps and tanks because of lack of healers.

BFA likely got a boost in interest at the start because people overall enjoyed Legion, but people didn't like BFA. Also in the decline era people generally would show up in high numbers at the start to give it a chance again, and then dip out in short order. Whatever lightning in a bottle WotLK had that kept it so stable was not something easily replicated.

But that wasn't the argument being made. The argument was "which expansion had the highest ever subs", and that was Cata. Early Cata hit the peak, exceeding all of Wrath, therefore Cata is the answer.

[Pann]

But that wasn't the argument being made. The argument was "which expansion had the highest ever subs", and that was Cata. Early Cata hit the peak, exceeding all of Wrath, therefore Cata is the answer.

China - which accounted for around half the sub numbers - was still playing Wrath at the time of the announcement of 12 million subs.

[FelPlague]

Except Warcraft logs says otherwise..... More people have parsed and raided in Classic wow then Retail Castle Narthia and it isnt even close


https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/zon...#timespan=1000


https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/st...#timespan=1000

this is just naxx btw and it destroys CN in the amount of parses

classic 10 million parses vs retail not even 1 million lmao

Shall we take an actual look?

1. nax has been out longer then castle nathria
2. you hilariously only compared ALL NAXRAMMAS KILLS to only the hardest difficulty of the current raid, which has many less bosses, which means naturally there will be less. there is 15 bosses in nax, so we gotta lower the number by 33% cause if you full a clear castle nathria it counts for 10 parses. if you full clear naxramas it counts for 15. However, instead of cutting that, i will simply let it pass, because there of course will be overlap between people doing normal and heroic, and heroic and mythic so.

here we go!

So i did about a 10th by hand till i remembered, i know how to use google sheets!

Here is the info.
Except there is a bit of an issue...
LFR is not included.
Also because of the smaller raid sizes, it is more likely for a classic raid to combat log then retail so we lose amounts there that we dont even know. Also the whole "nax released a week earlier, and mythic 2 weeks later"

but hey, there is a LOT more then 1 million parses in retail... althoguh they are still a fair bit apart, there is of course many things like LFR and ya know... retail having more content to do then just raiding, while classic's only endgame is raiding. (Also well... Multiboxxing is extremely more prevalent in classic, back when i played hardcore our raid lead raided with 3 hunters.)

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China - which accounted for around half the sub numbers - was still playing Wrath at the time of the announcement of 12 million subs.

Not true. it accounted for 3.2 million players, equal to US/Canada.

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You have pvp in classic too though. And lfr is just a dumb version of raiding.

1. except its rewards are horrid now and few people really care
2. its still raiding, if you are going to use raiding metrics as an example of the population, you still gotta count for LFR.

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Imagine believing Kotick's data manipulation and lies. Acti-Blizz is stronger than ever, pinky swear fellow kids!

Imagine thinking a company would risk a fucking audit and a multi billion dollar offence just to say "yeah we doing good!"

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Imagine believing Kotick's data manipulation and lies. Acti-Blizz is stronger than ever, pinky swear fellow kids!

Imagine thinking a company would risk a fucking audit and a multi billion dollar offence just to say "yeah we doing good!"

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There isn't causation, but it's foolish to say there isn't a correlation between the two, looking at how they compare when they did use to announce subscriber numbers:

This is why google trend data is literally useless.


1. as time passes more and more things get searched, i can literally go right now and say "Lol only 1 person per month since cata came out actually cares about wotlk, worst fucking expac ever!"



cause guess what, google trends is bullshit, it rarely works because of how it gathers its data, and simply changing how you search the same thing comes up with wildly different things, for example


2. search system



Literally the exact same spelling, the EXACT same but using different search styles comes up with DRASTICALLY different info.


This is why you dont use google trends to try and prove literally anything, it reminds me of when asmongold compared
"Wow: Classic" search term with "BFA" and laughed at how it was like 10 times larger... cause he used the specific writing BFA compared to ALL SEARCH TERMS with "Wow: Classic" in it.

Even look to the "Note" above the graph.


Dont use google trends unless you know how to properly use them, you can just search two words and compare them and then suddenly get a graph that shows how popular one is to the other.

[Pann]

Not true. it accounted for 3.2 million players, equal to US/Canada.

Any evidence for this claim? Although I am not sure how you arrived at this number as WoW China was comfortably above this when they stopped providing regional breakdowns.