I must repeat myself, this is the only point I do not agree at all. Not hitting the +- 24 month mark for expansion releases is disastrous for their revenue. Spikes in revenue will always, always beat
completing an expansion (whatever that means). Shadowlands can be completed by 9.2 easily, it can completed by 9.3 as well - there's no reason or indicator that a patch in between is mandatory or necessary to finish Shadowlands' plot. It will add more to the Shadowlands lore in general, but it's far from being mandatory.
Let's quickly look at the numbers: WoW has one spike per year when it comes to revenue: the time of a brand new expansion launch. In 2018 this was BfA, in 2019 it was Classic, in 2020 it was Shadowlands, in 2021 it will be TBC and in 2022 it will be another retail expansion again.
If we take the Superdata analysis on top of it:
https://www.superdataresearch.com/bl...l-games-market
World of Warcraft player numbers fell back to normal levels as the excitement around November’s Shadowlands expansion subsided. From November to January, revenue fell by 61% and user numbers declined by 41% (these figures do not include China). This roughly matches the pattern seen for the past several expansions, though Shadowlands had a bigger launch. Blizzard does appear to have found a way to increase how often expansions are able to boost earnings. The publisher recently announced that it will be adding the 2007 Burning Crusade expansion into World of Warcraft: Classic this year. Alternating between releasing all-new and classic expansions could cause WoW revenue to spike annually for the near future, instead of every two years (the typical development time for the title’s expansions).
Some important takeaways: even with Shadowlands' bigger launch its player numbers and revenue drastically decreased over the last 3 months and are back on the
business as usual. Now imagine how that looks until 9.1 is launched which takes another 2-3 months. The numbers pretty much will be disastrous until either TBC launch happens in June or 9.1 gets released in June / July (although the 9.1 increase in subs is going to drop faster than that of TBC because TBCs initial lifetime is way bigger than that of 9.1).
Shadowlands pretty much won't recover from the massive drops that took place until the 9.1 launch. Why would Blizzard then deliberately extend Shadowlands' lifetime with very low sub numbers and sacrifice their -+24 months release schedule for less revenue than they could possibly generate by shifting manpower to work on 10.0 instead of 9.3 and eventually releasing the new expansion sooner / on time for big $$$?
So if you're from the WoW team and you want to release 9.3, which causes a delay of 10.0 by 4-6 months and brings the overall lifetime from the +-24 months to a 28-30 months, how would you justify that in front of your WoW management
from a financial standpoint? And how would the WoW management justify that in front of the Blizzard management where only $$$ seems to count anymore? Honest question. Give me an elevator pitch on why releasing 9.3 is more important than to focus on 10.0 and stick to your annual revenue spikes for WoW. I'm just curious to hear different opinions on this.