is it just me but i been following diablo immortal it almost feels like its going to be a action MMOrpg from what i been reading how it will gameplay like or am i wrong?
is it just me but i been following diablo immortal it almost feels like its going to be a action MMOrpg from what i been reading how it will gameplay like or am i wrong?
SL is the first expansion where my subscription will lapse. I've was very active during BfA, had 30+ max lvl toons, most of them fairly well geared. I've struggled to lvl 2 in SL, just not that engaging.
Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries.
It doesn't matter what you want to call it, if further examination of the figures reveals that Acti-Blizz tend to sugarcoat things in their investor calls they lose trust and that directly affects their share price and ability to attract further investment.
The intended audience for these calls isn't nu-gamers who prefer to spend their time bitching about video games on forums, it's for people with big bags of money who want to turn them into bigger bags of money and they will be very unimpressed if it turns out the size of their money bag is being compromised to appease forumites.
then it was p2w since the very begining as you could buy gold, help with leveling or clearing content, gear, literaly everything you can buy now you could buy since vanila... (except gametime and game itself and shop items obviously)
and please dont give me that bullshit "it was against tos", people still did it, my old guild was selling gold and runs for decade and never had any troubles...
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not to mention giving false information to investors is actualy federal offense afaik
thats simple, its ego defense
im sure you met people like that, girl dump them and after they are done crying they are like "no, i dumped her, she was awful" and they have to shit on her on every occasion just to persuade themselves its not them who is horrible person, its their ex
this is similar just with the game, rather than admit the game they left for whatever reason is doing great without them they have to shit on it to feel better about themself
I would like to point out that the full quote from Booby Kotick re : the hiring of 2000 developers is that it started in Jan 2020 and will continue until the end of 2022
The timeline was not *fire people* *major devs run away* *opps we need to hire more people*
It's part of a hiring effort for developers that's been ongoing since the end of 2019
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-t...ings-call-tra/
(emphasis mine)We continue to ramp our investment in creative and development talent, especially with increased competition from Chinese companies and platform providers, and this will allow us to better serve our players. From the start of 2020 through the end of next year, we intend to hire more than 2,000 developers. We plan to triple the size of certain franchise teams compared to those team sizes in 2019. And we have aggressive hiring plans around the world, including new studios or major expansion in Poland, China, Australia and Canada.
Kinda half right, not nonsense.
They eluded to the cause of the reduction in a recent 8K SEC filing then went into more detail in their DEF14A 2021 Proxy statement to investors
Activision Blizzard put out a vote for investors to vote on their 2020 compensation program.
They only got a 57% positive vote back so they set out on a feedback program with their investors.
Over a 12 month period they had over 70 meetings with over 50 institutions owning approximately 63% of outstanding shares.
For a good majority of those meetings either Bobby was present , a member of the Compensation Committee was present or both.
Considering ATVI is over 80% institutionally owned means they spoke to a lot of institutions like investment funds and the like. All that feedback was a major factor in coming up with the new pay program. The compensation comittee is the team that comes up with remuneration at Activision Blizzard so it was both them and Bobby who come up with the new pay program.
Considering the same system has been in game since it launched and people have been paying for gold with game time within the confines of the game since vanilla, its always been P2W then. And while direct trading of game time for gold/services was against the ToS, it was also somewhat allowed and accepted that people were gifting stuff in game for sub time when they couldnt afford it (such as paying for a guildies 2 months and theyd stock the guild bank with herbs for raid etc).
As for real money for in game benefit making something P2W, where do we draw the line? You can afford a better internet connection than me, you have a better computer, you dont need to work as many hours because you dont need an income so therefor can spend more time in game etc.
P2W is being able to win at the game just by spending money. As I said before, there is no advantage to progress in the game just by buying tokens to sell for gold that is not also available without buying tokens. Ive never sold a token but I have enough gold to buy any carry or boost or loot funnel etc if I want to right now. Now if it was a case of gold was so hard to come by that it was almost impossible to earn enough to buy those boosts without selling tokens, you might have a point, but that isnt the case.
Looking at the 8k and the new 2021 proxy statement that's not actually that clear.
Change to Win , the activist investor group who raised the concern spoke of being concerned of how overpowered the "Shareholder Value Creation Initiative" clause is in Bobby Kotick's employment contract. They advised this can result in a $200 million bonus but never went into how they calculated that number.
While the Shareholder Value Creation Initiative has been cut it's only cut for future equity awards granted after April 28th 2021. This is something that , from what I've seen most all of the gaming media has missed out on. The 2021 proxy statement makes this a little clearer - it doesn't apply for bonuses given to him via section 12 before April 2021.
However the 2021 Proxy Statement (linked on a previous post) has his other bonuses for 2020 calculated but doesn't have anything listed for the SVCI in particular (only a list of equity awards that say they are subject to Section 12 in terms of when they can vest them)
yeyey record profits and more layoffs as always nothing new just funnel more cash to the top
bobby will just put the money he "lost" from taking a lower salary and bonus into some other pot or inatitive that he can claim later via some offshore account
This doesn’t actually tell us any thing in regards to wow as things like overwatch put out there last hero in April 2020, Starcraft had its last season update in august 2020 and so on. With a lack of post 2020 updates to other blizzard games its there’s no real way to know what games are driving the losses.
or less players in games like overwatch, starcraft, heros of the storm, and diablo which have not had any major updates in a LONG time.
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you do know wow is not blizzards only game right?
And this also came around the time of us finding out overwatch 2 was still far from release, aswell as the same for diablo 4, and diablo 2.
"World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands expansion continued to drive strong results following its record-setting release in November, with first quarter franchise net bookings growing sharply year-over-year. World of Warcraft saw strong reach, engagement and participation in value added services, along with a particularly high number of new players joining the community for the first time, boosted by initiatives to enhance the onboarding experience."
Ok...
But how are they NOW?!
What are the SUB NUMBERS?!
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You can't just say shit like this without proving it.
Less players overall, but more revenue overall. Granted, most of them don't actually stem from WoW but from other franchises that are basically dead in the water right now, like OW and Diablo (because people are waiting for the next game and they didn't receive substantial updated in a while).
What worries me is that they're actually making more money - doesn't really matter how, but it's a strategy that works. So they're likely to continue on this route, because in the end it's what nets them more money.