Euuhhhhhh what?
Services ( GM's). all the extra patches content like that. I must agree the quality of those have gone down.
But also development cost of the next expansion.
Its a company making money.
Before people start raging on blizzard. Ubisoft and others use pay2win with cash items. Or put cool/handy stuff behind paywalls ( microtransactions).
More and more games are offering base game free, but then you need to pay for the cool stuff. In the end that nets you more money then a subscription.
Why is WoW $15 a month? gotta pay bobby kotick bonus somehow man
WoW is from the era where almost every MMO was on a subscription model. No reason to remove that sub if its still profitable. Besides, i don't think the premium services are compelling enough for most people to spend.
If blizzard thought they would have more profits by making the game free and having free players buy more cosmetics in the cash shop; they would have done it already. When it comes to corporate greed, you know they are better min/maxers than WF guilds.
Only solution is to add more cash shop items until it can balance 15$/person/month
This is true and at some point may well happen. They will ofcourse have some sort of Blizztard fanboy subscripion with something like increased inventory space, access to the White Knight armour and a "free" mount every 6 months for those no longer capable of making informed decisions. The rest of the income will come from increased store sales from people playing FTP.
FOMO: "Fear Of Missing Out", also commonly known as people with a mental issue of managing time and activities, many expecting others to fit into their schedule so they don't miss out on things to come. If FOMO becomes a problem for you, do seek help, it can be a very unhealthy lifestyle..
For a few months in the last season I was a little worried.. but S2 is feeling good so..
Why does wow cost 15U$D a month to play? To keep out the scrubknights
F2P games are all cancer and I'm proud to play a game that at least requires you to make gold to play for free.. those scrubknights that plague the f2p games are literally EBOLA
You're also forgetting that Blizzard charges for expansions, basically full retails games. Imagine paying a subscription Price for SKyrim or Witcher 3 to access certain questlines aka Renown levels (which they lock behind a artificial time-gate to essentially make you pay more in the long run anyway.)
You already see streaming services doing that such as Disney+ and AmazonPrime.
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It is an allotted time of entertainment, so it is kinda fair?
You have access to WoW for 720 hours pr. subscription of 15 dollars. You pay 0.02 cents pr. hour of entertainment.
You have access to a movie in the cinema for about 2 hours pr. ticket of 20 dollars. You pay 10 dollars pr. hour of entertainment.
FOMO: "Fear Of Missing Out", also commonly known as people with a mental issue of managing time and activities, many expecting others to fit into their schedule so they don't miss out on things to come. If FOMO becomes a problem for you, do seek help, it can be a very unhealthy lifestyle..
FOMO: "Fear Of Missing Out", also commonly known as people with a mental issue of managing time and activities, many expecting others to fit into their schedule so they don't miss out on things to come. If FOMO becomes a problem for you, do seek help, it can be a very unhealthy lifestyle..
When you buy the product, you buy the license to play. The initial product development is covered here. This is also typical for Microsoft products and in general for all software. You never own it, but you may use it. It's like rentning, but better as you have different rights.
You Pay 15$ as sub, because this funds the cost of a huge serverfarm and construction of a whole building, the electricity bills, equipment, top redundant ISP connection and plain maintainance of all this. More people playing defines the cost and it can even be more costly, than what they earn from selling the license.
This part alone requires technical staff(outside programers)and requires another business mastery and this alone is enough to create a buisness case(I would know as this is my career field). This is not to mention hotfix maintaince of the game, running callcenters and hosting Blizzcon or tournaments.
The only technical difference between WoW and Netflix/HBO is that you dont pay for the license when you opt to Netflix/HBO(given that there is no product interface like WoW, with the required software devlopment).
Whatever that is leftover of the money, goes to other projects and to the devs(you kinda fund the development of D4, just like D3 before that).
Obviously this is a good business model, as WoW been around for almost 2 decades and it generated more money than WoWs initial development price(many times over by now). Maybe Blizz would crash and the Diablo series sold to some indie company, if it wasnt for WoW.
Personal note to you - how did you miss giving any after thought before creating this thread? Have you ever worked before? Any 14yo kid working at McD would atleast know, why a burger costs what it costs.
Last edited by HansOlo; 2021-07-13 at 09:06 PM.