How exactly do you think Microsoft will affect World of Warcraft as a game?

[Kokolums]

You are severely underestimating Bnet. It is one of ATVIs most valuable assets and is one of the best if not the best platform of its kind. MS will find a way to use BNet for sure.

thats not how companies think. you'd be surprised at the frequency with which a company gets bought and then does something that looks sideways or backwards in the eyes of customers. for example, MS might look at BNET as a PC feature in a world going mobile so they ditch BNET regardless of any past success.

[Dhrizzle]

the game has clearly fewer players than its peak with an internet of 10X more people. it's clearly a failed game in terms of commercial success at the moment.

I suspect the target audience for WoW, a PC-onky online fantasy video game, was likely to have an internet connection long ago. The huge increase in people online will mostly be older people or people getting online with mobile devices. The fact WoW has been the largest subscription MMO ever by a long way and remains massive almost two decades after it released makes it far from a failed game in terms of commercial success.

[epigramx]

I'd argue that the MMORPG genre as a whole is suffering. As such, wow does too even though its a juggernaut. Look at the MMORPG market of games in general. Its nothing out there. Nothing great or gamebreaking. Nothing that will take the genre forward in a big way. The biggest hopium right now is a game no one knows anything about, the LoL mmo.

Im pretty sure Microsoft wants to continue with wow. In what shape or form is hard to say, but it would be stupid to just drop it. Keep creating new content that is tailored to the gamer of this day and age is prob the way to go.

that's a flawed argument. maybe they're all suffering because they're all mediocre at developing mmorpgs fit for the 2020s; it's the most likely explanation especially because most of them followed behind blizzard's design like little puppies; for example: who do most insist to have excessive mandatory grinding as if it was ever required in order to have either an mmo or an rpg?

the design is just bad; e.g. people may want a sandbox instead of treadmill mandatory grinding with vertical progression; I was told "guild wars 2 does horizontal progression well" and it's extremely vertically progressive too.

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I suspect the target audience for WoW, a PC-onky online fantasy video game, was likely to have an internet connection long ago. The huge increase in people online will mostly be older people or people getting online with mobile devices. The fact WoW has been the largest subscription MMO ever by a long way and remains massive almost two decades after it released makes it far from a failed game in terms of commercial success.

a flawed argument. maybe the competitors are mediocre too because they follow them like puppies on design. e.g. guild wars is often cited as an answer to the excessive vertical progression on wow and they obviously have a lot of vertical progression too when it was never required in order to have either an mmo or an rpg.

[Sinaa]

For example

1. Will they alter the game engine a lot? Will they do a major technological revamp? Will it be able to do a lot more for developers to play around (e.g. vr or ai or multiscreen/consoles/mobile)?

2. Will they alter the way the game itself is promoted to new players? E.g. will it be renamed to just "World of Warcraft"(no expansions)? Will it have an MS Launcher?

3. Will they affect the lore at all? Will whatever expansion Blizzard had planned 2 years ago go as planned next year? Are they going to make another movie?

1. No.
2. Likely, but not right away, give it 5 years!
3. I don't really know, not in the short term.

If MS cares about WoW & has actual plans in store for the game, then the most likely changes will alter how in the ION era most dev focus has been on M+ & M raids and bring back casual focus instead. Also perhaps we'll see a big combat systems overhaul to transition the game to controllers & xbox.
I'm sure people will think I'm crazy, but I think the people thinking a free WoW sub will never be bundled with Xbox live are the real crazy ones, but it will take a lot of time to get there & WoW could really see a huge influx of new players due to this.