Even after the subscriber loss, ATVI (Activision) had quarterly revenues of over $300 million in subscription fees, the fact that an 8 year old MMORPG is still generating over $1 billion a year in subscription revenue is an amazing testament to the value of the intellectual property brought to the table by the purchase of Blizzard Entertainment. ATVI is still carrying over $7 billion in goodwill on their books from this acquisition, which is accounting speak for 'we believe that the Blizzard brand is worth this much, or at least this is the most our auditors will let us value the brand at.' The problem is that ATVI is on a quest to take the 'stereotypical evil corporate game company' crown from Electronic Arts.
The result is that WoW gets milked hard for that high profit margin subscriber income, while being told 'sorry we simply don't have the resources to invest into this game!' It is laughable that they will claim they cannot invest more resources into a property that generates recurring revenue streams, while they manage to spend $100+ million on advertising this quarters CoD du jour. WoW has been delegated to being the overachieving red-headed step child of Activision, why invest in a great property when all you want to do is make game equivalents of Michael Bay films? I suppose even Michael Bay films could be incredibly profitable if people were stupid enough to keep going to see movies where 80% of the content was copy-pasted from the last movie.
The best hope for WoW is that the general population stops buying Call of Duty games. Many gamers played the same version of CS for the better part of a decade and it was awesome, that game did not need 3 or 4 iterations of it pooped out every year for the sake of milking a franchise to death. I suppose the flaw in my logic is that games like CoD are not designed for 'gamers', they are designed for those with an attention span that is challenged by anything more than a 5 second respawn.
The WoW community needs to stop arguing about whether 'casuals' or 'hardcores' are driving the game to ruin, they need to realize it is actually a case of all the people who enjoy Blizzard games vs the mindless hordes that buy all the other garbage that Activision puts out.