6 ms·
Blizzard has a problem. World of Warcraft is growing stale and they seem to not have a replacement (as far as zero leaks). Overwatch has been a big success an
by eternalny1 7y ago
Blizzard has a problem.
World of Warcraft is growing stale and they seem to not have a replacement (as far as zero leaks).
Overwatch has been a big success and leaks suggest Overwatch 2 with more PVE.
That's fine and all but that's not going to be the cash-cow that WoW was for them. I was a dedicated player since launch but left after Legion and won't be returning.
- piptastic 7y agoWorld of Warcraft just had a classic release, which I would hardly call stale. https://www.newsweek.com/world-warcraft-subscriptions-triple-classic-release-1461086 https://www.newsweek.com/world-warcraft-subscriptions-triple...
- magashna 7y agoIt might be making money, but I wouldn't say re-releasing an old version is progress.
- LIV2 7y agoDigging a game out of the archives is pretty stale imo
- sleepybrett 7y agoLet's not forget that their next big release is a WC3 remaster .. womp womp.
- Fnoord 7y agoI agree, but there is one person who's not in the market for an out of date game but is for a remaster: youth who were too young to play the original. Case in point: my kid.
- krzyk 7y agoAnd earlier Starcraft Remastered :) Blizzard is as stale as it gets right now. It is very sad that Blizzard was: - the creator of Warcraft, which popularized RTS, - Starcraft which basically created esports (and popularized RTS even more) - Diablo which popularized hack-n-slash RPGs And now all they do is remaster after remaster (or "classic").
- MLpractitioner 7y agoIronic we are calling not stale a company that rereleases a game after 15 years
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- arkades 7y agoRe-releasing your old content to spike subscriptions with a nostalgia crowd might be the very definition of stale.
- radcon 7y agoClassic will never have the same revenue potential because players would revolt if they added in-game transactions. Those transactions were a massive source of profit in later expansions and completely eclipsed subscription revenue. Even as the WoW playerbase dwindled, revenue grew thanks to things like game-time tokens, level boosts, mounts, cosmetic items, etc. All of those things are 100% antithetical to the premise of Classic WoW.
- schaefer 7y agoI was definitely the target demographic for WOW classic: nostalgic as heck. Instead with the Hong Kong dust-up, I faced the facts. The blizzard I grew up with and loved is dead. Even with Wow Classic released, the world has moved on. Instead I initiated a full Battle Net account delete, which nuked all my Wow characters, Hearthstone decks, etc.
- mulletbum 7y agoI would do this if their p2p voice chat didnt work better than everyone else, including Hangouts and Discord.
- urda 7y agoRe-releasing old content is not something you consider "stale" ?
- j-c-hewitt 7y agoBlizzard accidentally stumbled on the biggest business model of the 2020s-2050s: digital retirement homes combined with the GenX/Millennial equivalent of re-releases of Beatles albums. I realized I was aging when I figured out that WoW Classic is Oldies Radio but for people in my age bracket.
- eternalny1 7y ago> I realized I was aging when I figured out that WoW Classic is Oldies Radio but for people in my age bracket. I was a hardcore Everquest player prior to WoW. I actually ran the biggest market site at the time, EQPrices.com. So you want to talk about aging ... but yes, WoW Classic, while interesting, was not enough to get me back in. And I played at launch. So I know all about having to carry around arrows and all that other jazz.
- j-c-hewitt 7y agoI played EQ as a young kid and I remember EQPrices! Really cool. Never bought anything, though, not having money and all that.
- magashna 7y agoI'm not sure people want OW2, especially with a PvE focus. Their last Blizzcon was pretty bad ("Diablo for mobile: Don't you all have phones!?") and they somehow managed to make things worse right before this Blizzcon. Things are looking grim for a company that used to be an industry game changer.
- andrewjrhill 7y agoThey could have just made a Diablo or StarCraft universe MMO (or both) and people would lose their minds and sell their kidneys to pay for a monthly subscription...
- kick 7y agoThey could have just made a Diablo or StarCraft universe MMO It's really not that simple. An analogue in software would be "Ford could have just made a fully self-driving car." MMOs are both technically hard and artistically hard, and even Blizzard has failed at making them in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Blizzard_Entertainment_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Blizzard_Entertainment_...
- RaiseProfits 7y agoMaybe nostalgic folks over 30.
- greenshackle2 7y agoMaybe on release, but it's very difficult to make an MMO that people will keep paying for month after month.
- elsonrodriguez 7y agoI've played OW with people who are absolutely terrible at shooters but loved the characters and skins. Eventually they rage quit because they never actually wanted to get better at the game. This same thing happened with Dust 514, where there was nothing at all for the person who couldn't aim, (unlike EvE which has some barely passable PvE). I'm guessing that Blizzard is looking at these stats, and noticing that people log back in for the limited pve content in OW.
- jandrese 7y agoI find it incredible that World of Starcraft is not a thing. (Starcraft Universe?) Blizzard is letting billions of dollars just sit on the table, refusing to even acknowledge the possibility of its existence. My only theory is that they didn't want to cannibalize the WoW playerbase, but that's how you get stuck in a rut as a corporation.
- pvg 7y agoCompared to many other moneymaking genres, MMOs are expensive to build and maintain and difficult to get right. The vast majority of them are massive, pricey failures including one of Blizzard's. I can't imagine any decision-makers at any major game studio thinking not-developing an MMO is leaving billions on the table and, to me at least, it seems they're likely right.
- pjc50 7y agoWhat would that look like? Would it just be WoW with a Starcraft skin? Would getting it wrong be worse for the brand than not doing it?
- SchoolboyBlue 7y agoprobably something like Halo / Borderlands 3 / Titanfall campaign.
- kick 7y ago
- Mirioron 7y ago>Overwatch has been a big success and leaks suggest Overwatch 2 with more PVE. I wonder about this though. While Overwatch as a game has been successful, I've heard some people say that they feel like Blizzard has lost their magic after Overwatch and Hearthstone. I used to always be interested in any new game Blizzard was working on, but those days are gone.
- mulletbum 7y agoYou are also older though. I don't know about you personally, but I was a fanboy all the same, but as I age the importance has decreased significantly, especially as I started to not enjoy the same types of games as I once did in my youth. My son however, he is just like me when I was 10, loves them. Likes waiting for them. Wants to be a part of the everything Blizzard.
- Balero 7y agoI often find this problem hard to detect. Are things less interesting? Are films worse? Or am I just less interested. ON the flip side when I was a child, we had no internet and I remember long boring weeks of Summer (In a rural area, meant I spent a lot of time alone). But as an adult I basically am never bored. Is this because of having more stuff to do? Or because of being older?
- eternalny1 7y ago> I wonder about this though. While Overwatch as a game has been successful, I've heard some people say that they feel like Blizzard has lost their magic after Overwatch and Hearthstone. I don't think they lost their magic. I was a WoW hardcore player for years. I won't play Overwatch due to it being a twitch shooter but I love the art direction. Hearthstone is awesome. Can be played lightly, whenever, and is extremely well built for a "card game".
- copenja 7y agoHearthstone apparently has 100 million users, and at some points was banking about 40 million a month.
- user5994461 7y agoHard to believe. That would be like one tenth of the world, excluding children and not internet connected. Even steam is a bit below that in active users and it has many more games and gamers.
- fesoliveira 7y agoCalling WoW stale is a reach. It consistently appears among the top 10 highest grossing games every month. Millions of people still play it and come back every expansion. They have no reason to make a "WoW 2" as long as their subscription base is strong and profitable. Also, keep in mind that they don't even use subscriptions as a metric anymore, since now they have the in-game store with micro-transactions and the WoW Token which sells for more than the price of a subscription.