Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard

From the numbers I’ve seen it is fewer people each time.

I think the correct way to look at it is “Blizz are doing a great job keeping the game interesting and profitable but a certain level of loss over time is inevitable” rather than “OMG Blizz suck, WoW d0med”.

How many successful MMOG sequels are there? FF XIV is the only one I can think of, although of course FF XIV was an epic fail and FF XIV:ARR was the success. I can see why WoW2 has never happened.

Well, “less than 2 weeks” didn’t mean that much, since it’s basically just a continuation of an existing game. Also, it’s free, so tons of people can just play with no investment.

But hitting 25 million even if its a continuation is alot of players… if only 1% buy season passes, that’s still over 1 million!

If only 1% buy season passes it’s a huge failure. I would imagine Blizzard wants to be making tens of millions of dollars every month on OW2.

My point was its obviously above 1%… I’d put it in the 5 to 10% range. I dont know there targets, but I’d believe they can get it to being sustainable like Gamepass.

I hate Blizzard, but even I know they make a killing. But yea theres no guarantee, the GaaS market is very fickle imo. Tons of good games get passed on… and I consider OW just above average.

Guild Wars 2. And I imagine there are a bunch of Asian ones.

Sure, but the peak was around 12 million back around Wrath of the Lich King. I think the last time Activision reported subscriber numbers it was around 5.5 million in 2015, at least that’s what I could find via Google. I’m sure the number goes higher when an expansion releases but I doubt it’s 12 million concurrent subscribers. I think if it were or if WoW had exceeded that, Activision would be shouting it from the rooftops.

Yeah, for sure. I think it’s both true that WoW is long past its prime (in terms of subscribers) while also saying it’s going strong and isn’t going away anytime soon.

I think the users WoW has left are the die-hard users who will likely stay until the servers shut down. Now, that is still a decent amount of money. WoW has changed from a super-casual (kinda) game to an esports-inspired speed run with M+ metas.

What is also interesting is the handful of WoW streamers I half-pay attention to that tried to pivot to FFXIV during the chaos last year have all shifted back. I bet they didn’t see the numbers they needed for that.

I would disagree. There is still a casual audience there, but I would agree Blizz has leaned hard into esports-ifying everything. I don’t think the actual playerbase is into that as much as Blizz is trying to market it. The retail guild I am in is a mix of both more hardcore and more casual players, and they have enough achievement hunting gear and mount collecting to keep those who are not super hardcore around.

The WoW Classic scene is where the super hardcore went, for progression world firsts, arena tournaments etc. At least, i get the feeling playing WOTLK classic it is the very meta-gamey hardcore crowd there. But, there are still plenty of casual “dad-gamers” playing.

Which is to say, it all kind of stinks. WoW used to be a lot less min-max, but like most of the online gaming sphere, that is how basically all games are.

I’m not sure when you think this was, because as early as BC hunters had macros that were so finely tuned that you had to change them based on your ping to WoW’s servers.

Yep, that’s entirely false. It used to be much more fiddly.

Also WoW is clearly well along in its decline, and saying otherwise is rejecting objective reality.

WoW’s total number of subscribers is still really high, but the number of active users is much lower than it’s been in the past. I think at one point they had something like 12M active users?

We really don’t know either number as they stopped reporting it quite some time ago, but it’s extremely clear the game is in rapid decline from a ton of (admittedly subjective) reports. Maybe the next expansion will turn that around. I rather doubt it; WoW is simply a very, very old game.

I mean, I played a hunter in Vanilla and BC, I have played every WoW expansion since then as well, and it is more min-max now than it has ever been. That “macro” you are referring to is the steadyshot macro to time steadyshots between your auto-attacks, and it couldn’t be “tuned” to your ping, you were just kind of fucked by your ping, and you had to do your own delaying to make the rotation work. It was more of a “feel” and it was super cool.

In TBC classic, on the re-vamped client there was no ping issues, so hunters had an even more complicated rotation that would depend on their main hand weapon speed, and timing steadyshots between auto shots. Even in that one example things have been min-maxed to a ludicrous degree since then. People have dedicated discords, heavily macro’d spreadsheets, just to optimize DPS. It is multiple levels of hardcore beyond what it was in 2007.

Fuck man, you have blizzard patching out DPS min-max exploits weekly at this point. It has gotten ludicrous.

DK’s clam-weaving was a hilarious thing a couple weeks back. Where you could open a fished up clam to reset the GCD (global cooldown) during your rotation, which increased your DPS by a very small %. Shit has been stupid in classic.

In my experience, playing TBC then vs TBC now, is that was not a widespread thing that everyone was into. Things were way more relaxed, there were no twitch streamers with 3 hour discussions on which pieces of gear to take, and how to time your rotation down to the nanosecond.

You only need to look at the % of people who completed raids then vs now. People have optimized the game to the point where many boss encounters have skipped phases due to the DPS being so high. It is a completely different world.

12M was the peak, which was WOTLK (and maybe the start of Cata), it is only considered to be the peak, because after that Blizz stopped sharing subscriber counts publicly (in the same way) and it was known that servers closed/consolidated, obviously people had left.

I would assume it is still in the millions, but probably not in the 10’s of millions at this point.

All that optimization was happening in the launch of the game too. The tools weren’t there yet so it was manual, and it wasn’t amplified on Twitch and YouTube due to being 2004, but it existed. Hell, high-level “theorycraft” existed in Everquest too. I’m the one that proved EQ1 Shaman alchemy didn’t actually do anything and that was in like 2000.

It absolutely was not.

I was there, I played it again in 2019. The difference is night and day.

You do not know what you are talking about.

Nope, it all existed back then but most players weren’t exposed to it, as you needed to drill down into class-specific forums, there was no algorithm putting the stuff in front of your face.

Now if you’re arguing that analytics and theorycrafting is much more effective now than 20 years ago, well, no duh.

Not sure how they are making their estimations, but they’re just over 1M currently.

It wasn’t, and you are wrong.

Really don’t think MS is buying Blizzard for WoW, guys. At least not in its current state…