
With World of Warcraft fading, what will Blizzard do next? - evo_9
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/123193-with-world-of-warcraft-fading-what-will-blizzard-do-next
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vibrunazo
I think the real money auction house in Diablo 3 will work tremendously well.
So well that it will change MMOs. Blizzard will make most of Diablo's revenue
from it, and competitors will follow. Blizzard will embrace this idea and will
apply it to future games, maybe Titan will be free to play with a similar
auction house. Which will also move a bit further away from the desktop.

The player auctions are extremely scalable. It puts two huge revenue streams
together. It's the sum of consumable virtual items + selling rare exclusive
items. I'm not sure Blizzard realizes this, but this will be huge. And I'm
already betting my money on it.

~~~
Negitivefrags
I'm highly sceptical.

Ignoring the auction house for a second, Blizzard makes money once though a
large up front sale, and then has no monthly fee. The game is played entirely
on online servers with no single player however.

That means Blizzard makes the most money from a customer who plays though the
game once (or not at all) and then doesn't play again.

This philosophy seems to be present throughout the games design which, as far
as I can tell, is tailored for minimum re-playability and maximising the fun
you get on your first play through. Even the auction house itself helps this
design goal when matched against their other design decisions.

This kind of design isn't conducive to long term success with the auction
house.

I believe that the auction house is primarily designed to kill 3rd party item
sales, which it absolutely does, albeit in a way I find personally
distasteful. While I'm sure it will be a non-trivial revenue stream, I don't
think it will be anything like what WoW subscriptions were.

Disclosure: I work for a company making a competing action RPG.

~~~
vibrunazo
The key difference between the subscription and the freemium model is the
scalability with flexibility. A subscription is a fixed value the costumer
pays for. If you set it to low, you're missing the opportunity to make more
money from users willing to pay more. If you set it to high, you run the risk
of users who would still be profitable not buy it at all.

Then you could try different tiers of subscriptions. But that only bandages
the problems. Then came consumable virtual items, which automatically gives
you infinite tiers of pay users. You can play the game for $15 a month, you
can play it for free, or you can pay $3000 a month if you're willing to. And
according to Zynga's report, many does, and that's where they get most of
their money from.

That flexible scalability is why freemium is replacing subscriptions. And
that's why I think the auction house will take over subscription. Because not
only it's a freemium model, but it's a genius freemium model. It takes the
best of the two main types of freemium (consumable and permanent virtual
items) and put them together. It doesn't put a limit on how much a user can
pay you. And it's also very attractive to users.

~~~
Negitivefrags
I'm not saying that auction houses can't work in general, I'm saying that it
will not work in Diablo 3 due to it's design.

I'm well aware of the benefits of free-to-play, as I am a founder of a company
making a free-to-play game!

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mckilljoy
No game can last for ever, and for WoW to last nearly a decade is pretty
impressive.

Blizzard has plenty of games in the pipeline for the next five years.
SC2:HOTS, SC2:LOTV, Diablo III, and the presumed Diablo III expansion pack.
Plus 'Titan', whatever that ends up being.

It might not be as robust and predictable as WoW subscriptions, but running a
profitable business isn't supposed to be easy.

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joblessjunkie
This is completely off topic, but does anyone know how to prevent extreme tech
from redirecting my iPad to their awful mobile version every time?

~~~
mrsebastian
AFAIK (I'm the editor there) there's no easy way around it. I think we've
recently rolled out another mobile layout -- but only for non-iPad devices
(iPhone, Android, etc.)

It's OnSwipe for WordPress, incidentally. Maybe there's a local hack you can
perform to disable it -- setting a cookie, or something.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

~~~
benbritten
I have to agree with pagekalisedown, onSwipe is a scourge that needs to be
destroyed. If you insist on using it to the detriment of your readers, then
please please please give us the ability to turn it off easily and have it
never come back on. Also a general note to all web devs: my iPad now has more
resolution than any of your monitors, DO NOT force me to view your 'optimized
for mobile' site if I dont want to. otherwise I will stop visiting your sites.
Thanks!

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kbutler
Sounds like 2007 all over again: [http://gigaom.com/2007/06/17/has-world-of-
warcraft-finally-h...](http://gigaom.com/2007/06/17/has-world-of-warcraft-
finally-hit-a-plateau/)

Raph Koster (much of whose work I admire!) seems a bit off-base speaking of
WoW in 2007: “This is how Open Big MMOs all go. A big rush, peaking a little
bit after the launch. Then a plateau for a while, then a tailing off.”
[http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/06/15/how-open-big-virtual-
wo...](http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/06/15/how-open-big-virtual-worlds-grow/)

I would not expect WoW to be around forever, but I wouldn't bet on its demise
any time soon. Fading? Maybe.

WoW subscription history vs other games from:
<http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png> (from
<http://mmodata.blogspot.com/>)

~~~
mattbriggs
With 10mil subs still they will take a long time to fade, but if you look at
that chart, the first significant dip in its history was post Wrath of the
Lich King, followed by the current dip which occurred after Cataclysm. They
regained their subs after the wrath dip, but this one seems to be ~4x as big.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Pandaria comes out, I doubt
that they will ever return to their peak, but that is the point where we will
_start_ to be able to make predictions on how long the demise will take.

------
cnkeller
The numbers are getting lower because many people are leaving due to Blizzards
repeated failure at basic concepts: trying to balance the game for both PvE
and PvP, trying to make the content challenging enough for hardcore players,
but accessible and rewarding enough for casual players. The first expansion
was pretty good, but I think the number of guilds that finished Sunwell were
something like 1-2%. I know a lot of "hardcore raiders" quit after the second
expansion (myself included) simply because of the design changes. Even among
friends that still play, I don't know anyone really looking forward to the
upcoming expansion, it's not that people are sick of WoW in as much as they
are sick of what Blizzard is doing with it.

~~~
Lavery
While calling these "basic concepts" is technically correct, I suppose,
they're also among some of the most difficult aspects of game design. In a
community as large and diverse (in terms of both ability level and time
commitment) as WoW's, it's hardly surprising that Blizzard would err on the
side of populism.

10.2 million may be a step down from the peak of popularity, but WoW is still
wildly profitable and maintains a userbase larger than most of its competitors
combined.

~~~
cnkeller
Just because I don't agree with their choices, doesn't mean I don't understand
them. Even though Sunwell was an unplanned response to Black Temple being
"tuned too well", the next expansion not being ready, the top guilds crushing
existing dungeons, it doesn't make sense to release content that 5% of your
player base ever has a hope of seeing, much less finishing. I mean I get it
for sure. From a monetary/subscriber point of view, they absolutely did the
right thing, the hardcore crowd for sure was the minority (the vocal
minority), but minority nonetheless. I think we're seeing that in the
subscriber numbers, 10% of so people got fed up and left, and the remainder
are [happily?] plugging along. But playing through the various expansions, you
can definitely feel that the top designers, etc have been pulled off onto
Project Titan. The game has lost some of it's epic feel (which could also be
due to it's age as well).

~~~
anonymoushn
The way they approached the problems with Sunwell in 3.0 and 3.1 seemed really
good. All of the content was easy to finish, but fights like OS3D,
firefighter, yogg+1, and algalon were engaging for a long time. After that the
hard modes stopped being significantly different from the normal versions of
the encounters, which makes them a great deal less exciting. The lack of
excitement in high-end raid content should only impact high-end raiders,
though, so this probably has very little to do with the people who are leaving
the game.

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ketralnis
> Subscription figures have fallen from 12 million just after the release of
> the last expansion to 10.2 million

That's probably a cycle that follows every expansion: all of the old players
come back, play it, get bored again and leave. I'm not sure this is evidence
that it's "fading"

But they've already announced their next game, Diablo III, and they tend to
only have a few games in their peak at a time anyway, so we know what they're
doing next because they've told us.

~~~
rbii
10.2 is the lowest it's ever been. Usually the numbers rise and fall depending
on what other games are released -- every time a big-title MMO comes out, WoW
generally loses 1-2 million players to it (and then they come back).

If the figure stays around 10 mil (i.e. if SWTOR keeps them), I guess that'll
be 'proof' that WoW is fading.

~~~
neworbit
Surely you don't mean "ever been"? I don't know how long it took them to get
to ten million players in the first place but I'm imagining it wasn't on day
one :)

And semantic point aside, ten million users is still mighty impressive!

~~~
kbutler
Looks like 2005-2008 to get 10 million users:
<http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png> (from
<http://mmodata.blogspot.com/>)

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noarchy
Despite the opening of the article, I wouldn't put much stock in The Old
Republic being a long-term threat to WoW. Short term, it probably did take
some players from WoW. Anyone who is currently playing TOR knows that the
server populations have been steadily declining, particularly since the end of
the first month. It isn't the same catastrophic decline that other would-be
WoW challengers had, but it isn't going to hold sky-high subscriber numbers,
either.

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Zimahl
I wouldn't expect WoW to lose any more players in the next quarter due to some
austerity measures they are doing (the Diablo 3 offer, Scroll of Resurrection)
but it is clear that see a down trend and are trying to stem the tide.

They are not planning any new content until the next expansion which we can
assume will be the standard November release (although no confirmation yet).
That doesn't bode well since even I, a mediocre player in a mediocre guild,
have killed Deathwing. If you haven't done it on regular, you've done it in
the Raid Finder.

So what are some going to do for the next 9 months? I'd expect quite a
subscriber drop during the summer with more in the fall. The numbers will jump
back up with the new expansion but most likely not be back over 10 million.

~~~
RegEx
Is Deathwing the current final boss? I used to play WoW back in BC, and I
LOVED it (a little too much to be frank, grades suffered quite a bit). The
triumph of your guild taking down a boss after struggling with it for weeks
couldn't be matched. After Wrath came out, content was getting cleared so
quickly that I didn't find it fun anymore. I'm currently having a blast with
SC2 though, with a large thanks to the esports scene.

~~~
anonymoushn
Deathwing is the final boss of the current expansion. Did you find that WotLK
hard modes were boring? I thought they were pretty good other than ToC.

~~~
RegEx
I quit fairly early in Wrath when Naxx was cleared on our relatively casual
server on day1 or day2. Good guilds still took a while to get through Kara in
BC because of attunements, etc. I felt that would set the tone for the rest of
Wrath so I jumped ship.

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Zarathust
I can't find the exact listing anymore but Blizzard job postings was searching
explicitly for people to develop a new MMO in a completely new settings (no
star/warcraft, diablo). This was a few months ago

[http://us.blizzard.com/en-
us/company/careers/directory.html#...](http://us.blizzard.com/en-
us/company/careers/directory.html#region=Americas)

~~~
Zimahl
They've been working on a new MMO for a while now, the only information that
has really come out is that the internal name for the project is 'Titan'.

There's a Wikipedia page with about all the non-speculation that is currently
available:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28Blizzard_Entertainment...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28Blizzard_Entertainment_project%29)

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nextparadigms
Diablo 3 and SC2 should hold them for a while.

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joshmlewis
How much round about revenue have they made off of WoW? And how much profit?

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laserDinosaur
Last I heard they are working on a new MMO. The name Titan got leaked a while
back.

~~~
mertd
Titan is mentioned in the article. According to the author it is targeted
towards a more causal gaming audience and not intended to be a WoW
replacement.

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indiecore
I'm going to guess they take a break to lounge on their huge pile of money
then ramp up Diablo 3 stuff.

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chasingtheflow
Jump on the iOS bandwagon or get left behind ....

