Activision Blizzard goes independent

It's hard to say how bad revenue is affected by the drop in numbers as the far eastern market was a pay for time deal, not a subscription.

It was this market that really pushed the numbers over 10m, but in terms of revenue individually they are likely to much less valuable compared to a western subscriber.

In 2007 they paid 0.45 Yaun per hour, with might be completely wrong now, but that's just under 5p now. (And I believe the game also has time limits in china) You'd have to play 5 hours a day every day to match a UK subscriber.

Unless we find what proportion of the 7-8m are subscribers compared to time players, the figures might be a bit misleading.

There was an article that suggested the first 4 years of wow cost $200M to run. If that is correct and say we add a healthy 50% for inflation that's still only $75M to run Wow for a year. Based on that they only need 500-600k subscribers to break even.

So they might not be doing as well as they were, but compared to practically any other game they are still minting it.
 
Activision-Blizzard needs a disproportionate amount of money to run its "business", anything less than excellent money grubbing schemes is thrown out of the window.

With the Next-Gen looking hazy and their slow adoption of mobile gaming (which has already had its bubble burst i might add), on top of their debt, they could sink fast if they cant resume business as usual.
 
I think this is a good move for Activision Blizzard since I feel Vivendi were forcing them to make changes to their games that took away what made them great to begin with.

Now everything you do results in a payment.
 
That's a large and hard amount of money to recoup.
With a new IP perhaps, but with other MMOs going the f2p and micropayments route, it will be hard to maintain a user base as large or as willing to pay long term.
 
KrazehJeff said:
I think this is a good move for Activision Blizzard since I feel Vivendi were forcing them to make changes to their games that took away what made them great to begin with.

Now everything you do results in a payment.
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That's probably to do with bobby kotick, Google the door handle for his view on gaming then you'll have a bit of insight to where his head is it :(
 
Kotick is one of the few people in the world i'd like to thump as hard as possible, right between the eyes. The guy is a cancer to gaming.
 
I'm guessing this has a lot to do with project Titan supposedly being sent back to the drawing board. With WoW numbers falling and no replacement anywhere in the near future the only way is down for the Blizzard cash cow.
 
Semiskimmed said:
its 7.3million now according to mmo champ.

£8.99 a month is the current pricing.
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djkav said:
WoW should have gone F2P already.

The engine is creaky and old. The graphics need a reboot. I guess they'll still milk it till its dry.
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£8.99 a month * 7300000
*12 months

£787,524,000.00 a year.......yea just forget that little sum to the left and just give it all away :p
 
m4rk84 said:
I'm guessing this has a lot to do with project Titan supposedly being sent back to the drawing board. With WoW numbers falling and no replacement anywhere in the near future the only way is down for the Blizzard cash cow.
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Whenever a game gets "restarted", it's usually a good sign that things are seriously wrong. Worse, I can't think of a single project that's been "restarted" and actually turned out OK. Guess Bliz are really struggling atm. Mind you, as with any dev that's been around for years, they've lost a ton of the original staff.

And sometimes you lose your way, or just can't recapture that spark you once had. Is it too soon for RIP Blizzard posts? :p
 
They've been operating under significant profits from the get go, you have to look at the bigger picture and look at the franchise as a whole

You have the game itself, plus expansions (4?)
Then the subscription model
The store which sells pets, mounts, toys, plushies and authenticators, character services

Then you look at "exposure" sales, people that used the WOW service, and were at some point exposed to Starcraft, Diablo, and even the original Warcraft franchise (encouraging sales)

I don't even want to get started on TCG and other stuff they do on the side

Theres a lot of money between all that, irrespective of wether the subscriptions plummel to a couple million or stay as they are
In Europe and North America respectively it wouldn't suprise me if those regions had less than 3 million subscribers between them
The bulk of subscribers are likely in Asia where theres a bigger following for it

I do wonder what the threshold is for action such as server mergers to become a reality to consolidate the players
 
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Dicehunter said:
Me personally I think this is one of the signs that WoW is finally going to lose it's MMO crown.
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The only thing to kill the crown jewel of MMORPG's, is death by a thousand cuts.

The FTP model is doing this, why pay for something, when you can just earn it or pay smaller amounts for little things?

Especially considering the direction of WoW since Cataclysm, which is apparently unwanted.
 
Now if it was blizz splitting from activision this would be good.

Them splitting jointly means nothing as Activision will just continue its milking process, business as usual.
 
StriderX said:
The only thing to kill the crown jewel of MMORPG's, is death by a thousand cuts.
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That's extremely debatable, just because WoW was and is the more commercially successful MMORPG does not by any means make it the crown jewel unless you only measure success by financial gain or number of accounts open (I'm not talking about players as these are different things).

I'd throw in Ultima Online as probably the top MMORPG of all time, for actually being ground breaking, commercially viable and encouraging roleplay whilst having no levels etc to restrict game play to certain areas of the game world. It also had a remarkably large player base for it's day.

I'm not knocking WoW, I played it for a couple of years but I think it's vastly over-rated, especially as it borrowed many elements from earlier games for which it's now held up as an example of originality. Much like Microsoft/Apple getting credit for many developments which they had nothing to do with originally.

Personally I don't think WoW is going anywhere for a very long time and doubt it'll be toppled from the top of the MMORPG tree for at least another 5-8 years. There's nothing, absolutely nothing in development which has a chance, the current batch of games have too narrow an appeal, the only way WoW will die is suicide by poor development decisions, much like Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online went downhill, despite being excellent games.
 
Halfmad said:
Personally I don't think WoW is going anywhere for a very long time and doubt it'll be toppled from the top of the MMORPG tree for at least another 5-8 years. There's nothing, absolutely nothing in development which has a chance, the current batch of games have too narrow an appeal, the only way WoW will die is suicide by poor development decisions, much like Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online went downhill, despite being excellent games.
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Which is happening now
 
Amnesia said:
£8.99 a month * 7300000
*12 months

£787,524,000.00 a year.......yea just forget that little sum to the left and just give it all away :p
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Its not like that's profit though is it? out of that they have to pay for network connections good enough to allow 7.3 million users to connect at once lag free, the hardware to run the servers and its required maintenance/upgrades, staff to oversee operations in game, in the data center, in the office, it has to fund the new content provided every major patch, and lets not forget that WoW actually pays for the running of the Diablo III and Starcraft II servers.
 
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