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Herstory Begins Now posted:given that cod franchise is an absolute cashcow and one of the single biggest things that MS gets out of the deal, I would be unbelievably surprised if they start making massive changes to what is apparently a very working formula I'm sure they'll also keep WoW. While WoW isn't the largest or biggest cash-cow it's still big enough especially if you consider its cultural impact. And why only grab 1 cash-cow when you can grab multiple ones? While I'm not happy about all of this consolidation under the great 4-paned banner I am definitely curious what this means to some of my favorite IPs.
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Jan 19, 2022 00:29
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Yeah even on a down year (or from last year) CoD is still crazy big. 
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Jan 19, 2022 00:29
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Jelly posted:I'm racking my head trying to think of gaming acquisition news prior to 2008 and the best I can do is come up with the Sierra Dynamix merger. Bandai merging with Namco and EA buying BioWare/Pandemic were probably the biggest ones before that. Oh, and Microsoft buying Rare, of course.
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Jan 19, 2022 00:29
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Anno posted:Yeah even on a down year (or from last year) CoD is still crazy big. Is there any way to break that down by platform, though? CoD always seemed to be mostly an Xbox/PC thing anyways. Jelly posted:It really feels like every important merger over the last two decades is now under Microsoft's umbrella. At the time, Eidos buying Crystal Dynamics was a big deal.
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Jan 19, 2022 00:43
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Acerbatus posted:Is there any way to break that down by platform, though? CoD always seemed to be mostly an Xbox/PC thing anyways. Idk if there’s a % breakdown anywhere, but I don’t think this has been true since Sony got marketing rights last gen and outsold Xbox by such a huge margin. It’s big on both consoles. A real opportunity is to try to revitalize the franchise on PC. Releasing on PCGP/Steam would be a good start. https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/1483439989832642565?s=20 https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/1483440209865764868?s=20
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Jan 19, 2022 00:52
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Anno posted:An interesting thing here is that arguably the most important non-mobile CoD game is already multiplat and will presumably be updated for a long time to come. Even if new games are exclusive starting in 2023/2024 PlayStation people will still have Warzone. and with the yearly $60 games unlocking content for Warzone, there's no way I could see them not continuing to sell CoD on the Playstation. Most likely Xbox versions will just get exclusive content and be the "official" version for advertisement.
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Jan 19, 2022 00:55
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Jelly posted:It really feels like every important merger over the last two decades is now under Microsoft's umbrella. EA buying Westwood and OSI is that old now, huh?  Either way, you're really selling Embracer Group's amalgamation of various middling publishers short there.If Sony gets in on this their answer is probably to look to Ubisoft. I do wonder how long Nintendo can pluckily go along. At some point if Apple gives them an offer it would be worth considering if they get organizational independence but access to Apple Silicon. Apple really doesn't want to gently caress with the iPad as they'd have to in order to compete with the Switch, and they'd rather just profit off the people who own an iPad and a Switch which is a hell of a lot of people.
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Jan 19, 2022 01:11
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sebmojo posted:i've been banging on this drum for a while, but COD: IW is actually really solid and quite innovative in its own terms, unfortunately everyone hated it
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Jan 19, 2022 01:15
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i would be astonished if WoW didn't still make vast amounts of money for how much it costs to run, it's millions of people paying $20/month plus cosmetics and stuff, plus buying expansions. People talk like it's on the scrapheap rather than just not as popular as it used to be.
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Jan 19, 2022 01:16
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It does for sure, blizzard remains quite profitable. It's only a failure if you consider anything under 50% margins a failure, which I'm sure some business do.
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Jan 19, 2022 01:23
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sebmojo posted:i would be astonished if WoW didn't still make vast amounts of money for how much it costs to run, it's millions of people paying $20/month plus cosmetics and stuff, plus buying expansions. People talk like it's on the scrapheap rather than just not as popular as it used to be. That and it would leave the biggest subscription MMO exclusive to non-Microsoft storefronts. I don’t think they want anymore stories about how FFXIV is “killing” WoW (I doubt it is, but it’s hard to tease actual numbers)
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Jan 19, 2022 01:29
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Non-Classic WoW basically is in the approach of “we don’t need as many subscribers, we just need the ones that spend hundreds on tokens”. Since Blizzard got into the business of selling in game money directly, removing all stigma from when it was the domain of Steve Bannon’s Bot Farm, the economy has gone Venezuela apparently, with quality auction house buys being priced at levels unattainable with just a subscription alone. Even Classic is selling collectors editions and boosts. The actual subscription is not the point.
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Jan 19, 2022 01:40
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sebmojo posted:i would be astonished if WoW didn't still make vast amounts of money for how much it costs to run, it's millions of people paying $20/month plus cosmetics and stuff, plus buying expansions. People talk like it's on the scrapheap rather than just not as popular as it used to be. Wow makes very good money still, but they have been seriously hemorrhaging players for *especially* the last year and the subscriptions # is generally inflated relative to actual players because they do a bunch of gimmick sales to get people into 6 month subs. That said, wow is quite genuinely on the rocks with TBC basically a big bot filled shitshow and main wow decimated its playerbase after the apocalyptic interview ion (wow lead dev) did with preach (where he tone-deafly doubled down on extremely unpopular game systems, among other things), which caused the mass exodus of almost all the big wow content creators to ff14. This was the leadup to ff14 continuing to blow up to the extent that they had to stop the free trial program and even, for a while, stopping sales because they were so inundated with players. Like wow is full of whales so it'll be profitable for quite a while still, but it is very much a game in crisis both of their own making and because it's just hard to compete in the mmorpg arena as a game that very much looks like it's almost old enough to vote (not insulting wow's art direction, which did a lot with what they had to work with, but the game just looks super aged). Their issues were compounded by back to back weak expansions and then all the other actiblizz drama of the last year on top of that, which specifically hit the wow team. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 01:53
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the main reason I think there's a serious chance Microsoft will abandon CoD's annual model is the entire focus of their game business these days is game pass. Annual CoD titles don't really have the same sort of benefit to game pass compared to one that you just keep updating forever with new content.
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Jan 19, 2022 01:57
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Also I think Microsoft just needs volume of games, in number but also scope, genre etc. Being able to take a handful of the CoD support developers and have them go back to making their own things would be great, and probably quite welcome for a lot of the teams there. I’d love to see the likes of Raven and Toys for Bob back doing their own things.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:02
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Craptacular! posted:Non-Classic WoW basically is in the approach of “we don’t need as many subscribers, we just need the ones that spend hundreds on tokens”. Since Blizzard got into the business of selling in game money directly, removing all stigma from when it was the domain of Steve Bannon’s Bot Farm, the economy has gone Venezuela apparently, with quality auction house buys being priced at levels unattainable with just a subscription alone. You know, like, tokens do not actually create gold, right? It gets repeated that they're pure gold from nothing blizzard profit, but it's really just shifting your token purchase in to place of someone else's sub fee. You buy a token for 20$ and put it on the auction house. Someone else buys it from the AH for gold, then applies it for a month of game time instead of paying 15.99$. the net gain to blizzard is miniscule compared to selling a 60$ boost or 55$ server + faction transfer or 25$ mount or 25$ race change. Token sales are a very small drop in the bucket, they require subbed users to even do anything. Before I quit I had a guild mate declare that they were cancelling their sub and playing via buying tokens with their gold instead, which.... is literally just having someone else pay their sub +15%. They weren't very smart. It's a convoluted system (probably on purpose), but it's not creating money. Blizzard has been trying to pull gold out of the economy with every expansion, they're just really bad at it, like most things they attempt.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:07
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i don't think wow looks super aged, the cartoony style has made it age a whole lot less poorly than, like, everquest 2
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Jan 19, 2022 02:10
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Yeah I log on to WoW like two days every year and am always mildly shocked with how great it still looks. It also sounds great and plays great, which gives me some hope that it can be resurrected if they make better design decisions.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:13
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The future of the industry right now are walled gardens and basic cable type subscriptions to games. Anyone with the resources to pull it off has been racing to make it happen and what you're seeing here is more of that. Amazon had the right idea and money, but couldn't pull it off because its run by idiots. Google never fully bought into it or the industry. Microsoft seems like its gonna be the one that wins with a big push on having PC and Xbox content. Tencent/China are a different story of course. Whenever Microsoft acquires a studio you can expect past games to still be on PlayStation, but future games are going to be Xbox exclusives. Some time after release they might get added as part of the Microsoft studios game backlog. There will be exceptions, but not many. Alkydere posted:I wonder how much the sale was done to escape the growing unionization. Zero 
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Jan 19, 2022 02:15
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moonmazed posted:i don't think wow looks super aged, the cartoony style has made it age a whole lot less poorly than, like, everquest 2 it looks great for an 18 year old game, but imo the wording of 'it aged a whole lot less poorly' is very to the point, too
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Jan 19, 2022 02:19
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Wow makes very good money still, but they have been seriously hemorrhaging players for *especially* the last year and the subscriptions # is generally inflated relative to actual players because they do a bunch of gimmick sales to get people into 6 month subs. That said, wow is quite genuinely on the rocks with TBC basically a big bot filled shitshow and main wow decimated its playerbase after the apocalyptic interview ion (wow lead dev) did with preach (where he tone-deafly doubled down on extremely unpopular game systems, among other things), which caused the mass exodus of almost all the big wow content creators to ff14. This was the leadup to ff14 continuing to blow up to the extent that they had to stop the free trial program and even, for a while, stopping sales because they were so inundated with players. Even without the external drama with content creators that not every WoW player would pay attention to, there’s still what was actually going on in-game that became impossible to ignore. Like how because of how they set up the Shadowlands as these disparate realms of the afterlife and refused to make any direct portals between them, it took several minutes to move out of one, into the central city of the expansion (derisively called the airport terminal of the afterlife), and then into the zone you wanted to go to… and that’s just assuming that you’re going to and from the flight points closest to the entrances. Or how they made a big fuss about how the central currency of the expansion was almost exclusively going to be used for strictly cosmetic rewards, then apparently used that as a justification to make said currency more of a pain in the rear end to earn than ever before. Or when they announced one of their big lorebooks to give a “definitive” account of the Shadowlands from the perspective of its inhabitants… and then preemptively declared that some elements might be being told “from a certain point of view” (in other words: subject to retconning) before it had even been released. Basically, there were also just a ton of little things that added up on people’s “fed up with this bullshit” meters.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:42
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Wow makes very good money still, but they have been seriously hemorrhaging players for *especially* the last year and the subscriptions # is generally inflated relative to actual players because they do a bunch of gimmick sales to get people into 6 month subs. That said, wow is quite genuinely on the rocks with TBC basically a big bot filled shitshow and main wow decimated its playerbase after the apocalyptic interview ion (wow lead dev) did with preach (where he tone-deafly doubled down on extremely unpopular game systems, among other things), which caused the mass exodus of almost all the big wow content creators to ff14. This was the leadup to ff14 continuing to blow up to the extent that they had to stop the free trial program and even, for a while, stopping sales because they were so inundated with players. i think 'big bot filled shitshow' is maybe an overstatement since bots don't really affect your experience much? i haven't been playing Classic for ages, but i see people were complaining about bots back then too, i used to see a couple and kill them until I got bored, was nbd. Perhaps I'll fire up my troll mage and play a bit, I'll come back and say if it turns out you're right. Anno posted:Yeah I log on to WoW like two days every year and am always mildly shocked with how great it still looks. It also sounds great and plays great, which gives me some hope that it can be resurrected if they make better design decisions. the music is fantastic too, I had such a good time coming back to classic.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:55
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Fruits of the sea posted:ESO has a pretty robust format for earning money from players. Apart from the subscription, they release a paid expansion every year (which is rolled into the subscription after a year has passed) and they release new cosmetics and minor dlc every financial quarter as microtransactions. The only downside is that the pace at which they add new content means they just ignore balance and make everything scale to the player. Which is neat but also weird, because there is no endgame and 90% of the content can be completed with a low-level character. One thing to note about ESO's yearly expansions, Chapters as they are officially called, is that they are WAY smaller in both explorable game space and amount of content than a WoW expansion. The game space players can actually explore is about the size of a large WoW zone with about as many quests, though all quests in ESO are fully voiced...by the same half dozen voice actors. True to the mainline ES games! As part of the yearly Chapter story two dungeon DLC packs containing two dungeons each will be released as paid DLC while a free, to those who purchased the Chapter, questing zone will be released as the ending of the chapter. The This zone will be smaller than the main chapter zone and accordingly have less questing content. A raid will also get released at some point. Or is it two raids a year? The raids are completely separated form the main story and very few people do them.
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Jan 19, 2022 03:06
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Dreadful news, for both the unionisation efforts, and for seeing yet more developers swallowed up under an already powerful corp. Always figured Kotick would sail away scot free regardless though, shitheads like that never get their comeuppance. Still, given what a toxic shitshow Blizzard are, and the 'small potatoes' - as some insist - they represent, it's interesting that the main press image Microsoft put out prominently features 4 Blizzard games plus only CoD and Candy Crush from the rest of ABK. Certainly suggests they're not an afterthought to Microsoft at all. Who knows, maybe SC: Ghost will finally get another shot even.
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Jan 19, 2022 03:17
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Anno posted:Yeah even on a down year (or from last year) CoD is still crazy big. I know that it's because Nintendo withheld the digital sales numbers, but I'm honestly curious how those numbers would actually look if Nintendo released their digital sales numbers, even just for Animal Crossing.
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Jan 19, 2022 03:39
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sebmojo posted:i think 'big bot filled shitshow' is maybe an overstatement since bots don't really affect your experience much? i haven't been playing Classic for ages, but i see people were complaining about bots back then too, i used to see a couple and kill them until I got bored, was nbd. If you play it, I'd be curious to hear how alive and populated it feels to you. I don't play any mmorpgs so I'm not ragging on wow out of any kind of favoritism, I just think wow is an interesting case because they made some really peculiar design choices in tbc that seemed very at odds with the long term health of the game. If you're going to try it and want to go in unbiased, then skip the next paragraph. TBC is where the botting stuff apparently got substantially worse, both because they made some changes that were extremely favorable to setting up more and more lucrative bots, plus fewer players stuck with it to offset the perception of more bots. Blizz was selling launch day boosts to 58, which both meant that bots were starting off basically fully profitable from day 1 (vs taking 150+ hours to get there per account, which over an entire bot network, lets them snowball far more quickly) as well as leaving lower level zones emptier because real players were also just boosting to level 58 on launch day. because you can skip leveling on bots, I'd be surprised if botting is super visible at low levels, but it has been one of the single most persistent complaints with tbc Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 03:42
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Regalingualius posted:I’m legitimately curious: how has CoD kept chugging along for all these years, when basically everyone knows that they’re formulaically churned out on a fairly constant schedule? Is it just a rolling audience of teens/young adults where by the time the “current” generation gets tired of them, they already have the next one lined up? Buddy just wait until you hear about FIFA games
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Jan 19, 2022 04:14
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sebmojo posted:i think 'big bot filled shitshow' is maybe an overstatement since bots don't really affect your experience much? i haven't been playing Classic for ages, but i see people were complaining about bots back then too, i used to see a couple and kill them until I got bored, was nbd. The music is the one consistently good part of WoW right up to the current day. I'd even argue it's only gotten better over time
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Jan 19, 2022 04:15
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Herstory Begins Now posted:If you play it, I'd be curious to hear how alive and populated it feels to you. I don't play any mmorpgs so I'm not ragging on wow out of any kind of favoritism, I just think wow is an interesting case because they made some really peculiar design choices in tbc that seemed very at odds with the long term health of the game. If you're going to try it and want to go in unbiased, then skip the next paragraph. I mean it's one boost per account, and you can only play one toon at a time, so...? I saw not that much, and complaining in mmos should always be taken with a grain of salt (lol) For e.g I just scrolled through the most recent 100ish reddit threads on classic wow and none of them are about botting, which isn't dispositive but still. I still have 1 month left on my account so I'll see if I can get my buddy back and get my little rogue to 70 before it runs out.
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Jan 19, 2022 04:22
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Craptacular! posted:EA buying Westwood and OSI is that old now, huh? Nintendo getting bought out still seems unlikely- especially by a non-Japanese country. I've heard that it's nearly impossible for a Japanese company to get bought out by anyone from overseas no matter how much cash is splashed around. (Significant given Nintendo typically has large cash reserves) They might not be a behemoth like Sony or Microsoft but they've never really needed to be, or at least seem to have figured out a cosy niche in the industry doing things the big companies can't or won't. Bloody Pom posted:Not sure if it's been brought up before, but one amusing outcome of this merger is that two of the Playstation's most well-known character mascots (Crash and Spyro) are now wholly owned by its chief competitor. Kinda says something about having your prominent games actually owned by you, though Sony never really relied on mascot characters the way that Nintendo and Sega did.
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Jan 19, 2022 04:23
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sebmojo posted:I mean it's one boost per account, and you can only play one toon at a time, so...? I saw not that much, and complaining in mmos should always be taken with a grain of salt (lol) you only run one bot per account, you just have tons of accounts. the significant thing is that it takes the time to get a new bot online from a week or two to basically instant
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Jan 19, 2022 04:41
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Nintendo would just not be interested in being bought unless they end up in a catastrophic & desperate position where they're looking at having to exit the console market or something.
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Jan 19, 2022 05:05
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Gwaihir posted:You know, like, tokens do not actually create gold, right? This is only technically true. Every server had incredible gold hoarders- massive sums of gold that had been accumulated over the course of 15 years, could never be spent, and which no cosmetic gold sink could put a dent into. The tokens take that gold out of people's inventory, from which they would never have escaped, directly into circulation.
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Jan 19, 2022 08:29
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30.5 Days posted:This is only technically true. Every server had incredible gold hoarders- massive sums of gold that had been accumulated over the course of 15 years, could never be spent, and which no cosmetic gold sink could put a dent into. The tokens take that gold out of people's inventory, from which they would never have escaped, directly into circulation. I haven't played WoW in over a decade, but a very good friend still does on and off and has forced me to watch YouTube videos of people ranting while also explaining things. I was initially pro-Token, because I'm the kind of guy who would play 100 extra hours of WoW a month if it meant my game time was free. Apparently nobody does that. The token won't go out of circulation because nobody is seriously redeeming them for game time. Everyone would rather pay for the sub and hold the token since that's one fewer token they need to buy. Players are instead using tokens to circumvent the obstacles they created through their own elitism. You save the token and buy game time because the tokens can get you carried through a heroic raid. The person you paid to carry you through the raid spends it to get carried through Mythic and or PVP. Doing these carries yourself is how you make gold essentially, and THAT is difficult just to get started because the gear needed to do that is priced by people for whom tokens have become a substitute for in-game gold. If you have that much gold to buy the gear, the person who gets your money probably uses it to buy a token. Basically, the WoW token has supplanted gold as the coin of the realm regardless of whether it generates additional in-game gold into the economy or not, and nothing less than, and while each token represents (x) amount of gold that doesn't mean there's that much gold in the global economy for all the tokens to be sold for that price, though the economy around the token is based on such fallacies. Gold isn't being generated by their presence, but there's a lot of gold in the population already and it's just basically a backing for tokens. In an economic sense the way it would stop is if someone comfortably wealthy in either in-game gold or real life money would generously circulate a surplus of tokens until the amount of gold each one represents has dropped significantly, but if you were to spam the market with 10k gold tokens the hoarders would just consume the excess and give themselves free game time until the median price rises again. EDIT: I just realized it's awfully hard to talk about this without sound like a libertarian whining about the gold standard, even if the reality is more like crypto. Anyway, the in-game gold is kind of useless because people don't actually want in-game gold, they want tokens. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 08:57
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That is completely not how tokens work. Once you buy a token with gold, you either redeem it for game time or $15 of Blizzard Balance. You cannot hold onto it and use it to pay for a mythic carry.
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Jan 19, 2022 09:48
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What happens is that the booster creates a character on your server, and you pay that character enough gold to be able to buy a token on your server, which they then personally redeem for either gametime or Blizz bucks.
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Jan 19, 2022 10:19
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Shadowlyger posted:That is completely not how tokens work. Once you buy a token with gold, you either redeem it for game time or $15 of Blizzard Balance. You cannot hold onto it and use it to pay for a mythic carry. Yeah this was me memory of how it worked (though I haven't played since BFA). You buy a token through the auction house but it's not a standard item that you can buy from a specific player, it goes into a big pool of tokens and you pay the market price for one of them. You can't freely trade them between players as far as I know.
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Jan 19, 2022 10:33
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lih posted:Nintendo would just not be interested in being bought unless they end up in a catastrophic & desperate position where they're looking at having to exit the console market or something. And even then they'd probably more likely pivot into third party games like Sega first. (hopefully without Mario having all the same problems Sonic had) Either way it's purely theoretical as long as Nintendo exclusives are top 10 sellers, despite like two straight decades of Nintendooooooom articles from every news site that wonders why Nintendo stopped sending them review codes.
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Jan 19, 2022 13:22
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moonmazed posted:i don't think wow looks super aged, the cartoony style has made it age a whole lot less poorly than, like, everquest 2 EQ2 looked like garbage the day it launched. https://twitter.com/TheWeek/status/1483796385556217856?s=20
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Jan 19, 2022 14:52
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30.5 Days posted:This is only technically true. Every server had incredible gold hoarders- massive sums of gold that had been accumulated over the course of 15 years, could never be spent, and which no cosmetic gold sink could put a dent into. The tokens take that gold out of people's inventory, from which they would never have escaped, directly into circulation. And these mythical couple gold hoarders are just buying all these tokens because ????? This is crazy and not how it works lol. Especially because there's caps on how many tokens one account can buy or sell weekly, these few whales would not be able to remotely fund any server's token economy. Craptacular! posted:I haven't played WoW in over a decade, but a very good friend still does on and off and has forced me to watch YouTube videos of people ranting while also explaining things. I was initially pro-Token, because I'm the kind of guy who would play 100 extra hours of WoW a month if it meant my game time was free. Apparently nobody does that. The token won't go out of circulation because nobody is seriously redeeming them for game time. Everyone would rather pay for the sub and hold the token since that's one fewer token they need to buy. Players are instead using tokens to circumvent the obstacles they created through their own elitism. You save the token and buy game time because the tokens can get you carried through a heroic raid. The person you paid to carry you through the raid spends it to get carried through Mythic and or PVP. I think you've been baited by the youtube algorithm or something because that is literally impossible based on how tokens work. You cannot trade, mail, vendor, bank, or destroy Tokens. Tokens purchased for real money can only be listed; Tokens purchased from the Auction House can only be consumed for Game Time or Battle.net Balance. Tokens are very much not "the coin of the realm," gold is. A guild selling heroic carries is doing it for gold, not tokens. Someone buying potions and consumables for a raid is doing it for gold, not tokens. Gwaihir fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 15:13
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