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That's some crazy fanfiction about how WoW tokens work and nothing to do with reality
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Jan 19, 2022 16:40
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Yeah, people absolutely do buy mythic carries(and I used to participate in carry runs from the carrying side back when I played), and the way it works is that people who want carries but don't have the gold on hand will buy tokens for cash, sell them for gold on the auction house, and then use that gold to pay for the carry. The people getting paid/providing the carry receive the gold and either use it for the things you'd use gold for(auction house stuff, mounts, whatever) or buying tokens to cash out into game time/balance. At no point do tokens directly change hands, and gold cannot be rendered entirely worthless because you explicitly cannot use tokens as a medium of direct exchange without several degrees of removal. I expect that the entire scheme is financially neutral or relatively small net gain to Blizzard, but the real purpose was to internalize and regulate the previously external process of gold buying/real money transactions, which existed since the game's infancy but was done through sketchy third party sites that generated enormous headaches in customer service via people getting scammed in various ways. e: You also can't even hoard tokens without having multiple accounts to store them, because there's a hard cap on how many you can hold on one account at once, and it's a very, very low cap. IIRC it's 20, which is too low to allow even slight market manipulation without running dozens to hundreds of accounts. Kanos fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 16:47
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Sentinel Red posted: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. Microsoft was streaming Starcraft on the official Xbox twitch account yesterday after the news broke. It's safe to say there's a lot of interest over there in actually taking advantage of the Blizzard franchises they acquired, particularly with how many folks in the games industry grew up idolizing Blizzard and their titles before everything there went off the rails. Microsoft just has enough resources and smaller studios to do things with the properties instead of them fermenting and rotting on the Blizzard vine for years on end because nobody's doing any work.
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Jan 19, 2022 16:56
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Honestly, the only negative I can really see is for the unionization efforts. Activision would already have spent every dollar they thought could possibly be useful to fight it, so Microsoft's additional resources aren't likely to make a difference, but they may make things just better enough that a critical mass of will for unionization isn't reached. Other than that, Blizzard is well into a death spiral that they have proven either incapable or unwilling to break out of. MS buying them is certainly not a guarantee that they'll be able to pull up, but it's a better chance than leaving Bobby/current Blizz leadership to keep doing what they were doing. I REALLY would have loved to see Bobby very publicly get the boot though(even though that would have never happened).
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Jan 19, 2022 17:04
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So apparently Kotick's strategy for handling the crisis was just to buy all games media: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/bobby-kotick-suggested-buying-kotaku-or-pc-gamer-to-change-the-narrative-report-claims
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Jan 19, 2022 17:13
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Kanos posted:
Yeah, this is really the impact of tokens. They are a minor bump in sub money (At the end of the day buying a token means that someone is paying 5$ more for a month of game time) but letting them cut CS staff?! MBAs n poo poo love chopping headcount!!
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Jan 19, 2022 17:37
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Fruits of the sea posted:So apparently Kotick's strategy for handling the crisis was just to buy all games media: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/bobby-kotick-suggested-buying-kotaku-or-pc-gamer-to-change-the-narrative-report-claims Hmm quote:
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Jan 19, 2022 17:38
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Is there some limited resource involved in running raids that makes charging other players for the privilege of helping them through a hard fight a non-lovely thing to do or are high level WoW players just assholes?
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Jan 19, 2022 17:42
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I mean, the Wall Street Journal is an OK source, even if they don't say where they get it from. But feel free to take it with a grain of salt, perhaps Kotick was just trying to flex on somebody.
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Jan 19, 2022 17:43
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Cattail Prophet posted:Is there some limited resource involved in running raids that makes charging other players for the privilege of helping them through a hard fight a non-lovely thing to do or are high level WoW players just assholes? Time, if nothing else.
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Jan 19, 2022 17:46
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Cattail Prophet posted:Is there some limited resource involved in running raids that makes charging other players for the privilege of helping them through a hard fight a non-lovely thing to do or are high level WoW players just assholes? For buyers, getting geared up enough to join a guild/raid clearing the content to get the gear you want takes dozens of hours of dungeon/rep grinding. For the sellers, they have done that process, cleared the content enough to not even need the gear anymore, so the only incentive they would have to run it is for money. It is not in and of itself a bad/amoral thing to do, but it drives gold buying/selling behavior.
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Jan 19, 2022 17:46
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Are carries that expensive? I've never looked into them
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Jan 19, 2022 17:56
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Cattail Prophet posted:Is there some limited resource involved in running raids that makes charging other players for the privilege of helping them through a hard fight a non-lovely thing to do or are high level WoW players just assholes? Any group that’s good/consistent enough to be able to sell boosts has collectively spent a metric poo poo-ton of gold on repairs, consumables, gear, etc. to get to that point, so the booster runs are great for recouping those losses and building up a bank for the next raid/expansion. As for the buyers, it’s mostly for the prestige of getting the achievement saying that you beat a raid on the two highest difficulties when it was the latest content, though the final raid of each expansion has also had an exclusive mount tied to doing that. And since a lot of non-booster groups often demand that you have the achievement as a baseline demonstration of competency at the raid, it becomes even more lucrative if you don’t have a group that cleared it in the first couple months.
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Jan 19, 2022 17:56
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Cattail Prophet posted:Is there some limited resource involved in running raids that makes charging other players for the privilege of helping them through a hard fight a non-lovely thing to do or are high level WoW players just assholes? Raiders and wow players are extremely gate-keepy with high level raiding So if you don't want to deal with aggro raid leaders treating the game like a second job then you can buy a carry instead of playing the game
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Jan 19, 2022 17:58
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Cattail Prophet posted:Is there some limited resource involved in running raids that makes charging other players for the privilege of helping them through a hard fight a non-lovely thing to do or are high level WoW players just assholes?
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Jan 19, 2022 18:01
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Craptacular! posted:EA buying Westwood and OSI is that old now, huh? Apple Silicon is stupid expensive, just fuckballs huge chips. Apple gets away with it because they only sell it in complete computers and make massive margin on any upgrades from typically anemic storage and ram on the base models. The cheapest AS device is $700, it would take a lot of doing to get that down to Nintendo's favored price points.
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Jan 19, 2022 18:03
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Either way, you're really selling Embracer Group's amalgamation of various middling publishers short there.
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I really don't think Nintendo gives a poo poo about the acquisition game and has no interest in being acquired. Microsoft already tried to offer a merger with them before and they were laughed out of the room.
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Jan 19, 2022 18:05
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Cattail Prophet posted:Is there some limited resource involved in running raids that makes charging other players for the privilege of helping them through a hard fight a non-lovely thing to do or are high level WoW players just assholes? I have run a guild that has sold Heroic and Mythic runs for years so I can kind of answer this. Basically consumables in WOW are extremely expensive to the point where per month my guild was spending ~1M-3M gold just to supply our raiders. This creates a pretty big problem since outside of sales runs, there are legitimately no ways for guilds to make the gold necessary to cover those expenses, so you either need everyone in your guild to dedicate like 10-20 hours a month gathering poo poo or you can just sell runs. Sales runs do create a very weird atmosphere though since people aren't really willing to spend their time helping out people anymore because they could instead be making gold on top of the fact that for a bunch of bosses every tier, if someone makes a mistake it almost assuredly results in a wipe so trying to help people learn a boss fight is going to result in spending 2-10x as long on a boss and when you are doing the same bosses every week, for months on end, wiping will absolutely kill your motivation to ever continue doing it. The last raid has a boss fight thats literally 12 minutes long in heroic, wiping on her literally makes your soul leave your body, doing it multiple times basically results in the raid wanting to leave.
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Jan 19, 2022 18:06
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Cattail Prophet posted:Is there some limited resource involved in running raids that makes charging other players for the privilege of helping them through a hard fight a non-lovely thing to do or are high level WoW players just assholes? Depending on the difficulty of the content you're asking 16-19 other people that don't know you to spend multiple hours of their time, and the expertise they've gained from working out killing these bosses over generally multiple months of practice. It would be an rear end in a top hat move to expect an organized group to just do that for you when you're bringing nothing to contribute, for nothing. If you're buying a run, then generally it's because you're playing a new character without the gear to contribute to killing the bosses, so the group selling has to be good enough to do it despite being down multiple people. If you already have a decent character then you can just join a pickup group of other normal players, but the ability you see in there will vary wildly and you have no idea how many bosses you'll be able to kill. Guilds do sales because it generally costs 1-2 million gold per tier to provide for repairs and consumables, and it's far more efficient to do 2 sales runs than expecting raiders to farm on their own. Personally I think the whole concept of currency, repairs, and farming for crafting stuff is just totally an anachronism and shouldn't even exist anymore. It doesn't add anything but a layer of hassle. Gwaihir fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 18:33
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This thread's getting a bit into the weeds on WoW specifics. I think it's best if this thread sticks to being about the business and industry side of things. There are plenty of other threads to talk about WoW's specific in-game issues. In fact, the general MMO chat thread over in MMO HMO would be a great place to talk about WoW's issues from a game design/player experience perspective. That is a discussion I'm interested in reading, I'm just trying to keep this thread to its intended topic. Harrow fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 18:51
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Yeah, apologies for the derails. Talking about dumb wow stuff is more fun than actually playing so I can't help myself 
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Jan 19, 2022 19:05
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Craptacular! posted: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. When has Apple ever signaled interest in AAA gaming? Why would they pivot into a new demographic when they already have a foothold in mobile gaming (which is infinitely more profitable) with room to grow? What company has Apple ever purchased that retained organizational independence? I get that you're just spitballing here but this take doesn't make sense. e: also why would sony buy ubisoft what is going on e: also do you think the nation of japan would be comfortable with the sale of its single most profitable public company to an american firm Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 19:08
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It's interesting to look at Netflix of all companies getting into the mobile game space recently, more as an Amazon Prime style "value add" for already existing subscribers. Also in context with stuff like Arcane being a league of legends story. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/netflix-gaming-starts-to-look-legit-with-impressive-league-of-legends-spinoff/
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Jan 19, 2022 19:13
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Netflix gaming is a joke like Stadia, Luna, etc. Its been time tested that tech companies can't buy their way into the games business, despite their 'best' efforts Microsoft is the exception here because they've been in the business for like 30 years
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Jan 19, 2022 20:17
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Microsoft at least tried to buy into the business properly by investing in a console (not a fake console like the Stadia, a real one) and even they were running at a loss for years before managing to break out with the 360. Netflix Gaming is barely a drop in the ocean for the level of investment needed to establish yourself.
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Jan 19, 2022 20:21
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They were also publishing games before xbox, so they had an idea of what it took. Right now its a fight over who controls content. The platform itself doesn't really matter, so anybody chasing a new way to stream stuff is a generation or more behind. Its not say Netflix can't create some cool place for indie games to thrive, make the Adult Swim of games or something... but that's many years away, its not going to challenge the big players, even they have to play it right for years. That's why its an eye roll for me and also why you see so much consolidation happening right now for those who can afford it. gently caress I've been in this business for too long 
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Jan 19, 2022 20:30
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I swear I'm not a Netflix stan but I do see the opportunity there - they have crazy popular franchises and shows that drive a serious amount of popular culture. It makes sense for them to try to capitalize on it, even though right now their offerings are essentially nothing. But they also arent hard to get into - I've already got a Netflix account, so sure I'm going to try their new card battler game that's free on Android with my subscription, and also know that it doesn't have micro transactions. Definitely a drop in the bucket right now, absolutely.
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Jan 19, 2022 20:39
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External Organs posted:I swear I'm not a Netflix stan but I do see the opportunity there - they have crazy popular franchises and shows that drive a serious amount of popular culture. It makes sense for them to try to capitalize on it, even though right now their offerings are essentially nothing. But they also arent hard to get into - I've already got a Netflix account, so sure I'm going to try their new card battler game that's free on Android with my subscription, and also know that it doesn't have micro transactions. You could make this exact same argument for Disney, Warner Brothers, Viacom and Fox. Every major media company has popular franchises, do you ever wonder why they don't just spin up their own in-house AAA game publishing/streaming divisions?
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Jan 19, 2022 20:46
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:You could make this exact same argument for Disney, Warner Brothers, Viacom and Fox. Every major media company has popular franchises, do you ever wonder why they don't just spin up their own in-house AAA game publishing/streaming divisions? This is true! Fwiw I don't think Netflix is developing them in house, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
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Jan 19, 2022 20:48
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BULBASAUR posted:Netflix gaming is a joke like Stadia, Luna, etc. Its been time tested that tech companies can't buy their way into the games business, despite their 'best' efforts Rarity posted:Microsoft at least tried to buy into the business properly by investing in a console (not a fake console like the Stadia, a real one) and even they were running at a loss for years before managing to break out with the 360. Netflix Gaming is barely a drop in the ocean for the level of investment needed to establish yourself. Yeah, it's important to emphasize that microsoft WAS a joke for like a decade after the original Xbox launch. The original Xbox was never, ever profitable and they were at best a trailing insurgent competitor - the reason why they eventually became a real competitor at the table is that they had brute persistence and the infinite wells of Microsoft cash to draw on to soak those lumps and beatings until they got established, at which point their biggest competitor Sony's unforced errors with the PS3 gave them the window they needed for the 360 to be a gangbuster success. For a lot of these big IP holder companies it makes a lot more sense to simply license out their IPs and collect passive cash from that than it does for them to spend a gorillion dollars spinning up their own development houses and trying to figure out how to make video games that don't suck rear end from scratch.
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Jan 19, 2022 20:52
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:You could make this exact same argument for Disney, Warner Brothers, Viacom and Fox. Every major media company has popular franchises, do you ever wonder why they don't just spin up their own in-house AAA game publishing/streaming divisions? https://www.polygon.com/2016/8/18/12514296/disney-game-industry-history
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Jan 19, 2022 20:54
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Yeah, you can have popular franchises but if you don't have the internal resources to make them work (because that is a very expensive investment that takes many, many years to get going just to produce anything, and even then it may not be good), the best solution is to just license them out.
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Jan 19, 2022 20:57
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It's like building a car: yeah, you could make it yourself with enough time and effort and money and research and so on, but every step of the process gets easier the more you outsource it. Eventually you reach the point where it's cheaper and easier to just make a custom order from an auto manufacturer.
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Jan 19, 2022 21:20
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To add an even more exaggerated example of how IP isn’t enough to make video games without heavy investment in development: Games Workshop has a very in-demand IP that has spawned multiple successful video games (and many not-successful games). With the demand for their IP well-established, why don’t they develop their own games in house?
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Jan 19, 2022 21:21
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that was admittedly a leading question but this is a great answer
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Jan 19, 2022 21:23
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Cantorsdust posted:To add an even more exaggerated example of how IP isn’t enough to make video games without heavy investment in development: I guess WB Games is a bit of an anomoly and had its own journey but it shows that these IP hoarding megacorps could do this poo poo themselves if they really wanted to (or at least buy some studios to do it for them).
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Jan 19, 2022 21:42
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WB almost sold off its gaming division for parts last year, so I wouldn't necessarily hold them up as some bastion.
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Jan 19, 2022 21:44
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games workshop discovered it was cheaper and easier to just license their properties out to random studios and let them make something with it. i dont think its a bad strategy because you do get a few good games out of it. but sometimes you get shovelware or a bad game out of it because the studio lacked the experience or time and budget to pull it off
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Jan 19, 2022 22:03
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Cantorsdust posted:To add an even more exaggerated example of how IP isn’t enough to make video games without heavy investment in development: A better example is Marvel who have probably the biggest IP in the world and squillions of dollars from movie profits but still aren't making their games in-house. And their recent releases prove that popular IPs aren't enough. Avengers has been a huge failure and Guardians of the Galaxy has been very middle of the road. Gamers on the whole are smart enough that they're not going to buy in just for an IP if the base gameplay underneath isn't where it needs to be.
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Jan 19, 2022 22:17
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Rarity posted:A better example is Marvel who have probably the biggest IP in the world and squillions of dollars from movie profits but still aren't making their games in-house. And their recent releases prove that popular IPs aren't enough. Avengers has been a huge failure and Guardians of the Galaxy has been very middle of the road. Gamers on the whole are smart enough that they're not going to buy in just for an IP if the base gameplay underneath isn't where it needs to be. I haven't played it myself, but: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/09/15/marvels-avengers-has-sold-better-than-you-think-this-year/?sh=67cca1281c96 Also this is your regular reminder to get GotG because it's excellent.
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Jan 19, 2022 22:28
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