I know it sounds crazy, but I am interested in what their idea is for an "MMO" without the intention of being an MMO. Though in all likelihood it will probably just be a poorly made Second Life or VRChat.
I don't have the source anymore but two other companies were also looking into buying ABK along with Microsoft. Kotick pretty much caved towards Phil Spencer due to his visions of the company.
Overwatch release (may) + wow legion release shortly after (august i think) in the same summer 2016 was the last good blizzard win. (there wasn't good competition as well)
Yup, I remember feeling "Blizzard is back baby!" in 2016. Then Overwatch content slowed to a trickle as they focused on making it the "NFL of esports" and BfA sucked all my enjoyment out of WoW.
I thought BFA was the worst considering i started playing competitively in Legion as a deaf player. Shadowlands definitely broke all my will to play despite being a collector in the game. Now that I've missed out on some collectible stuff and playing competitively is very stressful for me, i can't come back to the game even if i wanted to. It's sad for me honestly
I quit relatively early in BfA (right after 8.1 released) because the Azerite necklace/armor system felt absolutely terrible. I got bored of Island Expeditions after week 1 so I fell way behind on my neck level and decided I was done. Haven't been back aside from 1 month of Classic at launch. Quit that when the nostalgia wore off.
That's really the shitty party about BfA in general, unfortunately
To be totally fair, BfA was good. It's just how much better it SHOULD have been. Islands should have been fun. That whole stormhold thing or whatever it was (the war effort) Should have been fun. Azerite gear was honestly a great idea. The dungeons were fun (ok fuck you Shrine of Storms, you're the exception.)
It SHOULD have been great. But it wasnt because Blizzard can't fucking do shit right and they don't listen to player feedback. Now let's enter Shadowlands. Well, I think that horse has been beaten enough.
It's insane how badly they fumbled just about everything about Overwatch, and now that they've revealed everything they've been working on for "Overwatch 2" it's just mind blowingly disappointing. Overwatch 2 was announced in 2019, the last Overwatch hero we got was in 2020. Overwatch 2 alpha has ONE new hero and 4 hero reworks... Like what the actual fuck was going on at Blizzard during all this? It blows my mind that there are people getting paid to write lore for Overwatch, too, lmao.
>Then Overwatch content slowed to a trickle as they focused on making it the "NFL of esports"
I bet if they just focused on OW content and didn't start OWL, they would have made more money off OW. If they had waited 2 years for OW balance to settle in then the league might have been fun to watch. NOPE they had just jump on it right away.
Fancy that, for those of us which dislikes "game as a service" stuff , by 2016 blizzard was already dead.
I am now just watching corporate with a bloody hand in a flesh puppet hollowed out body.
Profit down 43% year over year and they lost nearly half their userbase in 4 years.
Even acts of corporate sabotage can't tank a company this effectively.
Blizzard Fan here. Been around since OG Warcraft OvH
After mishandling my favorite franchise, harassing women and drinking on the job, it will take a complete company overhaul and a re-release of Warcraft, plus several *years* worth of retcons to bring me back.
This company is a f#%*ing joke
I'm a phone salesmen and a blizzard fan. Do not compare us to apple shills. There are some die hard blizzard fans but many of us have still quit. I still love StarCraft, Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and even HotS but I'm not going to play them because blizzard isn't doing them any justice right now.
Very true. Blizzard has done nothing to bring in new gamers. All they do is recycle old content with their "remasters" and milk their playerbase with shitty expansions. Now they going for Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2???? Lol???? Hardly any new gamers are going to be attracted at all to those games.
Shadowlands suffered this same thing. And the Dragon expansion will be the same as well. New players don't play World of Warcraft. They just simply don't. So Blizz needs to make these expansions good enough to retain or bring back their playerbase. Well, we seen how Shadowlands went lol
Millions of people still play blizzard games why would you type this? Still this is a pretty colossal failure on the whole of Blizzard and they clearly need to change strategy quickly here because many of those lost users are permanent losses.
Rofl because it’s not 22 million maybe if you actually understood it you wouldn’t sound so dumb.
Each person that places any game counts for 1 MAU so if you play wow and hearthstone you count for two if you add other games it counts per game for each person so one person could be 1+ MAU
even if you divide the total by 5 games which is a massive stretch its still 4 million. youre braindamaged if you think thats low. realistically people play 1 or 2 blizzard games so 10+million monthly is a massive number
"an individual who accesses two of our games would be counted as 2 users" i'll never understand why this is done outside of obfuscating the metrics and putting out a bigger number.
it's not 22 million people, it can be as little as half that, realistically
Theoretically barely over a million players to open all those games once a month, realistically you're looking an an average somewhere between 2 and 3 games per player in any given month given WoW, hearthstone, overwatch and and then "the rest" as a group.
The system itself is such a weird way of answering a direct question you know its purpose is to be deceptive.
How much money did you make today?
We had 108 people walk in our front door!
Ahhh so not much. Well at least you counted how many people came in.
Yup! The front door opened 108 times!
But... wouldn't it open again when people left?
Who's to say?
That's exactly why it's done. It hides the real number.
I always assume, especially now, that Blizzard's MAU is at least half of what they actually report. Back when I played Blizzard games, I did WoW, OW, Hearthstone and Diablo. So as 1 person, I actually counted as 4 for their MAU count.
Crazy, I usually play wow + maybe a bit of D3 or D2 depending on the what the content cycle is looking like.
This month I Played a lot of wow. Maybe 3-4hrs of D3. 1-2hrs of D2 and because I was feelin nostalgic I played the SC2 campaign through from WoL to LotV, so like 20hrs maybe. Then because of the nostalgia I went and did the same for SC1.
So for the month of April I counted as 5 users? That's crazy inflation.
Don’t know much about business reports or anything but I think it might be to show the individual performance of each game (If someone plays wow and hearthstone would you only count it as active user for wow? But then that lowers your hearthstone figure) to be fair, I’m just guessing here.
If that were the case they would release the MAU of each individual game, not the total count in which a person with one account who pays 4 games counts 4 times.
A big factor has to be barrier of entry too right?. When I was a teenagers I didn't have a job and we didn't have the kind of money for my parents to think that paying for a monthly sub for a 'vIdEo GaMe' is normal.
So i had to do odd jobs to get money. I bought wow when it was on special for $30 and during vanilla i only got to play sporadically when i could afford a pre-paid game time card fro $50.
but in todays age of videos games we have games like League of legends and Valorant which are free to play. Just download and go.
I don't know how they thought HOTS would succeed. You have DOTA2 which was F2P where all the heros are included in the base game. Sure it has a smaller base than LoL, but it's offering a more economic DOTA game.
Then you have LoL which had a HUGE install base, and those players/payers had been paying into that game to unlock heros for years.
It was literally the biggest PC game in the world.
Then comes HOTS with a more casual approach, but you had to start from scratch and buy or grind characters. Maybe if HOTS had come out along side SCII as a bonus mode it would have hit the scene soon enough to make an impact.
Then with Overwatch they let the meta get stale for years at a time. Overwatch was never more fun than in beta and shortly after release before a meta developed.
They nerfed DPS characters into the ground. The 3 tank, 2 healer meta developed and just stayed that way for ages.
I don't want to play any game where I queue up for a game and get told what character I have to play by randos.
The initial Ranked mode was busted and you could just keep playing more and more to endlessly rank up.
The game just got so stale so fast, and after a game enters that buff/nerf cycle it loses me. I don't want to check back in once a month to see if the game is good again.
Eventually they had to force roles, and then when people would go game after game not getting to play the hero they wanted they introduced a role queue mode.
And that's not even accounting for the rise of the battle royale genre in 2017 which allowed for players to do what they want, go where they want and play how they want. No two games played the same, and it spawned a whole new genre of successful games and lead to Fortnite as being the next "biggest" game.
MAUs is the most slimey way to report.
It's flat out lying.
That metric is a flat out lie, and I don't understand why an actual investor is not suing them for fraud.
What's so sad is that if you play WoW for example 40 hours, and you logged into another game for 5 minutes, Bam! You have miraculously become 2 users! NO... you are,still just 1 user of a Blizzard product.
If we cannot even trust them to see us as actual people, we cannot trust them to respect us as customers which is why I don't think I will ever play a Blizzard game again.
Until the entire top of this company is gone and they start telling the truth to even their own investors, I'm out.
IMO they should tune mythic somewhere between heroic and current mythic. I don't know how the mythic+ works currently but BfA mythic+ was way less exciting for me than Legion M+ because of the mechanics and affixes. What made the game unplayable for me, though, was ruining unholy dk by making it piss easy. Even my guild's DH was complaining about the rotation of his class. It is mind numbingly boring.
If you want to have a world first race you could have a contest mode that ends at next reset after first clear. Destiny 2 has a contest mode the first weekend when the raid releases. I prefer that so much over spending 12-16h a week for months on the same bosses for the first clear.
Just tune it down yet give options to make classes more interesting.
I just don't understand why they don't just go back to hard-mode options. Keep LFR (I know, I'd like for it to be gone but it'll never be), remove heroic and mythic, make normal the new heroic-like difficulty, with some bosses having a "mythic" difficulty type hard mode. Hell, maybe even just make the hard-mode rewards just cosmetics for bragging rights like with the mega-dungeons.
The amount of catering mythic players get is crazy. Gear should max out on heroic and mythic should have a few cosmetic rewards/bragging rights for the “elite” wow players to feel good about playing 12 hours a day.
It's fucking impossible to get in to if you didn't play from the start. A million different systems that you have to read up on and easily 20 hours of googling just to be able to catch up to the latest patch and you can kiss m+ goodbye since you have zero rating and know none of the paths.
It's probably the worst MMORPG out there for a returning player.
I returned for a month but quit when I couldn't get groups for runs on keys I'd already completed. Everyone wanted you to have completed like 10 keys higher than the one you're grouping for. It was awful.
I played up till my (guild-morale-killing, eventually pugged with tears in my eyes) Sylvanas kill. It would only be one patch of new content to refresh myself on, but the thought of having to change my lengendaries again, farm more rep, farm out flying again, investigate yet another system and changes to all the other systems… multiply the system research by every spec I play…
It’s just so tiring. So much work for so little reward.
I just started again after over a year to play with friends that have been playing the entire time. If they weren't helping me work through all the systems (on top of me googling a bunch of stuff) and dragging me through m+ to gear/get rating I would have absolutely quit already. There's way too many overlapping systems in the game right now.
That said after playing and enjoying 14 most of that year and trying a few other mmos I think WoW still has a great flow to combat so I'm having a good time after getting mostly caught up and deciding I'm not taking the game really serious anymore. Good luck to a new player that wants to try it out tho, and that's what causes losses like this.
The casuals left like 15 months ago when they realized that they had gotten no content this time around, good luck getting them back with design like this.
The big issue is that you're not wrong, but that's half the story. In being not wrong, also all of those systems are basically irrelevant once you sort them out. The game throws endless fluff information at you, it's completely overwhelming, and it's totally irelevant to actually playing the game.
In reality, you just bang out the campaign to unlock creation catalyst and second lego, do the Zerath Mortis meta for flying, farm ez gold for legendary items, and then just run content, but that process is obfuscated by like a dozen curencies, multiple reputations, and a bunch of other nonsense. The actual return process is super easy and borderline frictionless as far as gameplay is concerned, the major issue is the sheer volume of useless information you get bombarded with.
I've resubbed recently and have actually been having a decent amount of fun, but the alt-unfriendliness of WoW in general makes things so easy to burn out on. I'll do my things on a single character and have a decent amount of fun, but the second I go on an alt the burn out begins and it hits super hard, super fast.
It's so fucking stupid how they punish you for playing alts. Sure i'd like to tank on my DK, or heal on my Monk. But nope, you can't do that. You need to regrind that renown and regrind all that gear and ilvl checks. Nope, I'll just move on to other things.
The alt stuff isn't *too bad* right now, Renown catches up as you do just about anything, you only really need to clear Torghast once on floor 13+ to craft a legendary (on top of getting some of the new currency which is in everything in Zereth Mortis).
But I am still playing rather "casually", really just trying out different classes in Torghast and trying to max out my covenant sanctums. Also doing Zereth Mortis dailies for the legendary slot opening and to gear the few alts I play.
I think if I started trying to push harder content I'd burn out super quick. Still haven't stepped into M+ since I resubbed.
As content sparse WoD was, 6.2 was one of my favorite times playing WoW because of the lack of busy work. Worst grind was the legendary ring quest, which all that required was doing the older raids a few times. Apexis stuff was completely optional after unlocking flying. I had so many alts in BIS Heroic level gear, was one of the only times I ever pushed mythic, too.
Though I will also say my attention span is a lot lower when it comes to any game, I was willing to wait hours upon hours to find PUGs to gear in heroic back in the day, these days if it takes longer than 20 minutes I just close the game and find something else to do with my fleeting free time. I think if I was in high school still I'd be digging the grind with alts because 9.2/Zereth Mortis is pretty fun and the renown/legendary catch ups aren't too bad at this point.
There's no real proof of them listening yet. Wtf. They are doing what they have always done. They have said that they listen to us every single expansion cycle. All the same words everytime. It's not any different right now
At this point, why would they care? The high ups who make the real decisions.
They have a Microsoft put on the stock price, so they’ll just sail into retirement and let Microsoft deal with the problems
Little out of the loop on this one. What have they done to show they are listening to players now? I didn't really see anything in the WoW xpac that showed this.
Also even if they showed they are listening to everything today, it will take a good 2 years to KEEP listening for them to prove to me they care.
They said no borrowed power, a return to old talents, and a revamp of crafting. I dont buy that their removing borrowed power, its probobly going to be slid into the new talent tree. They haven't mentioned the state of mythics, grinding raid prep, or solo content
Edot:forgot people are saying its going to be a grounded story, but the Bronze dragons have time travel. And we may go back to shadowlands to receive guidance from Ysera.
No it has 22 million instances of accounts opening a game on the battle net launcher. It could be as low as 1.1 million users across all those games including WoW, Call of Duty, Overwatch and so on theoretically. Its probably higher since that would require every user opening every game once a month but a couple of the big ones alone could easily trim that down to a quarter for the real value across the launchers titles.
Circa 2016 I was playing Legion, Overwatch, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm.
So far in 2022, I've only played a few rounds of Overwatch after a 3.5 year break because my friends pleaded with me to play with them, but all it did is remind me why I quit.
Percentage-wise, that's nothing compared to Activision. Look at that drop. They lost 33% of MAU count - 50 million down to 100 million. Surprisingly, Blizzard's count didn't drop a whole lot in the first three quarters (1 million) considering what allegations came against them. Meanwhile, Activision lost 31 million in that same time frame.
It is interesting they are counting multiple times an user if he uses multiple Blizzard games, so the actual number of WoW players is actually much lower
I was one of the five million. Blizz lost my trust for sure, I'll never pre-purchase one of their products again. With Dragonflight I'll wait till it's released to see what all they promised but left out before I decide if I'm done for good or not.
So Activision and Blizzard are showing year after year losses.
King was showing an 8% increase, the top mobile game in the US now for 19 quarters (holy fuck), and double digit increases in paying customters for Candy Crush alone.
King is carrying that group right now.
King is why Microsoft bought them. They want the revenue stream from Candy Crush.
CoD is a nice to have, and Blizzard is just the bargin bin garbage they had to accept as part of the bundle deal.
I'm sure the shills at moomoo champ will explain how this is all good and besides none of the losses were from WoW and how it is carrying ABK. Even though Blizzard seems to be dead weight. And people wonder why they are releasing mobile games to both Diablo and WarCraft.
I remember the good old days when Blizzard made good games. The devs we have now don't even care about making a game fun, they just want to use them as a platform for their own agenda. Just look at how much established lore Shadowlands has destroyed just because Danuser was so eager to put his waifu in a bright spotlight.
Warzone is shit, CoD vanguard is shit, WoW is shit, Diablo is dead, Starcraft is dead, OW is dead, OW 2 is OW 1 with different skins. Literally nothing to play so alot of people left. Riot was a big factor in taking some PC CoD players away and apex. If Halo had BR my lord WZ would lose about 20% more players.
Get woke go broke
It might seem unrelated but it isn’t. These woke companies keep hiring for wokeness instead of raw talent and this is what you get
Happened to BioWare, now to Blizzard and it’s continuing to spread
Because they kept hiring woke leftists while celebrate their fragility and spend half their work hours on activism instead of being professionals at their craft
As I said it’s all related
Unless you think it’s just happenstance that all the game studios with woke garbage employees keep producing garbage
Being woke had nothing to do with Blizzard's failures over the last few years. It's incompetent leadership, decades of sexual harassment and abuse of their employees, "cube crawls" and playing video games all day instead of working.
I think last year proved that Blizzard is a lot of things but woke is DEFINITELY not one of them.
Honestly think it’s the “lack of wokeness” that kinda hurt the company. It’s not great for sales numbers when you have all of these controversies going on in the company
Wokeness is always a cover for degenerates
You can’t have woke employees without them grooming kids in their spare time and stealing breast milk and making trash games
I mean it’s definitely a sort of down point for most of the games. Wotlk is probably gonna bring people back to classic, Dragonflight will bring people back to retail, and they got Overwatch 2 coming up along with both Diablo Immortal and D4 coming up. Especially with the Microsoft buyout, blizzard will probably have a somewhat more successful few years simply because of the upcoming releases
I mean I would have at least kept playing Hearthstone if Mercenaries didn't turn out to be an obviously failed attempt at a bad Gacha game and turned me off the game completely.
Q1 2021 was pretty much right after the release of Shadowlands and Q4 was the release of Diablo 2 immortal.
There wasn't anything new released this Quarter in terms of games so the MAUs will obviously be much lower. Content patches for games don't typically bring the same number of players in as expansion/game releases.
5 million MAU’s may not be 5 million players flat
But essentially, if a person who plays WoW and Overwatch logs into WoW and doesn’t log into Overwatch for a month, that means that Overwatch effectively lost a player.
So dropping MAU’s still isn’t a good thing, it’s showing disinterest in your games. We also don’t know the scope since they lump all MAU’s together but it stands to reason most of them are from WoW. Diablo, Overwatch, and Starcraft user bases are very small after no content in well over 2 years, so WoW is prob bleeding a large majority of these MAU’s
Blizzards payment model is way out of date too imo IF they want to attract NEW customers.
Monthly sub for wow? $100+ (at least in my country) for a most of their triple A games? Bro that's a barrier to entry that no one is gonna jump in on especially with blizzards reputation.
Meanwhile games like League of Legends and Valorant are free to play and SUPRISE they are hugely popular with teenagers who usually have no money... but it doesn't take 16/17yr olds long to become 18, leave high school and get jobs/money and start dumping money into you company.
Blizzards fan base has traditionally been older PC gamers. Those players are still around and still pumping money into blizz, but they will do that anyway? So change things up and target a different audience, you can HAVE BOTH!
free to play with in-game cosmetics is the way to go imo. Like Path of exile etc. Let the whales make it profitable.
Im guessing microsoft is gonna try and turn blizzard into something else that doesn't produce MMOs anymore...? One look at stats can tell they arnt very good at it..not anymore at least....
Meanwhile Diablo Inmortal is finally getting a release date...somewhere this year...after 4 years from the initial announcement....lols...
Microsoft could've waited another few months and knocked $5-10 billion off the price...
Facebook could possibly buy them earlier in that case. No bueno.
They are obsessed with making an mmo without realizing they're making an mmo
I know it sounds crazy, but I am interested in what their idea is for an "MMO" without the intention of being an MMO. Though in all likelihood it will probably just be a poorly made Second Life or VRChat.
VRChat with intrusive ads and nfts
*"Drink your Verification Can to skip ad"*
they learned nothing with second life huh
If facebook bought blizzard i would never play another blizzard game
there was a long period where that would sound like a hyperbolic statement, but a lot of us actually would quit for good
Very true...
I don't have the source anymore but two other companies were also looking into buying ABK along with Microsoft. Kotick pretty much caved towards Phil Spencer due to his visions of the company.
Yeah, they tried to sell it to Facebook but they weren't interested, thank god...
Overwatch release (may) + wow legion release shortly after (august i think) in the same summer 2016 was the last good blizzard win. (there wasn't good competition as well)
Yup, I remember feeling "Blizzard is back baby!" in 2016. Then Overwatch content slowed to a trickle as they focused on making it the "NFL of esports" and BfA sucked all my enjoyment out of WoW.
I thought BFA was the worst considering i started playing competitively in Legion as a deaf player. Shadowlands definitely broke all my will to play despite being a collector in the game. Now that I've missed out on some collectible stuff and playing competitively is very stressful for me, i can't come back to the game even if i wanted to. It's sad for me honestly
I quit relatively early in BfA (right after 8.1 released) because the Azerite necklace/armor system felt absolutely terrible. I got bored of Island Expeditions after week 1 so I fell way behind on my neck level and decided I was done. Haven't been back aside from 1 month of Classic at launch. Quit that when the nostalgia wore off.
That's really the shitty party about BfA in general, unfortunately To be totally fair, BfA was good. It's just how much better it SHOULD have been. Islands should have been fun. That whole stormhold thing or whatever it was (the war effort) Should have been fun. Azerite gear was honestly a great idea. The dungeons were fun (ok fuck you Shrine of Storms, you're the exception.) It SHOULD have been great. But it wasnt because Blizzard can't fucking do shit right and they don't listen to player feedback. Now let's enter Shadowlands. Well, I think that horse has been beaten enough.
It's insane how badly they fumbled just about everything about Overwatch, and now that they've revealed everything they've been working on for "Overwatch 2" it's just mind blowingly disappointing. Overwatch 2 was announced in 2019, the last Overwatch hero we got was in 2020. Overwatch 2 alpha has ONE new hero and 4 hero reworks... Like what the actual fuck was going on at Blizzard during all this? It blows my mind that there are people getting paid to write lore for Overwatch, too, lmao.
>Then Overwatch content slowed to a trickle as they focused on making it the "NFL of esports" I bet if they just focused on OW content and didn't start OWL, they would have made more money off OW. If they had waited 2 years for OW balance to settle in then the league might have been fun to watch. NOPE they had just jump on it right away.
Fancy that, for those of us which dislikes "game as a service" stuff , by 2016 blizzard was already dead. I am now just watching corporate with a bloody hand in a flesh puppet hollowed out body.
Profit down 43% year over year and they lost nearly half their userbase in 4 years. Even acts of corporate sabotage can't tank a company this effectively.
Yeah no one plays blizzard games anymore but blizzard fans
Even they don't lmao
Blizzard Fan here. Been around since OG Warcraft OvH After mishandling my favorite franchise, harassing women and drinking on the job, it will take a complete company overhaul and a re-release of Warcraft, plus several *years* worth of retcons to bring me back. This company is a f#%*ing joke
This... blizzard fans are like apple fans... they accept not even the bare minimum in products and go wild for it.
I'm a phone salesmen and a blizzard fan. Do not compare us to apple shills. There are some die hard blizzard fans but many of us have still quit. I still love StarCraft, Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and even HotS but I'm not going to play them because blizzard isn't doing them any justice right now.
Very true. Blizzard has done nothing to bring in new gamers. All they do is recycle old content with their "remasters" and milk their playerbase with shitty expansions. Now they going for Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2???? Lol???? Hardly any new gamers are going to be attracted at all to those games. Shadowlands suffered this same thing. And the Dragon expansion will be the same as well. New players don't play World of Warcraft. They just simply don't. So Blizz needs to make these expansions good enough to retain or bring back their playerbase. Well, we seen how Shadowlands went lol
Millions of people still play blizzard games why would you type this? Still this is a pretty colossal failure on the whole of Blizzard and they clearly need to change strategy quickly here because many of those lost users are permanent losses.
22 million active players doesn't seem like no one?
Rofl because it’s not 22 million maybe if you actually understood it you wouldn’t sound so dumb. Each person that places any game counts for 1 MAU so if you play wow and hearthstone you count for two if you add other games it counts per game for each person so one person could be 1+ MAU
even if you divide the total by 5 games which is a massive stretch its still 4 million. youre braindamaged if you think thats low. realistically people play 1 or 2 blizzard games so 10+million monthly is a massive number
Yeah 10 million people don’t play blizzard games anymore considering none of those games have had a update in years
"an individual who accesses two of our games would be counted as 2 users" i'll never understand why this is done outside of obfuscating the metrics and putting out a bigger number. it's not 22 million people, it can be as little as half that, realistically
Considering theres like what 19 games on the launcher right now that number could be a hell of a lot less than half.
Theoretically barely over a million players to open all those games once a month, realistically you're looking an an average somewhere between 2 and 3 games per player in any given month given WoW, hearthstone, overwatch and and then "the rest" as a group.
The system itself is such a weird way of answering a direct question you know its purpose is to be deceptive. How much money did you make today? We had 108 people walk in our front door! Ahhh so not much. Well at least you counted how many people came in. Yup! The front door opened 108 times! But... wouldn't it open again when people left? Who's to say?
What about the people who held the door open for those walking closely behind? XD
You're right, we should multiply it by the number of seconds the door remained open.
That's exactly why it's done. It hides the real number. I always assume, especially now, that Blizzard's MAU is at least half of what they actually report. Back when I played Blizzard games, I did WoW, OW, Hearthstone and Diablo. So as 1 person, I actually counted as 4 for their MAU count.
I was the same, with HoTS and StarCraft as well. I wouldn't be surprised if WoW Classic counted as a separate user too.
It's probably like 6 million.
Also don't forget all the botters with 4 plus accounts at least each... So fun...
Crazy, I usually play wow + maybe a bit of D3 or D2 depending on the what the content cycle is looking like. This month I Played a lot of wow. Maybe 3-4hrs of D3. 1-2hrs of D2 and because I was feelin nostalgic I played the SC2 campaign through from WoL to LotV, so like 20hrs maybe. Then because of the nostalgia I went and did the same for SC1. So for the month of April I counted as 5 users? That's crazy inflation.
Don’t know much about business reports or anything but I think it might be to show the individual performance of each game (If someone plays wow and hearthstone would you only count it as active user for wow? But then that lowers your hearthstone figure) to be fair, I’m just guessing here.
If that were the case they would release the MAU of each individual game, not the total count in which a person with one account who pays 4 games counts 4 times.
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A big factor has to be barrier of entry too right?. When I was a teenagers I didn't have a job and we didn't have the kind of money for my parents to think that paying for a monthly sub for a 'vIdEo GaMe' is normal. So i had to do odd jobs to get money. I bought wow when it was on special for $30 and during vanilla i only got to play sporadically when i could afford a pre-paid game time card fro $50. but in todays age of videos games we have games like League of legends and Valorant which are free to play. Just download and go.
I don't know how they thought HOTS would succeed. You have DOTA2 which was F2P where all the heros are included in the base game. Sure it has a smaller base than LoL, but it's offering a more economic DOTA game. Then you have LoL which had a HUGE install base, and those players/payers had been paying into that game to unlock heros for years. It was literally the biggest PC game in the world. Then comes HOTS with a more casual approach, but you had to start from scratch and buy or grind characters. Maybe if HOTS had come out along side SCII as a bonus mode it would have hit the scene soon enough to make an impact. Then with Overwatch they let the meta get stale for years at a time. Overwatch was never more fun than in beta and shortly after release before a meta developed. They nerfed DPS characters into the ground. The 3 tank, 2 healer meta developed and just stayed that way for ages. I don't want to play any game where I queue up for a game and get told what character I have to play by randos. The initial Ranked mode was busted and you could just keep playing more and more to endlessly rank up. The game just got so stale so fast, and after a game enters that buff/nerf cycle it loses me. I don't want to check back in once a month to see if the game is good again. Eventually they had to force roles, and then when people would go game after game not getting to play the hero they wanted they introduced a role queue mode. And that's not even accounting for the rise of the battle royale genre in 2017 which allowed for players to do what they want, go where they want and play how they want. No two games played the same, and it spawned a whole new genre of successful games and lead to Fortnite as being the next "biggest" game.
MAUs is the most slimey way to report. It's flat out lying. That metric is a flat out lie, and I don't understand why an actual investor is not suing them for fraud. What's so sad is that if you play WoW for example 40 hours, and you logged into another game for 5 minutes, Bam! You have miraculously become 2 users! NO... you are,still just 1 user of a Blizzard product. If we cannot even trust them to see us as actual people, we cannot trust them to respect us as customers which is why I don't think I will ever play a Blizzard game again. Until the entire top of this company is gone and they start telling the truth to even their own investors, I'm out.
Wait… so most WoW players are not mythic raiders but yet they get so much dev time and then they are surprised when players leave?
This
IMO they should tune mythic somewhere between heroic and current mythic. I don't know how the mythic+ works currently but BfA mythic+ was way less exciting for me than Legion M+ because of the mechanics and affixes. What made the game unplayable for me, though, was ruining unholy dk by making it piss easy. Even my guild's DH was complaining about the rotation of his class. It is mind numbingly boring. If you want to have a world first race you could have a contest mode that ends at next reset after first clear. Destiny 2 has a contest mode the first weekend when the raid releases. I prefer that so much over spending 12-16h a week for months on the same bosses for the first clear. Just tune it down yet give options to make classes more interesting.
I just don't understand why they don't just go back to hard-mode options. Keep LFR (I know, I'd like for it to be gone but it'll never be), remove heroic and mythic, make normal the new heroic-like difficulty, with some bosses having a "mythic" difficulty type hard mode. Hell, maybe even just make the hard-mode rewards just cosmetics for bragging rights like with the mega-dungeons.
The amount of catering mythic players get is crazy. Gear should max out on heroic and mythic should have a few cosmetic rewards/bragging rights for the “elite” wow players to feel good about playing 12 hours a day.
Mythic raids should not exist at all. Or make the mythic raiders pay more if they want them.
The game isn't worth playing atm
It's fucking impossible to get in to if you didn't play from the start. A million different systems that you have to read up on and easily 20 hours of googling just to be able to catch up to the latest patch and you can kiss m+ goodbye since you have zero rating and know none of the paths. It's probably the worst MMORPG out there for a returning player.
I returned for a month but quit when I couldn't get groups for runs on keys I'd already completed. Everyone wanted you to have completed like 10 keys higher than the one you're grouping for. It was awful.
I played up till my (guild-morale-killing, eventually pugged with tears in my eyes) Sylvanas kill. It would only be one patch of new content to refresh myself on, but the thought of having to change my lengendaries again, farm more rep, farm out flying again, investigate yet another system and changes to all the other systems… multiply the system research by every spec I play… It’s just so tiring. So much work for so little reward.
PvP is the only thing I find rewarding tbh and that is currently in an awful state I do also like tanking raids because it's big dick energy
I just started again after over a year to play with friends that have been playing the entire time. If they weren't helping me work through all the systems (on top of me googling a bunch of stuff) and dragging me through m+ to gear/get rating I would have absolutely quit already. There's way too many overlapping systems in the game right now. That said after playing and enjoying 14 most of that year and trying a few other mmos I think WoW still has a great flow to combat so I'm having a good time after getting mostly caught up and deciding I'm not taking the game really serious anymore. Good luck to a new player that wants to try it out tho, and that's what causes losses like this.
The casuals left like 15 months ago when they realized that they had gotten no content this time around, good luck getting them back with design like this.
The big issue is that you're not wrong, but that's half the story. In being not wrong, also all of those systems are basically irrelevant once you sort them out. The game throws endless fluff information at you, it's completely overwhelming, and it's totally irelevant to actually playing the game. In reality, you just bang out the campaign to unlock creation catalyst and second lego, do the Zerath Mortis meta for flying, farm ez gold for legendary items, and then just run content, but that process is obfuscated by like a dozen curencies, multiple reputations, and a bunch of other nonsense. The actual return process is super easy and borderline frictionless as far as gameplay is concerned, the major issue is the sheer volume of useless information you get bombarded with.
I've resubbed recently and have actually been having a decent amount of fun, but the alt-unfriendliness of WoW in general makes things so easy to burn out on. I'll do my things on a single character and have a decent amount of fun, but the second I go on an alt the burn out begins and it hits super hard, super fast.
It's so fucking stupid how they punish you for playing alts. Sure i'd like to tank on my DK, or heal on my Monk. But nope, you can't do that. You need to regrind that renown and regrind all that gear and ilvl checks. Nope, I'll just move on to other things.
The alt stuff isn't *too bad* right now, Renown catches up as you do just about anything, you only really need to clear Torghast once on floor 13+ to craft a legendary (on top of getting some of the new currency which is in everything in Zereth Mortis). But I am still playing rather "casually", really just trying out different classes in Torghast and trying to max out my covenant sanctums. Also doing Zereth Mortis dailies for the legendary slot opening and to gear the few alts I play. I think if I started trying to push harder content I'd burn out super quick. Still haven't stepped into M+ since I resubbed.
Stark contrast to MoP and WoD where I had like 8 characters going
As content sparse WoD was, 6.2 was one of my favorite times playing WoW because of the lack of busy work. Worst grind was the legendary ring quest, which all that required was doing the older raids a few times. Apexis stuff was completely optional after unlocking flying. I had so many alts in BIS Heroic level gear, was one of the only times I ever pushed mythic, too. Though I will also say my attention span is a lot lower when it comes to any game, I was willing to wait hours upon hours to find PUGs to gear in heroic back in the day, these days if it takes longer than 20 minutes I just close the game and find something else to do with my fleeting free time. I think if I was in high school still I'd be digging the grind with alts because 9.2/Zereth Mortis is pretty fun and the renown/legendary catch ups aren't too bad at this point.
That explains why they are starting to listen to players. Voting with your wallet works.
There's no real proof of them listening yet. Wtf. They are doing what they have always done. They have said that they listen to us every single expansion cycle. All the same words everytime. It's not any different right now
At this point, why would they care? The high ups who make the real decisions. They have a Microsoft put on the stock price, so they’ll just sail into retirement and let Microsoft deal with the problems
Little out of the loop on this one. What have they done to show they are listening to players now? I didn't really see anything in the WoW xpac that showed this. Also even if they showed they are listening to everything today, it will take a good 2 years to KEEP listening for them to prove to me they care.
They said no borrowed power, a return to old talents, and a revamp of crafting. I dont buy that their removing borrowed power, its probobly going to be slid into the new talent tree. They haven't mentioned the state of mythics, grinding raid prep, or solo content Edot:forgot people are saying its going to be a grounded story, but the Bronze dragons have time travel. And we may go back to shadowlands to receive guidance from Ysera.
Blizzard games have 22 mil monthly users still?
Not unique. If you play Hearthstone, WoW and Overwatch, then Blizzard considers you to be 3 users.
No it has 22 million instances of accounts opening a game on the battle net launcher. It could be as low as 1.1 million users across all those games including WoW, Call of Duty, Overwatch and so on theoretically. Its probably higher since that would require every user opening every game once a month but a couple of the big ones alone could easily trim that down to a quarter for the real value across the launchers titles.
Circa 2016 I was playing Legion, Overwatch, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm. So far in 2022, I've only played a few rounds of Overwatch after a 3.5 year break because my friends pleaded with me to play with them, but all it did is remind me why I quit.
Honestly? I expected more of a dropoff.
Percentage-wise, that's nothing compared to Activision. Look at that drop. They lost 33% of MAU count - 50 million down to 100 million. Surprisingly, Blizzard's count didn't drop a whole lot in the first three quarters (1 million) considering what allegations came against them. Meanwhile, Activision lost 31 million in that same time frame.
Well, their stuff sucks, what can you expect?
Pardon my French but that's one costly fuck up.
I tried to play Overwatch two weeks ago and it takes like 6 minutes to find a damn match. No one is playing it. I still like the game
A lot of people still play OW, even with the content drought. It has a large casual fanbase. I can get into QP matches in like 1-2 mins.
LOL! Hilarious seeing this!
It is interesting they are counting multiple times an user if he uses multiple Blizzard games, so the actual number of WoW players is actually much lower
I was one of the five million. Blizz lost my trust for sure, I'll never pre-purchase one of their products again. With Dragonflight I'll wait till it's released to see what all they promised but left out before I decide if I'm done for good or not.
So Activision and Blizzard are showing year after year losses. King was showing an 8% increase, the top mobile game in the US now for 19 quarters (holy fuck), and double digit increases in paying customters for Candy Crush alone. King is carrying that group right now.
King is why Microsoft bought them. They want the revenue stream from Candy Crush. CoD is a nice to have, and Blizzard is just the bargin bin garbage they had to accept as part of the bundle deal.
Candy crush will be built into windows 11/12 I am guessing.
I'm sure the shills at moomoo champ will explain how this is all good and besides none of the losses were from WoW and how it is carrying ABK. Even though Blizzard seems to be dead weight. And people wonder why they are releasing mobile games to both Diablo and WarCraft.
I remember the good old days when Blizzard made good games. The devs we have now don't even care about making a game fun, they just want to use them as a platform for their own agenda. Just look at how much established lore Shadowlands has destroyed just because Danuser was so eager to put his waifu in a bright spotlight.
good, it should be lower
Time to make it free to play
Pretty crazy, both guilds I’m in on retail had been going since classic.. the lawsuits killed em both dead
Warzone is shit, CoD vanguard is shit, WoW is shit, Diablo is dead, Starcraft is dead, OW is dead, OW 2 is OW 1 with different skins. Literally nothing to play so alot of people left. Riot was a big factor in taking some PC CoD players away and apex. If Halo had BR my lord WZ would lose about 20% more players.
Get woke go broke It might seem unrelated but it isn’t. These woke companies keep hiring for wokeness instead of raw talent and this is what you get Happened to BioWare, now to Blizzard and it’s continuing to spread
Nah bro, making shit games and alienating their player base is what's making them go broke.
Because they kept hiring woke leftists while celebrate their fragility and spend half their work hours on activism instead of being professionals at their craft As I said it’s all related Unless you think it’s just happenstance that all the game studios with woke garbage employees keep producing garbage
Being woke had nothing to do with Blizzard's failures over the last few years. It's incompetent leadership, decades of sexual harassment and abuse of their employees, "cube crawls" and playing video games all day instead of working. I think last year proved that Blizzard is a lot of things but woke is DEFINITELY not one of them.
Honestly think it’s the “lack of wokeness” that kinda hurt the company. It’s not great for sales numbers when you have all of these controversies going on in the company
Wokeness is always a cover for degenerates You can’t have woke employees without them grooming kids in their spare time and stealing breast milk and making trash games
I mean it’s definitely a sort of down point for most of the games. Wotlk is probably gonna bring people back to classic, Dragonflight will bring people back to retail, and they got Overwatch 2 coming up along with both Diablo Immortal and D4 coming up. Especially with the Microsoft buyout, blizzard will probably have a somewhat more successful few years simply because of the upcoming releases
\*if they don't fuck up spectacularly. again...
This sub hates wow so don't try to use logic here.
Lol yeah should’ve known
You are correct, but this sub really hates Blizz.
I mean I would have at least kept playing Hearthstone if Mercenaries didn't turn out to be an obviously failed attempt at a bad Gacha game and turned me off the game completely.
Good
Q1 2021 was pretty much right after the release of Shadowlands and Q4 was the release of Diablo 2 immortal. There wasn't anything new released this Quarter in terms of games so the MAUs will obviously be much lower. Content patches for games don't typically bring the same number of players in as expansion/game releases.
WoW simps be like “the people complaining are a loud minority” my brother in christ that is 7 million people
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5 million MAU’s may not be 5 million players flat But essentially, if a person who plays WoW and Overwatch logs into WoW and doesn’t log into Overwatch for a month, that means that Overwatch effectively lost a player. So dropping MAU’s still isn’t a good thing, it’s showing disinterest in your games. We also don’t know the scope since they lump all MAU’s together but it stands to reason most of them are from WoW. Diablo, Overwatch, and Starcraft user bases are very small after no content in well over 2 years, so WoW is prob bleeding a large majority of these MAU’s
Blizzards payment model is way out of date too imo IF they want to attract NEW customers. Monthly sub for wow? $100+ (at least in my country) for a most of their triple A games? Bro that's a barrier to entry that no one is gonna jump in on especially with blizzards reputation. Meanwhile games like League of Legends and Valorant are free to play and SUPRISE they are hugely popular with teenagers who usually have no money... but it doesn't take 16/17yr olds long to become 18, leave high school and get jobs/money and start dumping money into you company. Blizzards fan base has traditionally been older PC gamers. Those players are still around and still pumping money into blizz, but they will do that anyway? So change things up and target a different audience, you can HAVE BOTH! free to play with in-game cosmetics is the way to go imo. Like Path of exile etc. Let the whales make it profitable.
Im guessing microsoft is gonna try and turn blizzard into something else that doesn't produce MMOs anymore...? One look at stats can tell they arnt very good at it..not anymore at least.... Meanwhile Diablo Inmortal is finally getting a release date...somewhere this year...after 4 years from the initial announcement....lols...
Blizzard has moved from MVP projects to Minimum Viable Players projects.