Blizzard's COO Paul Sams revealed in an interview recently that their production team have decided on the general framework of World of Warcraft's next expansion.
Danish from eXputer: "Despite Blizzard's attempt to give a fresh new spin to World of Warcraft, some fans still seem to be stuck in the past."
HG writes: "Blizzard is usually pretty bad at keeping secrets, but the company somehow managed to keep this one under wraps until now. Plunderstorm is a special limited-time event that’s basically World of Warcraft’s take on the Battle Royale genre."
Hanzala from eXputer writes "History is witness to their downfall, yet they keep coming."
It's not so much Devs as it is Invested and shareholders, issue is barely anyone has the backbone to stand up to them anymore and say no for the sake of the project.
The problem is the idiot gamers who keep throwing money at them. Actions speak louder than words.
Microtransactions made up over 70% of all game revenue last year. Think about the order of magnitude that is in terms of percentage - it's billions of dollars. Money isn't in game sales, it's in getting children who don't understand the value of money, to use their parents' credit card to buy an outfit for their favourite gun in Fortnite.
And the idiot gamers who say they hate them but instantly attack any multiplayer game that isn't run as a live service by saying the devs "sent it out to die" or "abandoned" it.
Those idiots you talk about is all they care about now, they don't care about physical copies sold as it's pants profits, don't care about anyone over 35 years.
They care about the 11-30 year old who loves buying the MT/playing GaaS, don't care about AAA SP stories, doesn't care about Gfx etc.
We are not even a thought in these companies eyes anymore if you're over 35.
What's even more ironic is that games like NBA2K, Madden, NHL, FIFA (whatever it is called) should be GaaS games.
Buy the new season update but keep the core game, then come out with a new game in 5 years.
Management is too stupid to realize this. For now, I just play old sports games offline. They literally ignore gamers that want this model for these games.
Then they're too stupid to realize that other games shouldn't be GAaS.
I think they'll get there. But it depends on the audience. The sports audience don't care about spending more in game. They just want the newest version out there. A new badly made iteration every single year is very profitable....it's not like they're improving these games.
They're the same game every time with minor improvements and several steps back
This is a fairly interesting article that does summarize a bit of the history of this revenue type. But to answer the main question is a much simpler affair: While people will say in the internet that they hate GaaS games. The top revenue generating games are GaaS, so companies will try to have their own. Take Genshin Impact for example, that game alone generated more than 1.5 Billion USD in revenue during 2022. That is almost as much as the 1.9 Billion USD that Ubisoft as a whole generated that year.
It's definitely a risky move because the majority of GaaS games don't reach the level of success Genshin Impact achieved. However, companies can't seem to take their eyes off that tempting prize at the end.
Do you ever think that over the past year or so every studio who makes this shit has started to think
"GaaS is dying out partially because there's so many of them in the market now, I think other developers are moving away from the model now BUT lets stick to our GaaS game and then when it releases we'll be one of the few on the market still which allows us to get more of the market share since every one else has left"
Yet because every developer has that same thought process they've now all got GaaS games on a still over saturated market.
@fox
Most studio heads aren't gamers. They see money generated and think their game can just as easily fill the spot another game has. At least that's my opinion on it. They don't really see the finite amount of online gamers can only flock to so many games and that they're pretty entrenched in what online games they play. All they think about is how nice it would be to have the success of cod or fortnite with barely spending any money. Since they're not gamers they don't see that it took a lot of variables gamers enjoy for the games to get entrenched they just think they can be a me too
It’s a bit like trying to create a meme
You can, but the proper meme’s develop over time, organically and that’s why they reach max popularity.
One simply does not just ‘gass’
Premiere gaming is dying. With Spider-Man's 300 million dollar budget and Ratchet & Clank's ridiculously low return on investment (8 million Dollar loss) AAA gaming is going to be only filled with even more High profile IPs trying to make the biggest bang for buck. Expect to see more of this stuff.
"AA" level games are now making a big comeback and are usually even more beloved by playerbase now. So hopefully that's the silver lining. Smaller, better games.
ratchet and clank has got $22+ millions of profit, did you just seriously quote a forecast on a leaked presentation that was refuted almost immediately way back dude?
Thanks for the reminder, I just went back and saw that the profits were up after the PC launch since the leak was outdated prior to the PC port launch.
https://gamerant.com/insomn...
Well, my theory is actually that they already have the next 3-4 ones more or less lined up in terms of planning, but that they are still all open for change. They have at least 5 year or more *plans* for WoW, without a doubt...
I wonder if there aiming for one next year like they said they'd like to be doing... i doubt it but still it seems like there moving as fast as possible
wow, WoW is moving fast!
At BlizzCon they insisted they really didn't know what was next, that they were totally focussed on Lich King. I guess they don't hang around at Blizzard ^ ^
Good to know that lvling to 80 is already obsolete!! Keep it up Blizz!