In just a little over three days, the continent of Northrend will open up for excited World of Warcraft players, with new races, new monsters, and new places to go. One such place is the new instance, Utgarde Keep, which contains content for 70's and 80's. Of course, the only real problem for newcomers to this frozen land is getting there without getting chewed up and spit out first. Today's friendly One Shots reminder of that comes to Massively courtesy of Deadend, who snapped this picture of a Storm Giant and a bunch of Shoveltusks that will be waiting to gang up on characters. "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate for those who think they'll charge straight to Utgarde without any fighting at all." (Unless, of course, your server is insanely heavily populated, everyone's destroyed everything in the zone by the time you've logged in and your option is standing around waiting on repops.)
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.
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.
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.
Navigate your way through 2024 with the World of Warcraft roadmap with Executive Producer Holly Longdale.