Some big news came in over the weekend, as we got to see how subscriber numbers have been changing over the last 8 years! The data comes from a Games Developer Conference (GDC) presentation by Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Warcraft franchise John Hight, summarized on Korean sit...
  • Breezy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    3 months ago

    Estimat 5 million players at 15 a month for subscription that’s 75 million monthly 900 million yearly. Idk how the game runs, idk if there are a lot of microtransactions nor do i know how much the expansions are. But alone at nearly a billion per year wow is a huge success. When they bring it over to consoles and have another surge in profits microsoft will be all smiles.

    • filister@lemmy.world
      English
      1·
      3 months ago

      I used to play WoW back in the days and am mildly interested in the game development afterwards, but somewhere I read that currently some players are able to buy in game time with their game money, so I presume not everyone is actually paying this price. And their most dedicated hard-core players are probably not paying it either.

      In reality I don’t know how easy it is and probably casual players are mostly paying subscribers but even back then the game was plagued by a lot of micro transactions.

      Additionally we don’t know how much it costs Blizzard to support the servers and run them, as they run a lot of them for sure.

      • Nighed@sffa.communityEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        You can buy wow tokens with in-game gold, however the tokens are ‘created’ by someone buying one with real money to sell for in-game gold.

        So all the wow subs purchased with gold were actually paid for by someone else.

        • Zulu@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          And its $20 instead of $15. So its actually MORE money for blizz to buy via in game gold

      • Breezy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        I haven’t really played mmos since around 2010. But as far as i know, there was always pay for gold and items for sell. It was waay more sketchy though. I played wow and a bunch other when i was a teen. I played with my older sister, and she paid for shit in every game we played. Underground selling had been a thing since the beginning of online games. Btw microtransactions have stolen money from farmers and botters that sold items and gold for profit.