Good morning you happy people in internet land… I am struggling horribly to get up and around today. I gathered up breakfast but did so while wearing a skullcap to hide my disheveled and unkempt hair. This is feeling one of those screw the world days… it is nice out but I don’t really want to go out and experience it. I am perfectly happy sitting on my comfy couch with my laptop and chilling out. The week had an odd amount of stress for nothing major actually occurring, and last night I had a temporary relapse of the panic attacks. Jury is still out on whether or not I will be drug out into the world to experience today kicking and screaming or not.
Blizzard Free?
The big semi-shocking news of yesterday is that Actiblizz managed to bail itself out of ownership by Vivendi and now is a relatively free agent. Granted for me so long as Activision is tacked on front of Blizzard it will never actually be a “free” company, but I feel that ship has sailed and the two companies will forever be joined at the hip. There have been a lot of news reporting that Blizzard is now the largest “indie” company… but I feel like these same outlets have zero clue what that term even means anymore.
Do I think it is good overall for Actiblizz to control its own fate? Sure… I feel that Vivendi was directly responsible for pushing out games before in an “unprepared” state in order to recuperate some of its money. Additionally there were several stories floating around just prior to this announcement talking about how Vivendi was planning in raiding its cash cow to try and repair its own bottom line. In essence this move fixes both problems… Blizzard is free from pillage, and Vivendi got a shot of money in the process.
The Footnote
Almost as a footnote the press release also casually announced that the subscriber base of World of Warcraft had fallen once again to 7.7 million. After watching the two stories play out in my RSS feed yesterday, there was a significant delay as individuals got over the shock of the first and began to Grok the second. Basically this was no real shock to me, because somewhere… and I am seemingly unable to find the source I saw a quote after their last big drop… that they were fully expecting to be at 6 million by the end of the year. Another 600,000 subscribers seems like they are on course for that possiblity.
This is more “Bel talking out of his ass” time, because I don’t really have references to back myself up… but essentially what I have heard thus far is that Blizzard is losing China. These losses are essentially the fallout of that problem. What happened in China then? Essentially there are so many WoW clones in the Chinese Market, that simply market and hit the culture touchstones better. Even more… WoW is no longer an aspirational game in the way it was. It used to be a brand that Chinese consumers wanted to identify, even Coke drew upon it to sell soda. From everything I have heard… this has changed and WoW is simply “not cool anymore”.
A Change in Model
I have said it multiple times… and I will continue to say it until November when I may or may not have to eat crow… but I believe this year at Blizzcon we will see the announcement of some form of a free to play model. They have already publically confirmed that a cash shop is on the way, and usually going hand in hand with that is a switch to one of the many now viable free to play options. My only hope is that they choose to follow the lead of Rift and giving players a Carrot, instead of following SWTOR and bashing players down with a stick.
Do I think going to Free to Play would help? Honestly I am not sure. I would likely poke my head in every now and then pending the model is not egregious. I figure there are lots of people with a mild interest in the game that would return every now and then and maybe spend a little money there. What I do think however is that there are probably still enough extremely devoted fans that the model would still be profitable for them. At this point I feel the subscription model is just no longer viable.
As I said yesterday a huge chunk of why I will not be playing Final Fantasy XIV is because I just don’t feel it is worth a monthly fee. Right now we have only a handful of holdouts still charging a monthly access fee, and the vast majority shifting to pay as you go or pay for perks schemes. I feel that regardless of when it happens, sooner or later World of Warcraft will convert and do so in a big way. Given their flair for showmanship and ability to spin something that would normally play as bad, into a positive for the Blizzcon audience… I feel that all the signs are right for them announcing the shift.
Vanilla Servers
Yesterday there was an interesting post by Syp over on Bio Break, asking if we would play on a Vanilla server if Blizzard created one. Essentially the post was spurred by comments that Drysc apparently made back in 2008 that hey had been seriously considering the model. Since that time however… Everquest has made a killing by creating Retro servers that allow players to experience the game through the eyes of history. Essentially SOE has proven that the model is completely viable, and viable enough that at last count I believe there were three different “retro” servers.
The most interesting part about Syp’s post however is the large batch of comments that occur afterwards. It seems like the majority of the posters essentially said “take my money now”. A few of us however were more “sounds awesome, but not for me”. I definitely fell into the second camp. I like the concept of a Vanilla server, but I feel as if it is probably best leave our happy memories in the rose tinted past. When I think about just how much WoW progressed as it went through its expansions… what would exist as a Vanilla server would feel like a primitive shell of what exists today. So while you would lose heinous inventions like the dungeon finder… you would also end up losing quality of life changes such as the ability to trade BOP loot in dungeons and even the “Need / Greed” loot system.
Ultimately while I am still interested in the advancement of that game… as evidenced to the fact that I devoted an entire blog post this morning to little blips about Blizzard in general… I just think I am done with the World of Warcraft as a game. I might return every now and then to check in on it… but I am not returning for the game itself… I am returning for the few people that are still there and rabid about it. I feel as if I have just moved past the limits of that game, and want more. In my “MMO Must Haves” series of posts, I rattled out all the features that I wanted in a game… and expectantly WoW has very few of them. On the converse Rift has damned near every one of them… so it is no shock that I am playing that these days.
I think eventually Vanilla servers will come to fruition, because there will come a time when Blizzard is trying to wring out every last drop of cash from an aging brand. I do not however think we will see it until they change their business model. There will likely be some access fee that you add to your account that allows you to roll characters on the closed Vanilla servers. I think the same kind of people that find the Everquest Retro servers alluring will also find the old world WoW servers that way also. I will admit… I would be more tempted if they started releasing servers for each era. Wrath of the Lich King was my favorite time in the game, and after we killed Arthas… everything felt tarnished.
Wrapping Up
I have a feeling that my wife is going to want to go out and explore the world… and as much as I do not want this at all… I figure I will end up being a good guy and aggressing to it. As a result I really should get up and around and get ready for the day. It is a lovely day outside at least, and the temperature is an unseasonable 80*. I just have zero interest in the outside world and would prefer to sit at home on my sofa. I hope you all have great weekends, and that you get accomplished anything you need to.
Actually, Blizzard isn’t really “independent” in this transaction. It’s more accurate to say they’ve traded one master for another. Those billions of dollars used to buy the shares from Vivendi came from somewhere. Some of the money came from Tencent, a big Chinese MMO company, in fact, which makes your reasoning for why WoW is floundering in China all the more interesting.
Well I did say this post was in the “tinfoil hat” territory. This is purely conjecture on my part based on unrelated statements I have heard from folks I generally trust. At the end of the day it is just me rambling on about something, and nothing you can take to the bank. Only time will tell whether or not I was on the right track. I am looking forward to November to seeing just what changes are announced at Blizzcon.
Haha, I said it early yesterday when I saw the Massively Tweet: Calling ActiBlizz independent is like saying TimeWarner went independent when they divested themselves of AOL.
I do think in the long run they will be better off for themselves. I believe Vivendi was involved in the whole rushing Horizon out the door fiasco eons ago… and I have held a bit of a grudge for them since.