Larreth wrote:
He's got a few good points tho. Blizzard has the most popular mmog with the highest subscriber rate making the most income of any online game in history....Yet with all their income they have put out one whopping expansion, few content patches and have had the same battlegrounds with the exception of EoTs for eons now.
They've been doing nothing new and now you've even got the old carrot on a stick patch 2.4 to keep people grinding to the expansion.
New dungeons, new bgs, new classes, new races, new...something would be nice.
People are going to have to learn to stop linking success to
quantity. It should be linked to
quality.
Just because you become insanely rich or profitable doesn't mean putting out more will make you more successful. If anything, it may dilute your product.
This can easily be seen in real world examples. Take the auto industry, for example. You have Mercedes-Benz, one of the most recognizable and respected brands in the automobile industry, making 2 horrendous mistakes when they had a high margin of profitability. First, they merged with Chrysler, supposedly to merge technologies.....where did that get them? That abortion of a car called a Crossfire, and then eventually they had to sell off Chrysler at a huge loss. Secondly, they have released way too many models, to the point several of their smaller lines are having difficulty with quality control. Before, a Mercedes automatically meant you were getting a great car. Now, you have C, E, M, ML, G, S, CL, SL, CLK, AMG versions.....lots of classes, with a WIDE variance in quality. C-Class is basically shit, but it still carries the Mercedes label. So now, because you decided to pump out a ton of cars, your quality control goes to shit, your overhead is higher, and your marquee name is no longer what it used to be.
The same can be said of Jaguar. They turned profitable after launching a few successful lines, and then they let their success get to their heads, they opened a second plant, they pumped out a bunch of models that couldn't match their original quality, and now the company is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Blizzard has always been slow with release of expansions. Always. All games. Starcraft 2 is coming out like....a decade?....since the original. How many Command and Conquer versions did you have to put up with since then? What are they up to now? 4? 5? Haven't they basically driven that franchise (C&C) to the ground? You give a franchise like Diablo or Starcraft to Electronic Arts, and you will be playing Diablo '08 and Starcraft '08 on your Xbox and PS3 this summer, which would be like 1% different than the '07 version (new maps! better graphics! new pieces! Tiger Woods now an unlockable character!). Would that make you feel better?
In fact, as a businessman, I don't really understand Blizzard when it comes to WoW. I would have released Battlegrounds/Arenas as an expansion and charged $20 a box......if even 1/2 of the players bought it (conservative by any measure), that would be an extra
80 million dollars gross revenue. Silithus and AQ would have been an expansion pack. Black Temple and Arena season 2. Sunwell and new 2.4 badge loots....can you imagine? Game plays the same, but 2.4 badge loots only available if you have the Sunwell expansion. Again, an extra $80,000,000 with each expansion. They should've taken this page from the Sony playbook. But they don't. So kudos to them for sticking to the business model and strategy that made them successful in the first place, and not deviating from it just because now they are rich and famous.