Yesterday, Blizz announced that the Midnight Pre-Patch will drop on January 20th, 2026.
In case you were keeping track, the TBC Classic Pre-Patch for the Anniversary servers arrives on January 13, 2026.
It used to be that when a pre-patch event for any Blizzard product happened, Blizz made sure to clear the calendar of other games so they could maximize player activity. But now, we're seeing two distinct versions of World of Warcraft dropping their own separate pre-patches within a week of each other.
Some, such as Wilhelm, believe this is a sign that Blizzard doesn't care about TBC Classic. To be honest, I also harbor thoughts along those lines, but I believe there's also something else afoot. Blizzard wouldn't deliberately sabotage subscriptions, so I suspect that what these dates ALSO say that WoW Classic Anniversary players simply don't play Retail. The Venn Diagram of WoW players probably looks something like this:
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| Pretty self-explanatory, if you ask me. |
Even my occasional forays into Retail have centered upon merely observing others and sticking to the post-Cataclysm Old World starting zones. I'm the sort of Retail player that Micro-Blizzard doesn't like very much, because I only subscribe and don't buy expansions or Cash Shop items. They'll take my money, because they're a corporation and some money is better than none, but I'm not the focus of their interest.
Perhaps that's the root of the problem: because Classic Anniversary players are resistant to playing Retail, they won't buy things in a Cash Shop and have no WoW Token to purchase, so Blizzard doesn't care about them. If Blizz wants to hit that 30% profit target that Microsoft's C-Suite set for the XBox division, they simply can't afford to give any time to the Classic Anniversary crowd.
It does make me wonder whether Blizzard is hoping the Classic crowd goes away, so they can cut that staff and be done with it. They won't sell WoW Classic at all, because they're not going to try to compete with another version of their game. Just ask Wizards of the Coast how THAT went over when they came out with D&D 4e and most of the D&D 3.x crowd instead migrated to Paizo's Pathfinder game (which was colloquially known as D&D 3.75). D&D became second banana in tabletop RPGs to another version of their own game.
Maybe that's the real Endgame for Classic WoW: kill it off due to a lack of support, but then sue any private servers to keep newer versions of Classic WoW from coming out. It's all a numbers game, which means that it's more cost effective to kill the game off than support it for a player base that won't buy any of the extra trinkets Blizzard is peddling.
"You think you do but you don't" indeed.
EtA: Added quotes at the end.
I really hope that Blizzard isn't trying to sabatoge Classic, becuase it's the only version of the game I consider worth playing. But yeah, I kind of have to agree that doesn't look too good. Kind of like moving a sitcom to a death slot.
ReplyDeleteIt always drives me nuts to see companies walk away from products bringing in milions a year just becuase they don't feel like fooling with it any more. Like when NCsoft originally pulled the plug on CoH despite reports that it was still profitable.
I agree with this.
DeleteHaving watched many of my favorite old television shows die a slow death because a network did it's damnedest to wash its hands of a show people liked but not enough --WKRP in Cincinnati and Miami Vice to name two of them-- I think your description is pretty apt.
I don't think it's a matter of a company not wanting to fool around with it per se, but that it's simply not bringing in enough money to warrant keeping it around. Honestly, more projects and games will be killed off by that insane 30% profit margin demand by the Microsoft CFO (or other finance person) because very few games will ever meet that target year in and year out without a complete and utter prostitution of themselves. Hell, I've even seen that with Microsoft Office 365; I have the family plan because it makes the most sense to cover those of us in the household who use Word, Outlook, and Excel, but in the past few weeks Microsoft has begun shoving Microsoft 365 Premium in my face for purely profit-driven reasons. If anything, I'm less inclined to keep up the Microsoft Office 365 Family Plan because Microsoft discontinued support for Microsoft Publisher, so I'm actually getting LESS for my money than in previous years. So why would I effing pay MORE for something that includes Copilot, which I refuse to utilize anyway?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I can't tell the difference between Satya Nadella and a Generative AI managing by spreadsheet.
I think you're right that Blizz doesn't care that much about TBC, but I don't think it's a sign that they've stopped caring about Classic altogether, just that this particular branch is dying off. You have to remember that Anniversary is one of four different versions of Classic they are running right now. Based on Ironforge.pro the one that's bigger than the other three put together is MoP Classic, even though you rarely see anyone talk about it. Plus while they may or may not be doing anything like a Classic+, I have no doubt that they are working on something new to release for Classic next year.
ReplyDeleteI honestly don't know anybody who is still playing MoP Classic at this point. Even the people I ran with in Valhalla seem to have stopped playing, based on who logs in, so I do wonder if its merely inertia at this point. Of course, it could also be a morbid sense of curiosity as to whether Blizz will push forward with Warlords Classic that keeps people around. (My bet is that yes, there will be a Warlords Classic purely based on the raiding numbers.)
DeleteEither way, I'm not planning on raiding in TBC Classic on the Anniversary realms, so my activity won't even show up on Ironforge.pro.
I think your venn diagram is correct, that there isn't much overlap between retail and classic. That being the case, it *doesn't matter* if the two games both drop new content releases at the same time, because almost nobody wants to play both. From a player retention standpoint, it might actually be beneficial to have each version to have something to bring players in about the same time!
ReplyDeleteI think that in the days of BfA and Shadowlands there was quite a bit of overlap between Retail and Classic --I know that we had quite a few in our Vanilla Classic raiding guild-- but over the years that has shaken itself out. The Retail fans went back to Retail and the Classic fans either went back to the Private Server environment or hung around in various versions of Blizzard's Classic.
DeleteWhat this represents is that Blizzard no longer has "Blizzard" fans, who would play anything that Blizz released, but fans of a specific version of a game. More than anything else, that's representative of the downfall from the heights that Blizz had.