A Lack of Something

I've caught up a bit on the news out of BlizzCon, and it seems that Blizz has made a couple of announcements:

• Legion, the new WoW expac, will drop in "Summer 2016". The placeholder is "on or before September 21, 2016".*
• Activision Blizzard will no longer release subscriber numbers as part of financial quarterly statements.**

The former isn't exactly a surprise to me. For all their talk about speeding up releases, Blizzard remains incapable of pushing the release cycle beyond the (roughly) 2 year mark. And this was even when Blizz decided to not wait until BlizzCon and release the name of the new expac at Gamescom. Blizz also stopped major content patches for Warlords significantly earlier than in prior expacs, with the unspoken promise of a quicker release cycle for the next expac.

As for the latter, I'm not surprised. At all.

WoW's subscriber numbers were stable from June 2015 (5.6 million) to September 2015 (5.5 million), but Blizzard's announcement of Legion came in August. Speculation ran rampant on various message boards that Blizz was going to release significantly earlier than they had in previous expacs --maybe even as soon as BlizzCon itself-- and I'm sure that kept people subscribed through the latest quarterly ending.

But with Legion's release sometime in Summer (people will hope for June, but will likely see an August or September release), you can expect subs to plummet.

The subscriber number problem has become an albatross for Activision Blizzard, so they are now attempting to jettison it entirely.*** The thing is, Activision Blizzard loved to trumpet their WoW subscriber numbers when it was a positive, so its absence will be interpreted by analysts as a potentially major problem facing the studio. The corporate finance people can talk all they want about better metrics for the health of the game, but they set the standard for years by talking about subscriber numbers, and you can't simply sweep that under the rug.

That said, a reduction in subscriber numbers is going to have an impact on development of the game. WoW has long been a cash cow for Blizzard, and a reduction in that cash flow means that they've got tighter financial constraints on future projects. 

***

What does this mean long term? 

Blizzard is likely to depend more on Overwatch, Hearthstone, and HotS to provide income where WoW is no longer able to. I believe it a very shrewd business decision that Activision Blizzard is opening it's own television/movie studio, and its first project is the wildly popular Skylanders property. Not WoW, not StarCraft, not Diablo, but Skylanders.

That's where the money is these days, and Activision Blizzard is chasing that money.****

Oh, and one more thing: without subscriber numbers, Blizzard is now free to experiment with F2P models in WoW. Sure, they've always said they'll never go F2P, but with the cash shop and the WoW Token they've currently sidled up right to that F2P line. If Bobby Kotick says "go F2P since I can't justify the staff for WoW", WoW will go F2P.

*There's a very interesting discussion on this over at Blizzard Watch as the Breakfast Topic.

**Word of this came out a few days before BlizzCon itself. Here's the eurogamer.net article on this.

***I'm deliberately saying Activision Blizzard versus Blizzard, because this is more a corporate business decision, not one made in the development house itself.

****Money is in mobile games too, and the purchase of King Digital is expected to bolster that area.

Meanwhile, back in Azeroth...

It's BlizzCon, which means that this got viewed and released into the wild:

The oldest Mini-Red was confused. "World of Warcraft?" she asked. "They really improved the CGI on their expac trailers."

"No," I replied. "It's for the movie."

"There's a movie?"

"Yeah. Been in development for a decade or so."

"Looks pretty good," the youngest mini-Red added.

"True, but the dialogue is a bit clunky."

(I decided not to point out the obvious Moses references to Thrall in the trailer. I presume a helluva lot more of those will be in the movie.)

***

Seeing a full trailer, I'm wondering whether this is one of those movies where the best parts are all in the trailers. (I'm thinking the same thing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens as well, so it's not just Warcraft.)

Why? Well, trailers have now been honed to an art form, making even bad movies look good.

Like, oh, this one:

But in terms of Warcraft, I'm really thinking of this:

In a pre-LOTR special effects environment, it's really a pretty good trailer. And the characters didn't sound that bad in their acting, either. But if you actually watch the Dungeons and Dragons movie, you realize pretty quickly how lousy it is: clunky dialogue, confusing plot, metagaming*, and bad acting.

Looking at the trailer for Warcraft, I honestly rolled my eyes at the Thrall parts. I know the story, but the Green Jesus criticism that is often lobbed in Thrall's direction is going to haunt this movie. And he's not even a main character.

For the sake of the MMO genre, I hope it doesn't suck, but I've a bad feeling that some of the worst parts of the Warcraft storyline are going to bite this movie in the ass.

***

Oh, and continuing the tradition of the Warcraft movie being upstaged by Star Wars, the Star Wars: The Force Awakens international trailer was released:

Yes, it has Japanese subtitles, but it shouldn't detract from the trailer experience.

All of the extra scenes not in the US trailer make the movie's secrecy all the more interesting.

Will it succeed? I think that's more on J.J. Abrams than anyone else.

***

While digging up the D&D Movie's trailer, I started punching in some old trailers from movies that I liked when I was a kid. These movies were much older than me, and I used to watch them on television when there were a lot of independent television stations and they would show old 50's and 60's era movies during the day.

Like, say, this one:

Yes, that's really Ernest Borgnine. And yes, they really butchered Viking society in this flick.


Or this one:

Yeah, that's Pat Boone.






*There's even a scene where one character accuses the other of being just low level. I mean, who actually wrote this script, anyway? Was it a riff on a D&D campaign?


EtA: Clarified when I was talking about the D&D movie trailer versus the movie itself.

Candy Crush Got Even Tougher....

...now that they'll have Diablo in level 666.

Yes, Activision Blizzard bought King Digital, the creator of Candy Crush, for a whopping $5.9 Billion --Ah sayid billyun, Boy!*-- dollars.

I'm pretty sure that King Digital is going to be part of their own little mobile empire, and that they'll likely keep their Blizzard owned mobile initiatives separate. Outside of that, however, I'm not sure what synergies they'd have going forward. It would almost seem that they want King Digital to teach the old dog --Activision Blizzard-- some new tricks. But corporate mergers tend to be tricky things; if the merge is performed at the cost of destroying the old corporate culture, the result isn't exactly a good one all around.

"It wasn't a good fit" is corporate speak for "We messed up and tried to hammer a round peg into a square hole."

Not that this will impact MMO space directly, but it does signal even more of a shift of Activision Blizzard's priorities away from PCs and consoles and into mobile space. Rather than hire a bunch of new employees and continue building from the ground up, they just bought a mature company (if you can call a company that's been around 12 years "mature") to do their mobile for them.

Just watch out for that Forsaken level in Candy Crush; those Apothecaries are murder.





*You have to say it in Foghorn Leghorn's voice to get it to work.

A Post in which the Blogger Attempts to Remain Relevant

No, I'm not blog-fading.

Really.

And no, while I've been playing some Wildstar --and poked my nose into SWTOR on the first day of early access-- I've not been consumed with MMO playing either.

I've been adulting.

As in, I've been a parent and been dealing with parenting stuff, an employee and dealing with (lots of) employee stuff, and a janitor dealing with (lots and lots of) cleaning stuff.

And you do know what's on the horizon, don't you?

NANOWRIMO.

Oh noes!

Oh, yes. THAT.

And yes, my Sisyphean attempts continue unabated.

I'm pretty sure that mini-Red #3 is going to make an attempt of her own, having succeeded at writing a 12,000 word story last year.* This time, I hope to get her officially registered, but you never know. She's very much a self motivated person and would likely consider any external reminders/encouragement to be annoyances.

In that respect, her natural tank-style stubbornness shines through.

Me? I'd just be happy to write about 10,000 words, let alone 50,000.

Maybe if I wrote really crappy MMO fanfic.....

....like that time Quintalan and Lady Liadrin hung out together
in Nagrand with a picnic lunch and.... NO NO SCRATCH THAT!!

Or maybe not.





*Yes, she beat my own word output by a mile.

"It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!"

The other night, The Symphony of the Goddesses dropped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Yes, they were there to help promote the latest Zelda release for Nintendo's portable 3DS device, but they were also there to play:

Stephen, as a geek like the rest of us*, thoroughly enjoyed the performance, as did the audience.

The mini-Reds thought it awesome, too.

Yes, The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses is on tour. Whomever at Nintendo thought this promotion up is a genius.






*Although we aren't geeky and well connected enough to manage to get a cameo in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

EtA: The original video is now marked Private, so I redirected the link to another video.

If You'd Have Told Me...

...back in the Spring that in October of 2015 that I'd be playing Wildstar, I'd not have believed you.

But here I am, having just reached the Exile capital city of Thayd, and have just gotten the grand tour.

Yes, Wildstar does have an automated grand tour of Thayd in a similar fashion as the tour you receive when you reach Shattrath City in WoW.

In fact, there's a lot more in feel to WoW from Wildstar than I'd care to admit. The text based quests, for example, are far more of a throwback these days. The Exiles themselves are a heavy dose of WoW-esque nostalgia, with the Granok mimicking the Dwarves, the Aurin as the Night Elves, and the Mordesh as a faction-swapped Forsaken.*

The Aurin/Mordesh heavy starting zones (up to L15) of Everstar Grove + Celestion remind me a lot of Blood Elf starting areas, up through The Ghostlands. I don't think it an accident that at L15 or so you finish up the Celestion area and are given a quest to go to Thayd, the capital city of the Exiles; after all, a similar thing happens to Blood Elves at the end of the Ghostlands' main questline.

If I'd not have known ahead of time that some of the Wildstar devs are ex-Blizzard employees, I'd be speculating on that already.

All of these similarities are one thing, but if I don't find the story engaging, there's not a lot to really hold me as a player. But that's the surprise: there actually is enough of a story there that I want to follow it through and see where it leads.

And no, I'm not posting spoilers. It's F2P now, so the subscriber wall is no longer an obstacle.

***

Are there things that I find annoying?

Of course.

Like I said last post about Wildstar, a lot of the things that I grumbled about --the annoying Texas + SF mashup, the obnoxious level up graphic, and the women in refrigerators plot device, among others-- are still there. However, they kind of fade into the background after a while. In a way, it's akin to the scrolling alerts on Neverwinter and Star Trek Online: some people can handle them, others can't. Whether you can handle the annoying aspects of Wildstar is up to you, but I don't think there's any reason to not try the game out and give it a true multi-day test.

Now, if they could do something about the occasional lag when playing, particularly when getting quest info....





*Haven't run into the equivalent of the Apothecaries yet --at least in terms of that terrifyingly amoral approach to their studies, that is-- but I'd imagine that the Chua more fit that bill. Only with more explosions.

Things That Amused Me, Part Whatever

I was behind this minivan the other day.

Were it not for a traffic light, I'd have missed this.

You see it, don't you? The Lion of Lordaeron is by the left brake light.

For the Alliance!

Leeroy Jenkins is alive and well.