Decline 15$ Sparklepony Cosmetic in WoW made more money than Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

[Chuck Norris]

Just let that sink in. If you want to understand the reason behind Blizzard's downfall, this was it. If you're buying these bullshit cosmetics, you're killing the game industry and discouraging developers to make anything worthwhile.

 

[std::namespace]

Blizzard's downfall

blizzards claim to fame is an rng clicker
KILL YOURSELF AND ALL YOUR GENETIC RELATIVES
FUCKING KILL YOURSELF

 

[Naraya]

I wanted to post a rant but eh, I'm just glad I was born early enough to experience the golden age of gaming. I have no delusions it's only going to get worse.

 

[Chuck Norris]

Blizzard's downfall

blizzards claim to fame is an rng clicker
KILL YOURSELF AND ALL YOUR GENETIC RELATIVES
FUCKING KILL YOURSELF

You're a "Blizzard never made a good game" brand of edgelord, are you?

 

[HoboForEternity]

At this point i cannot blame blizzard for doing what they are doing but fuck, people are fucking stupid

 

[Tehdagah]

Sometimes I buy cosmetics in Fortnite.

 

[lycanwarrior]

Don't know whether the person is speaking the truth but it honestly would not surprise whatsoever in the least:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comm.../?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm kind of shocked more people don't know this, but here it is again because everyone should know that Activison on the Call of Duty side HAS live phone and text support but ONLY for "VIP" players aka whales. They tell non payers there is no such thing while rolling out the red carpet to those with fat wallets, they are literally lying to you.

To add insult to injury, they nuked a good chunk of their normal player support in the early 2020s and left thousands of players to fend with their ticketing system with 2-3 day wait times. Activision does not give a fuck about it's player unless they're buying in-app purchases.

Also, there is no "security and enforcement" team because their anti-cheat is automated and yes there is SBMM, and sometimes it's designed to put you in matches with people who have the latest cosmetics that you don't own.

Don't believe their lies. Fuck them.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Lol, who the fuck needs "telephone and text support" for a fucking vidya game?*

Spoiler

*Except hint hotlines of course

 

[Eisen]

Wow, Blizzard is trash and people are retard for paying for microtransactions
News at 11

 

[Chuck Norris]

Wow, Blizzard is trash and people are retard for paying for microtransactions
News at 11

No, the point is that Blizzard was not trash. But the trashiness of humanity made them that way. This is a new way of looking at things, because we always assumed all of these companies are evil by nature.

Even if you're the most ethical and empathic person, when you see something like this, it changes something in you. I mean how can you even process information like this? How can you convey to shareholders or higher-ups that something devoid of value (a cosmetic skin) made more money than a fully-fledged video game?

The publishers are not shit. The people are shit. They made publishers that way. They made them misanthropic, because they saw what these assholes are truly interested in. Which is meaningless shit.

 

[Eisen]

Sometimes I buy cosmetics in Fortnite.

why play Fortnite in first place?

 

[Ezekiel]

Sometimes I buy cosmetics in Fortnite.

why play Fortnite in first place?

I don't even know what Fortnight is. My zoomer boss asked me as we were pissing a few weeks ago,

"Do anything fun over the weekend?"

"Watched some movies. Played a video game."

"Fortnight?"

"No, A Link to the Past. It's a Zelda game that came out in the early '90s."

"What did you play it on, N64?"

 

[Tehdagah]

Sometimes I buy cosmetics in Fortnite.

why play Fortnite in first place?

It's great.

 

[ferratilis]

If you're buying these bullshit cosmetics, you're killing the game industry and discouraging developers to make anything worthwhile.

You're barking up the wrong tree. I don't think an average Codexer spends his hard earned money on cosmetics, except for the few well-known retards.

 

[Konjad]

I don't care.

In fact, I like microtransactions. It's a huge red flag that the game is shit and not worth my time nor money, so I don't waste them to play it for a few hours and abandon.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I don't care.

In fact, I like microtransactions. It's a huge red flag that the game is shit and not worth my time nor money, so I don't waste them to play it for a few hours and abandon.

I have a similar sentiment. Is gaming really in such a bad place right now? Definitely not worse than in the period from roughly 2007-2012.
My backlog is filled with interesting games to play from the last 10 years and new interesting stuff is on the horizon. Let the normies have their microtransaction-infested addiction machines, their Call of Duties, Fortnites, FIFAs, GTA Onlines and whatnot. Who gives a shit really?

 

[Hobo Elf]

To be honest SC2's monetization scheme was itself gross nickel and diming so it not selling well is a good thing. Or did people already forget the amount of bitching there was when they announced that the main campaign was split into 3 different full priced products that you had to buy? Of course this didn't stop even worse monetization schemes from entering the hobby but so it goes.

 

[Damned Registrations]

In fact, I like microtransactions. It's a huge red flag that the game is shit and not worth my time nor money, so I don't waste them to play it for a few hours and abandon.

This, with the caveat that some F2P games are good and essentially use cosmetics as a means to donate to the devs. But yeah, if the game has microtransactions and an intial purchase price, fuck that shit.

 

[Ash]

If you're buying these bullshit cosmetics, you're killing the game industry and discouraging developers to make anything worthwhile.

You're barking up the wrong tree. I don't think an average Codexer spends his hard earned money on cosmetics, except for the few well-known retards.

Yeah. WoW is also played by a lot of women. Women love cosmetic shit and don't listen to reason. So what can you do...lol

Probably worth barking for the 50% of men (in general) that are retards though. "Hurr ha wouldn't it be funny bro to buy the sparklepony and run around killing people!? Epic fam. Bet"

 

[TripJack]

If you're buying these bullshit cosmetics, you're killing the game industry

 

[Tyranicon]

If you're buying these bullshit cosmetics, you're killing the game industry and discouraging developers to make anything worthwhile.

You're barking up the wrong tree. I don't think an average Codexer spends his hard earned money on cosmetics, except for the few well-known retards.

The average codexer probably doesn't even spend money on games

 

[Alienman]

To be honest SC2's monetization scheme was itself gross nickel and diming so it not selling well is a good thing. Or did people already forget the amount of bitching there was when they announced that the main campaign was split into 3 different full priced products that you had to buy? Of course this didn't stop even worse monetization schemes from entering the hobby but so it goes.

I never saw this a problem myself. I liked that each game in the series had a focus, which made the campaigns itself pretty damn expansive with some unique mechanics. If it had been released as one big game, I doubt the campaigns would even be a third of the length. Just like every other RTS released before that had several factions.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Just let that sink in. If you want to understand the reason behind Blizzard's downfall, this was it. If you're buying these bullshit cosmetics, you're killing the game industry and discouraging developers to make anything worthwhile.

The takeaway: StarCraft 2 should’ve cost $15.

Especially if they were going to sell StarCraft 2 as three different games.

That’s only half a joke. Publishers should probably be thinking about releasing games at something like $15 or less. Release games at impulse buy prices. At the moment you’ve got a console market where the Switch has sold 132.46 million and the PS4 has sold 117.2 million. Now not every one of those is going to be one single unique customer. But imagine you could get like 25% of the PS4 or Switch (or both) user base with like some $10 game within the first month of something of release. That isn’t something larger series would never need to think about...Call of Duty, Diablo, Grand Theft Auto, Monster Hunter, a handful of Nintendo series. But, if you’re selling below six million within the first week or month at $60, it’s completely possible you might make more at $15. And at a $10 or $15 price tag, if you’ve got a cross save, it’s totally possible someone just might pick the game up more than once.

I guarantee some game like Street Fighter 5 (which across all versions sold 7.40 million, with most of those sales coming later when it wasn’t being sold at full price) would’ve made more money at $15 and $10 than it did at $59.99 and $29.99. Looks like it sold 1.4 million copies in its first year. Like, at $10 bucks people would probably just pick up random games they wouldn’t ever think about buying otherwise just because it’s so cheap. And people would probably buy more games too.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Like, at $10 bucks people would probably just pick up random games they wouldn’t ever think about buying otherwise just because it’s so cheap. And people would probably buy more games too.

Yep. We're in an era where so many games of such high quality and length are being released, there's really not that feeling of 'Oh god I have to buy that, I've wanted that for so long' unless it's a sequel to something you loved. I've got such a massive backlog of games, I generally assume even when buying a new game that I won't even finish it unless it's even better than I expected. I mean ffs, the two games I've been playing the most for the last few weeks have been total conversions of the original Doom and XCOM. I got Baldur's Gate 3 as a gift and played it for like... an hour? I picked up Quasimorphs because it was cheap and gave it about the same amount of time. Last big purchase was AC6 and I only did a single playthrough of that for 20 hours, mostly out of stubborness and nostalgia. I spent longer playing Halls of Torment, a decent vampire survivors knock-off. So the idea that your game is so much better than another that it's worth 4 times the asking prices... doesn't hold water with me any more. If Fromsoft and the AC franchise weren't things I wanted to support, AC6 would have been a hard pass at that price. Blizzard? They can go fuck a railroad spike.

 

[abija]

When you have an established playerbase releasing at full price (or even higher) then slowly lowering makes perfect sense. SC2 wouldn't have made more money than it did. They squeezed a lot of it after release.

And the 15$ mount story sold at the height of WoW is ragebait for morons, done by some wannabe grifter (if you look at the games that company put out).