WoW SUB Numbers FINALLY Revealed! - Preach Reacts to Bellular Video

right let's jump into some controversy a little bit is uh so this started doing the rounds very very quickly so apparently let me swap over here real quick because I am curious about this uh is apparently John high and Holly lale which we like both of them uh they are very very awesome people who I've spent time with and I've single-handedly seemingly reshaped how uh wow is going attending did something called GDC uh which I assume is game developer conference uh and slides from this event got l

eaked is apparently what happened slides from this event got leaked uh and in this they revealed report for you I'm going to be presenting information uh oh something like this we we have wow subn numbers right for anybody who doesn't who hasn't seen this yet cuz I got sent this and I was like I obviously have to save this till stream uh that's a bad pitch of Mike hold on Mike let me let me help you out there buddy the details that's better there you go Mike um uh so uh for anybody who doesn't k

now the answer because I don't know the answer yet what do we think it's at H it's definitely up people have gone back to wow from ff14 now the story is done after the big you serer uh 2 million 2 million seems sharp with classic I would expect somewhere around four to five would where I'd expect maybe more with season of Discovery and hardcore being a thing so I would be guessing somewhere around four to five uh is where we're at but let's see World of Warcraft subscriber Trends this is real da

ta from a blizzard presentation that took place at GDC this right this was an event for companies okay so PL so we had the uh executive officers Nintendo there we had obviously Sven from laran he was there just talking mad [ __ ] probably uh Fini I don't know who Fini are Rebecca Saltzman CEO and co-founder of Fini I don't know who Fini are year in fact it took place like writer from like this talking about a thing that's kind of leaked out it's got to be genuinely newsworthy it's got to serve a

public interest and given that we are talking about world Warcraft TR I'll be there for like how voice actors need to be used probably an I wonder if he was there in an anti eventually GDC talks always end up being available after the fact in the GDC Vault though often at a decent bit of a delay now me saying this does make it all so the full conference is going to be Reve and in a way it is I got to be pausing a bit because this is going to get interesting but it okay so the whole thing is to

be revealed which means blizzard new that going in that this would become public information that's worth noting at this point serious we are dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars but mostly this is fascinating this charts World of Warcraft success it's downward Trend it even confirms its lowest point in modern history do you want to know when wow is at its worst you're going to find that it has to be Shadow lens it has to be it has to be shadowlands there's no way it's not it has to be B

FA will be bad and shadowlands is worse today and we even have an internal breakdown of why the shadowlands expansion failed no by the end of this analysis have the most accurate possible show the ja okay they're going to blame the Jailer oh I'm so in right now I'm so a subscription number for right now we will also know sub numbers for its worst of health and we'll be able to compare our workings out to Blizzard and Activision Blizzard prior statements I cannot wait to get into this and this ki

nd of thing is tickling your brain getting it woring I'm I'm right with you Mikey you Irish is to teach you back no sorry Mike boot. boot. rock and roll 25% off yeah there you'll see all the first we've got a graph of subscribers this is something we've not instead we saw historically higher churn okay so there was a graph before this uh subscribers rolling average expectation versus actual all right so we're going back to Legion we're skipping wad okay we're skipping W uh so Legion I can't reme

mber what the legion numbers words uh coming down here so Legion has what you call normal drop off after Legion that makes sense BFA did not do as well as Legion did at launch interesting coming off the that's really interesting to me as well uh is coming off the back of how successful Legion is regarded and uh considered is BFA did not get back up to Legion numbers H so this will probably be the three patch obviously I'm going off various dayses so this will be the three patch of Legion uh then

people came back for a little bit and then BFA did not do as well at launch as Legion then classic hits now oh so right okay interesting shadowlands does not take the dip that BFA does in terms of overall but it's being hard carried by classic which is exactly the way they are planning their business model here here so if shadowlands was stand alone I have to believe this number would have been this graph would have dipped down to here but that's not the case and this is what we talked about la

st week interestingly enough is that blizzard is creating this environment where it doesn't particularly matter which version of while you're playing you're still within the sub uh diagram you're still in that in that pot of subscribers and it doesn't matter cuz I have to believe although blizzard would never tell me and I did ask in is that this dropped dramatically if it was just shadowlands and the ratio of people playing classic to shadowlands was probably so dumb uh I remember when I asked

Ian about this and I said I I I said to his face that classic was carrying retail and he went he's like uh but I have to believe that was the case uh I have to believe that's the case so Shadowland what's interestingly though is shadowlands and classic almost hits the lows of just BFA almost around here right like round here this is slightly higher than bfa's lowest lowest but that's with shadowlands and burning Crusade just came out during that time so I interpret this as shadowlands being so [

 __ ] bad so [ __ ] bad like toil water absolute toilet water um interestingly enough okay if I'm reading this correctly uh yes I am expectation uh they expected the burning crusade to do better than it did uh because it had a little Peak and then people quickly dropped out I wonder if that and this is all Theory crafting right now I wonder if this is because at least in my mindset the burning Crusade is where the game play changed from classic being dog [ __ ] slow to actually getting pace and

being in engaging and when I played the beta of the burning Crusade classic it very quickly dawned on me that was not the case and it probably wasn't until like wrath or cata that the game play started to pick up in Pace because I know I played berning Crusade beta for like an evening and gave up because I was like this is spoiling my memories of the burning Crusade this is act actively ruining or alternatively had by this point World of Warcraft classic gone from being a fun return to the old t

imes and having fun doing Mt cor stuff to the sweat Laden SAA swimming pool of beards that classic became where it was just it's it kind of got rid of the fun which was a huge amount of feedback I got from the classic guys is classic is just not fun anymore everyone's treating it like a world first race all the [ __ ] time and if you're not minmaxed to the ass and doing every last thing and collecting and farming 25 [ __ ] Potions all the time that people don't want you and it's all gdkp runs at

this point like essentially we're paying classic by buying gold which is absolutely what was happening and just paying guilds to just consistently Runners through raids to collect purples to do that again um so I would guess it's a combination of both of those things is that uh the shine had worn off cuz classic was the big one obvious L look at this up surging classic like absolute lunacy um but the shine had gone and TBC wasn't as good as people remember uh it might just be the steeper drop f

rom shadb and CBC just flatten out the curve uh yeah I I imagine there was a huge surge back but shadowlands is so that's correct as well this this looks like a tiny bump right but your classic players and a little bit are offsetting the fact that shadowlands was probably down here if we could separate them out I got to imagine it was down here uh and came up here this is also the lawsuit era absolutely uh we're going through that as well around here where blizzards coming under Fire and all the

se uh the boys club [ __ ] that was happening there for years is also happening so in some ways it's probably not as bad as they expected what's I think was the misplay here and I really do remember us talking about this um pre- dragonfly I want to say and it had been on a live stream so I can't really find when it it happened I think it was too early to try and tempt people back they like they expected a huge bump up to at least shadowlands levels for dragonflight in fact the fact that if this

projection is accurate they expected dragonflight to do better than BFA and Legion on launch obviously that's with a combination of classic I think was too much people are still to this day not recovered from the Burns that are BFA and shadowlands and Dragon flight was too early to try and tempt people back in they were too burned they were in the height of certainly those who went to 14 they were in the height of the msq they were enjoying the story they'd never seen before in the MMO they had

moved on to greener pastures uh I think it was way way way too early to be like and we fixed it comeback like it was way too early their marketing was a little too much uh because it was unproven dragonflight needed to be a return to fundamentals which it was uh and getting things in place which they have done but the marketing was like please come back and I think it was way too early to ask for that way way too early uh they have to do some wow to pull me back like extreme I think what wow nee

ds to do and I don't know if the war within is going to do it wow needs a new feature that's like I want to play that because I don't think they have that yet I don't think they've come up with it with a new feature which is like that's something I really don't want to miss not a story no the story no matter what you tell anybody even if the story is awesome for war within people won't believe it until they see it that's not going to get people to buy it uh they need a new gaming feature that is

literally like oh [ __ ] that looks [ __ ] awesome I need to go there um and it needs to not be something that be could crapped on from Miles housing would be one something like that is like we're doing housing something along those lines something huge that people want to come back to CU dragonflight got this problem right now where everybody is saying it's good uh and as far as I know I'm not actively playing dragonfly right now I'm playing I was playing season of Discovery uh is it's got mor

e people returning to it than ever before I'd be interested to see what the graphic in fact it does seem to be climbing unless this is the dragonflight launch uh more people are playing dragonflight right now than we're kind of at launch weirdly enough uh because people are drifting back you know they've finished the F14 story they've been in seing Guild Wars 2 they're now like drifting back into World of Warcraft because there's all kinds of [ __ ] going on uh so it's it seems to be rising agai

n and everyone's saying it's good it's really good but it's not got that key feature it hasn't it just does not have that key feature that's like you can't miss out on this it's got its raids it's got story okay it's fine but um it really doesn't have anything that's you how are you missing out on this you don't want to miss out on this it's worth coming back for this uh what else would I draw from here yeah I think this this was a bit of a delusional expectation it was too early way too early t

o expect that while we then maybe uh but here not so much not so much man I really wish I could see the ratios of shadowlands to Classic but considering apparently we're going to talk about shons anyway they kind of get that a decade blizzards stopped reporting them during Warlords of dror because yeah there's no why ACC how we getting numers damn big anyway you see the numbers be pretty good for the launch of legion we see Legion lose players then flat out BFA bumps us up but not by as much as

I thought to be honest yeah I'm surprised by that too yeah Mike's correct here I would have thought after Legion why would that have been the case Legion is considered to be a great expansion especially towards the end interesting I wonder roll with me a bit we always expect people to drop out relatively quickly from a new expansion that happens all the time however from this graph right people left quicker during Legion than they did during shadowlands that's interesting uh whether or not it's

because they took a little while for the average play base to real realize how [ __ ] shadowlands was that could have been the case uh like hey this Covenant business is actually turbo tits and toor Gast is now toor Gast is really fun oh God get me out of this [ __ ] prison I hate everything about it um legion's launch was not good and this is something that is always overlooked by people remembering Legion fondly its launch was not good it was the first time blizzard actively lied to us and I d

on't care how they try and twist it and try and say that wasn't Our intention [ __ ] you straight up lied to the [ __ ] lot of us you straight up lied to us about these legendaries and how they were going to work and it became incredibly [ __ ] obvious that you were lying to us what was the LIE blizzard basically pitched there everybody gets a legendary idea and as uh the more you play the more you get and they kept it that simple in the marketing however the players actively discovered that tha

t was not the case and you were hard capped at four uh some people bugged and got more but generally speaking everybody was hard capped at four and what we what people found is that if you got a bad four legendaries it was actually well worth you rrolling your character and doing it again on a different one and that's what was happening at the top end a lot is like I got my four there [ __ ] I should roll my character and start again and a lot of players did that because it was very obvious desp

ite what blizzard was telling us that you did not get more than four and then uh probably two three months later blizzard admitted they had caped at four and they were going to unlock the cap later and their idea I think I might be Mis paraphrasing here or misremembering is they didn't think people would hit four that quickly and nobody would really notice whereas the sweats found it in like two days because um it became apparent that court of stars was dropping more legendaries than average and

so players spent 25 hours in court of stars just farming it over and over and over and over again to get their legendaries uh and they were like yeah I hit my four so I'm rerolling and I didn't get the good one because of course it's blizzard so the legendaries were massively imbalanced and if you didn't get the good one you were practically dog [ __ ] in the eyes of a serious player so I wonder if that's what dropped people out Legions laun not amazing uh yeah so that's probably a part of it t

hat's probably a part of it CU BFA drops off pretty damn quickly because I think that's when people got into islands of warfronts and they were like what in the [ __ ] is the [ __ ] what is this uh but they stuck around a little longer for shadowlands I think it maybe took a little longer to set in there but interesting immediately after BFA we do see awful awful months and what we're actually looking at here is a rolling average of World of Warcraft question what would this graph have looked li

ke if they didn't pull the trigger on you think you want it but you don't take the fact that they pulled the trigger on a feature they said they weren't going to do so what the [ __ ] does this graph look like if they didn't pull the trigger on something they were pretty adamant that the players did not want it would have been it saved wow in many ways like I don't think they would have gone bankrupt but there's there's a strong strong strong strong argument that classic really [ __ ] saved well

really saved well because this graph would have just gone down and down and down this peak would have been probably here like if you take this out of the equation take classic out which is obviously carrying a lot of subs for the game what's interesting here is that this doesn't show the revenue I would imagine the revenue for World of Warcraft is just a straight line up if not even [ __ ] steeper with all the microtransactions they have now across the games so I think like you know tokens and

whatever like the actual revenue of the game goes up but the actual player retention is just in the toilet completely subscribers it does not get any more real than that now at the time of Classics launch we heard that it just about doubled W subs and this graph absolutely does back that up classic then was clearly helping as we were moving into of course the pandemic us did incredibly well but that was followed by crippling failure and when we zoom in we see The Unbroken line is the actual Subs

the dash line is the expected Subs you can see shadowlands dropped like a rock and unlike Legion and BFA classic existed during those initial quarters of Shadow L looking at this you may think that TBC and wrath classic didn't help much remember TBC wrath class classic and regular World of Warcraft all show the same subscription so even if TBC was doing pretty decently that could very much be canceled out by the performance of Shadowland correct and of course it's very much not a surprise when

we see this labeled as historically High church we all knew that difference here is we're hearing it from blizzard directly now next here's another slide for us to look at and this one gets really interesting this is a breakdown of why pause I don't want Belle's opinion before I read it okay right we're looking at shadowlands uh can't see the title after life okay so this is why did shadowlands fail okay the afterlife setting wasn't accessible H what does that mean the afterlife setting wasn't a

ccessible uh hm I need your help on this one I'm not sure I'm not sure what that means uh two law breaking dead is death the Machinery of death the inner workings of death think just people couldn't relate to it is that what they're talking about there it's just not relatable that we're in the afterlife considering we can just walk backwards and forwards and [ __ ] law breaking wasn't believable couldn't get into it I can buy that okay that makes sense to me is uh I honestly obviously I'm not a

big story guy when it comes to World of Warcraft but I could see that for people people like wait so we're dead and but we're not dead and but there's ghosts within the afterlife kind of uh but these people are alive blah blah blah uh the new antagonist wasn't developed yeah we'll agree on that uh I think we could agree on that yeah at least they're recognizing it is like the jaila was just bad was just a bad idea and trying to make him a big deal was just a bad idea uh it didn't work nobody gav

e a [ __ ] yeah that's fair well-known story Heroes were diminished oh yeah I did anybody like the andwin play out there the anduin arthus sort of crossover I mean they're us using it now obviously there's shades of it in the war Within trailer uh which he used really well but at the time it it felt desperate to me it was like we need you know I wish we could have Arthur back because he was badass and the Jailer sucks so it just felt a little desperate as like just try to turn andn into Arthur y

eah the gash stuff yeah not great Sylvanas obviously poor I think they missed a chance for Sylvanas entire character yeah yeah yeah for sure uh can't we be the heroes arthus pus garish puse yeah Uther yeah so big names came into it and just didn't do anything they ruined Arthur's Legacy uh I would have goone that far for me but I mean there's a lot of people who care more about the story than I do but I I agree with all this actually yeah this is fair I mean obviously the antagonist nobody gave

a [ __ ] about the Jailer he was just a big he was the guy who had the loot on him who the [ __ ] he is who cares uh the apply sitting not accessible if you're a LW guy I could totally buy into that as well and yeah the same for the stories okay game play the systems didn't evolved with player expect ations yeah you [ __ ] tar G ass up this whole [ __ ] tree was turbo [ __ ] I hated this thing from day one absolutely hated this [ __ ] thing I think we did probably me and Finn uh did so many vide

os on how stupid this system was absolutely ridiculous do you I mean does anybody remember the launch where you couldn't get the good ones until like eight weeks in but then if you played a certain [ __ ] class you got your really good ones like with the first week or the the play was actually to use one and then till week four when you had to swap over it was just so [ __ ] dumb remember we did the video on the number of combinations yeah the number of combinations I think I think the number en

ded up at like 16 million 16 million combination it was something like that facted in what was the conduits the conduits yeah because they of course the conduit power oh my God that [ __ ] conduit power Jesus Christ man the worst of this oh this is bringing it all back the [ __ ] worst of this is when they realized this thing was turbo [ __ ] and so they turned it over and I remember when Finn like called me you're like you're not going to believe what they've just done I'm like what and he's li

ke they've just turned them upside down they haven't changed what they do they just literally turned them upside down and put them on the same background it was [ __ ] bizarre it was bizarre it's like what are you so [ __ ] dumb uh and then of course toas became a [ __ ] endless prison where the goal came to be as out of there as quickly as possible and then the gold how many of you played shadowlands started looking at the legendary base pieces like 250,000 gold to get a five item level upgrade

or whatever the [ __ ] it was like what in the [ __ ] is this what in the [ __ ] is this and if I want decent legendaries I now have to do tour gas like 12 times for months I just want to play my character man that's all I just want to play my [ __ ] character that's all I want to do sometime like if you were a multic classer oh my God God go [ __ ] yourself if you're a druid go [ __ ] yourself oh you want to play bear sometimes well you got to grind T gas for this one oh but sometimes you play

Resto well you got to stay in there and do it for this one you got to play moonin you got to oh you enjoy playing different specs and stuff well [ __ ] you [ __ ] you you're going to live in Tor gas forever just horrible uh borrowed power yeah I mean borrowed power sucks as we well not always right borrow power is a bit of a nebulous term like trinkets are fine like little bits of borrow power are fine but like everything being borrowed power is too much and it sucks yeah t sets are borrowed po

wer T sets are fine like in the most part T sets are fine uh little bits of borrow power totally okay and expected and fine but your whole character being borrow power is too far uh not enough Variety in gameplay I think that's reasonably fair so what did you have in shadowlands you had daily quests more dailies and then it was M plus and PVP and they really if I remember right I'd have to go back but this is what my memory is telling me is that they they kind of made World quests totally ESS us

eless there was a lot of world quests that were like a little bit of gold or a little bit of renown like little tigy tiny amounts and relatively crappy gear it was a real shame that the covenant's individual things didn't super pay off in any way like Kyan had that weird boss mode um Mal draxus had the building of the Abominations but I did that for a few days and I got really tired oh God the revendreth T party a the mushroom yeah the mushroom for the [ __ ] flower people oh that tea party thin

g holy yeah oh the gardens with the seeds which all has potential but like you did this better in Mr Pandaria that's what was always so confusing about that stuff is like you just did this better ages ago so why why have we got this version so confusing so weird like we've had this before but better I don't get it why have you why is it worst uh okay Community gaps in content uh I don't remember that because I kind of was drifting out by that point that did we have long content droughts in shado

wlands I can't remember that uh lack of transparency didn't feel heard is this for me is this for me personally hello this is going to go really badly I'm just let you guys know before the game even comes out n it's all right it'll be fine hello do my best over here I'm screaming into a void this is going to [ __ ] suck blie uh Ian they they had a vision like I've got a lot of respect for Ian I like Ian a lot um and he did listen to me it's just that he didn't agree and it felt insane it felt in

sane like how are you not seeing what I'm seeing cuz it's so obvious I feel like I'm looking at an elephant in the room like an actual elephant and you don't seem to be seeing it but I see it it's right there it's so obvious and it sucks like let's just not do this uh we hear you but I'm not doing anything about it uh where's that one interview you did with I in uh I did two over the course of shin with the I one was to address these concerns where the infamous rip cord line came up uh where the

y had a plan to drop a lot of their stuff but didn't do it to be fair though let me extend an olive branch here if they fixed covenants that wouldn't have saved Shadowland it would have been better but it wouldn't have saved Shadowland like there was too much other [ __ ] like fixing covenants was certainly like one of the argu argumentative things that we talked about cuz it was it was one of the bigger deals for sure um but it would not have stopped the the Tor Gast grind it wouldn't have stop

ped these stupid dumbass trees it wouldn't have stopped any of that stuff like everyone focuses on the covenants for shadowlands but I even I know is like just flipping the rip cord on the covenants would not have saved that expansion there was too much going wrong in too many different directions it was like it was built on a house of toothpicks it was all cracking and crumbling yeah it was rotten from the ground up I agree uh the Covenant was the big one because that made totally no sense it d

idn't even fit in with the story of the game it was absolutely absurd uh in all respects like I really hated that story it's like thank you for opening up atun like he did the that the that tweet we made where it's like thank you so much you are the Savior the Primal May one day return wait you chose Kyan I hate you now you're the worst person ever but also when I need you you must come back and help us and save the world again but you're not allowed inside our house anymore but we need you and

also thank you for building our house like what is going on why would this ever be a thing this is so [ __ ] dumb this is absolutely stupidest [ __ ] ever ah so bad okay um let's go shans didn't work in their estimation they say afterlife setting wasn't accessible new antagonist wasn't developed well-known story Heroes were diminished I mean does that match of shadowlands to you certainly does for me and this remember the closest that we will see to Blizzard just saying straight up this whole th

ing was a mistake we shouldn't have done it we've ruined our iconic Heroes the villain sucked as for gameplay they say it lacked variety borrowed power was wearing thin systems were not evolving and that I get they were just iterating the same thing again and again and again and when we think about variety I mean hey 16 months in the sanguin depths does that sound good to you vitally they call out community specifically saying gaps in content lack of transparency didn't feel hurt I meaned all [ 

__ ] that we said but this is best I will stand by that to the day I lot of team members were not happy at this period of time there's a phrase I could say referring to some cleaks but I will not say it because it would be revealing I said it multiple times I would give anything anything to have been in the meeting where they're discussing these ideas and you just know so many people are like this is bad we shouldn't be doing this and other side of the table saying actually I think it's going to

pay off I think people are really going to enjoy having this meaningful choice where they feel locked into their characters like no no they won't no that's not how they're going to feel it's a combat game that's not how they're going to feel yeah they will like this like [ __ ] backwards and forwards that was going on between the devs going on and another side is there has actually been quite a lot of Staff turnover since the shadowlands anyway tldr it was a little bit of a [ __ ] show and I th

ink that absolutely a little bit of a [ __ ] show in their public community ation the question then for us is does the contents of this slideshow feel like it's being internalized by the team I mean literally in some ways game-wise I very much think so the state of core class design is better than it's been in years Mythic plus is at an all-time Peak I've got a report coming out on that next week by the raw numbers it is literally the best it has been through all of this current WoW expansion bu

t let's not get ahead of ourselves let's go back to some numbers we're taking a look at the launch of dragonflight and that must have been a terrifying thing for them its launch did not bring them back to their earlier shadowlands numbers that is dire and it reflects an abnormally weak marketing campaign one of their worst expansions expansion that felt almost unexciting by Design which I kind of understand how can you have a massive villain Arc right after you've tried to pull the Jailer right

after you've wheeled out developers to claim in marketing materials of the jailer's demise is in fact the closing of a book that began in Warcraft 3 that was complete insane and feature-wise it didn't have any insane hyper marketing feature like artifact weapons and there was even tracking was the big thing expectations with the new race the dra the were a take and playable Dragon Kin there were nothing like what Warcraft as a franchise had led people to desire or expect is that true I have no i

dea what the context for that is I thought the dra I thought dra the were pretty cool yeah dra dragon riding was the big thing they were selling it on but uh I don't know I really liked uh I like the draag the I guess that's from a law uh the dra the are lame they're cool I can't be Dragon Ball and Paladin dra the is fur [ __ ] I wouldn't say that by any means uh dragon SW what big ones I yeah I can see that for all of that and indeed because of some of that it did focus on the essentials class

Des I like them from G basic traval content Cadence let's see then what investing in those core foundational things actually get you in your game looking at the dragonflight subbers we see that initially pretty mid actually the initial content seemed to do okay not amazing it clearly did have a lower turn rate than what we would have expected oh [ __ ] the graph goes on there's more all right excellent so season of Discovery definitely helped hardcore helped a lot uh cataclysm classic coming lat

er on and War within coming there so yeah this is what I would expect actually we're getting back up to this is a good sign they're getting back up uh record post launch stability and growth yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah this is good this is exactly the feeling I've had recently with people drifting back into World of Warcraft this is exactly what I think was happening this is good and they're keeping them in this WOW ecosystem that they're dotting around it's like you're invested in the Apple f

ranchise this makes sense okay is mid 2023 and Beyond so what happened well classic hardcore both unofficial and official kicked off there was a revamp of gearing in modern wow and that I cannot overstate the importance of because for so many people gear literally makes them go and play the game Pi up gearing people start playing more surprising BlizzCon then was huge it got the Vibes right and instead of a woohooo happy trailer we got something with meat with emotional depth with compelling voc

al performances amazing animation industry leading and of course season of discovery which was launched quite shortly after you would be forgiven for assuming that this spike is all season of Discovery but some numbers suggest that not all the case as an example we've just published our report of Mythic plus activity to our members and our analysis numbers EXC me more than core thing though is that season 3 of dragon flight in terms of the number of runs done is demolishing seon serious well I l

ike my Ser well sta numers that are essential I'm not going down this RO with you some people like it some people don't some people refer to Mr par draws us comparison right now World of Warcraft has as many Subs as it did partway through the classic Spike back in the days of w they do really well just shy of shadowland's flash in the pan and it actually looks as strong as Legion they're at Legion levels again [ __ ] hell they've got to be smiling in that office assuming this is correct corporat

e graphs are always right it's like when we get them processor uh processor performance graphs from AMD and Intel and they're like uh corporate graphs are always a little sus uh but consider this is a developer conference and it's John and Holly I have a lot of faith in John and Holly but um yeah we've got no numbers but we I think we did in Legion does it feel like that though does the community feel like that the answer is no and there are many reasons but a big one is fragmentation they're al

l over the place Discovery and modern have all got different player bases we literally don't see each other we don't watch the same YouTubers and watch the same twitch people people right so together we're producing Legion like subscription numbers it doesn't feel like that cuz we're actually logging into don't think giv shra and that I think is an important factor modern world Warcraft is I think very much on an upswing but modern wow is still short of Legion because Legion produced these numbe

rs by itself without a season of Discovery without a classic but still I truly believe it is on an upswing basically what they need to do is the hard work and just making stuff look Dragon flight was a great version of world war they can do all sorts of classic different game modes like they do with types of play the reward schema massive they've tapped into something they didn't realize was going to work out as Warcraft the franchise Warcraft the emotion is Warcraft the world the setting it's n

o wonder that they are leaning into more core Warcraft things with the war within and why they are setting both midnight and the last Titan in fan favorite continents so clearly modern wow as a subset of World of Warcraft has a long way to go but I think is absolutely on the upswing that was a weird time to talk about some numbers okay we cannot do exact ones here but we can our last official number is 5.5 million that was a few quarters after they plummeted from the war okay so we got to assume

the graph is accurate million and uh guess what based on what they did say in Prior earnings calls we can get a workable subscriber number estimate for now that is basically so war of R's low was 5.5 million when Legion launched a misund what W's low was 5.5 million it should have been so much less it should have been so much lower so so much lower I'm I'm amazed it should have been so much lower the the one's low is 5 and a half million uh it should have been lower did Legion boost wow to 10 m

illion in with a journal the rating was good but not a lot of people like rating false they didn't provide a number though but enter this the q127 earnings report so that's q117 Legion released in Q3 the prior year and this is what it says legion's overall performance is slightly ahead of the prior expansion now this is obviously not perfect data but you know two to three quarters post launch wad was about 5.5 million so what is their definition of slightly if it's only 5% then that would put Le

gion point it cycle at 5.8 million subscrib [ __ ] are they up to like seven or 8 million subscribers okay if we're at 5.8 million two quarters after Legion launched then you just draw a horizontal line you see that we hit about 5.8 million with the launch of Guardians of the dream but since then it's hard to say because the y-axis isn't labeled but if you are to assume that the Y AIS starts at zero and you count 5.8 million pixels you work out a Subs per pixel value and then you do the maths th

en we get 7.2 that's an assumption and we got some to that up right now there and abouts and yes this is but guess what we'll be able to prove that the y-axis actually does start at zero so while this is rough I think you can see the Fairly clear logic here and at least it's a pretty damn good ballpark but let's get a bit spicier what were Wow's worst numbers well 4.0 7 million there and abouts Midway through BFA and during shadowlands even with classic helping 4.5 million one thing that actuall

y does make me feel good about these numbers is the scale though because in the earnings call again covering Classics release blizzard said it was the sharpest growth in history and that they essentially double their subscribers and if you go back to the annotated chart you can see from 4.07 million to 8.27 million which basically is a doubling so I'm very confident that uh on that graph yes that's fair it's zero on the y axis that is its starting point and that I actually really do respect a lo

t of companies will try to fudge with data by not labeling Y axis or being a bit funny with it that they really do seem to be just giving out the actual Trends well played that's honestly quite refreshing so I suppose props to Holly and John they evidently felt that actually they're in a strong enough feeling position that they can show this kind of thing yeah yeah they obviously knew this vital things because for blizzard it's all about Revenue per user they use the store a lot more now than th

ey used to they pull future Revenue forward using six and 12 month sub deals but the thing is wow is probably over twice as expensive to develop I mean literally the head count is like over sub numbers really a part the picture the actual Revenue that W's making is way way higher than it used to all the [ __ ] bundles and [ __ ] buying [ __ ] cosmetics and the token are doing quite a bit of work um because yes Ely the World of Warcraft team is I think just shy of 600 people it really is quite ma

ssive and that is far larger than it was at the past and say you know the likes of Wrath of the Lich King Wrath of the Lich King had had a far a team that would look tiny compared to the current one um and of course that's when they had 12.1 million subscribers so that is basically it I cannot waitd get out there so we can actually just down go through all the detail I think um Holly and John doing a talk like this is really really cool of course at GDC this is a case where they will be doing a

presentation to fellow developers like you don't just walk into GDC those tickets are pretty damn expensive um I should know because um one of us is over there right now doing GDC things working out stuff for our next project now to be clear he did not go to this talk we learned about this through uh sources shall we say but knowing that this will be going public uh not super far in the future I kind of feel comfortable um sharing it because I think especially right now probably benefit from jus

t a all right let's go back uh 7.25 million that's way higher than I thought it was and GG's to those that also kind of fits that seems pretty reasonable like uh I I agree with bell here and how he's arrived at these numbers that fits that's very very very respectable very respectable uh a lot of well that that's we keep saying you're within the ecosystem like season of Discovery is probably petering out a little bit now uh I know I'm kind of I'm kind of done with where I wanted to be in season

of Discovery my character has a couple of things to get to be like bis biss but like it's not really worth it um and then people booger off to different things I don't understand a curve on TBC and rth the lichking and the big jump in season of Discovery uh so what's happening here is this is after Classic comes out so BFA obviously is tanking would have continued to do this but then classic comes out and classic boosts it back up because obviously the launch of classic was such a massive massiv

e Community thing people around the world were begging for classic it's finally here the hype around it was astronomical um you remember I was in Las Vegas for the classic launch doing a big event with tons of streamers uh it was a huge huge thing and so a lot of players would have resubbed for that and also moved on from BFA to play classic like practically everybody with a World of Warcraft uh investment was playing classic when it came out uh a lot of people drop out obviously they remember j

ust how [ __ ] classic is sorry classic andies and I know you're already angry at me about my season Discovery video but classic is great if you love classic but it's also got a lot of problems it's very very slow it's uh it's it's it's questing is trous it's terrible it's really bad there's a reason it got left behind but either way it hasn't nostalgic feel and people love it I'm fine with that that's great um so stuck around play classic I wonder if this coincides with the launch of like AQ uh

KNX Ramis things like that these extra Peaks how many people are leaving between Raiders uh' be interesting to see I'm not sure what this bump is here uh then the new W expansions coming shadowlands it's surely what was the Mantra at the time while players they never have two expansions back to back at the time we all opium the [ __ ] out of ourselves that it always goes weak one good one then we get a weak expansion then we get a great expansion right we were huffing that [ __ ] like cocaine w

e was like it can't be as bad as BFA they would never do two bad expansions back to back like we were snorting that [ __ ] up uh and oof oofers oofers oofers but shadowlands looks as good as it does because it's also including remember this is the overall wow sub number so it's still including everybody playing classic so the reality is this graph probably would have come down here and gone like this right something like that if it wasn't for the fact that classic exists and people are playing c

lassic and they're doing all the [ __ ] in classic so the reality if it was just the Standalone retail version of w it probably would have dipped even lower and then maybe peaked a little bit and then down even further I imagine just like I said I'd love to see the ratio of players but I have to believe that shadowlands would have actually on its own been down here like 2 million which is what we did a we do some math on this Chris and that was accurate for shadowlands about 2 million didn't we

do that at some point based on that we pulled a lot of information from uh the the the scraping websites and it looked to be about 2 million didn't we do something on that sort of we made an assessment based on Mythic plus participation yeah we got a lot of we got some spreadsheets from r. and then there was that other website that was scraping Covenant choices you remember we did that yeah and it was about 2 million right it was quite low yeah it was very low cuz I remember talking about I thin

k it was but obviously it was flawed data yeah it flawed data it was never going to be accurate it was the best guess work we could do but we did a lot of research on that and it seemed I think we found that cuz you could base it on Armory Covenant choices that's what we got information from right so it was like obviously some people have a lot of alts and things like that but it was floating around that 1.8 to2 million number I think yeah I can't remember yeah it was something like that um so I

think yeah it would probably would have been about 2 million for just shadowlands but then obviously there's a little bump uh and burning Crusade comes out which also bumps up the numbers uh Wrath of the Lich King doesn't seem to do much of anything where's where's hardcore that come from uh there was another slide hardcore on it I think even The Unofficial one would have even been bigger um yeah it looks like uh I wonder if the entire luster of classic is wearing thin for people well I think l

ike just classic yes I think it's things like season of Discovery things like hardcore it's the twists that are going to get people right if you consider that for many rra Lich King is the height of World of Warcraft for a lot of people like massively popular was the highest point of Subs ever in World of Warcraft was R of Lich King you would have kind of expected a little bump but I wonder if the reality a larger bump than this I wonder if the reality of how classic is playing out versus expect

ations is really took the Shine off it a little bit yeah I know I mean wrath is when I do oh can you L at reio um so I'm very nostalgic for wrath have you play well you're very nostalgic for wrath but have you played wrath classic no no cuz I can't be asked I can't be honest yeah yeah yeah I mean there is there is a Nostalgia for it but it's not something I necessarily feel to repeat no I understand that you're going through kind of yeah that's why I didn't play cuz I've done it day I did it eve

ry single day since the game came out like there's nothing for me to find in the classic experience other the disappointment honestly like um what was that [ __ ] the Old Kingdom for justice badges is that thanks yeah I get it yeah I mean I have no intention of replaying a game that I've played before for years hi John uh okay uh so that's not got hardcore in it uh hardcore wouldn't have appealed to a lot of people I don't think okay here we go uh can we maximize this okay uh so yeah wrath is a

surprisingly Small Bump I would have expected higher uh the normal classic has the bonus that being lost in retail wrath is still in retail yeah I literally did wrath when it was new yeah cu the problem I guess classic is running into perfectly matches the massive drop off at that point in shadowlands mhm I would guess the problem with classic is is now catching up to being not as long ago as wow classic was it's actually getting more recent even though cataclysm is still what 10 years ago you a

re enveloping more and more players into stuff they have played before uh and coming through cuz I imagine a lot of classic players never uh the people who were here I bet there was a fair chunk of people who never played classic cat 15 years ago exactly so for them it was the first first time they ever got to play the original World of Warcraft right and experienc it like I never got to do it I'd heard about Dax ramas I'd heard about the ashbringer the corrupted ashbringer and all these events

and things like that so you would have had that but as you go forward obviously that's less and less people depending on when they started because you're just moving up to less further away obviously um hardcore is a little bump but nothing Mega uh season of Discovery is a huge bump good idea for season of Discovery yeah very cool people gate ke and optimizing the fun at the easiest content in Wrath classic yeah yeah yeah especially the questing you can go and do most C quests on live true yeah

yeah this is more content you can actually just go doing the retail version as well yeah I don't think hardcore would have a wide appeal uh or people would have tried it briefly died and gave up Good Times all around that's what would have happened uh with hardcore is people would have tried it died to level three [ __ ] bat or something and just like yeah I can't do this I'm leaving uh or it's it's just annoying or whatever what are you talking about I got like uh I did pretty fair for a first

little attempt there I only died once and it was in the 30s that's all right that's all right we did pretty well we certainly didn't dip after the first bat or anything like that that was not how it went down uh died to a sausage roll that's how I prefer to remember it yeah for sure uh Caesar Discovery does surprisingly well and more people returning to play Dragon flight very cool uh very very cool I don't think kata's going to provide the biggest bump that if we're looking at the trends of bur

ning Crusade and wrath probably Kata is not going to do anything too much I wouldn't have thought compared to war within but they could be if War within does well they could be looking at the largest bump they've seen since Legion which is pretty cool uh the curve without classic numbers is this is this made by you [Laughter] no you see it is going up with dragonflight you see this is all that time this is not accurate they are going up with uh dragonflight for sure they are going up with dragon

flight I'm not sure that Dragon flight's launch would hit I would actually change this I don't think dragonflight hits shadowlands amount of people with still people holding out probably about here but uh I would imagine this actually goes like this honestly and starts ring again probably not to us the sales version but lower and then back up now it's like going up we the wall within shadowlands was also during covid as well yeah true yeah W was not back yet it's not back yet it's doing well but

they're going to lose it's kind of like doing an ff14 msq stream it's like yeah you've had the bump from it like with classic but that's kind of wearing off now so something will need to replace that which is no doubt why season of Discovery came about when it did cuz they could see Wrath of Lich King didn't quite do what they hoped it would do so the luster is wore off on this product so now we need season of Discovery uh to come up with something else to play with until we get to war within u

h so you can see you can actually kind of see their internal strategy here I kind of Wonder and I would ask this is season of Discovery and direct response to the lack of Interest in Wrath of the Lich King they did not see the it was already low at Burning Crusade as you can see it's a little hop up but obviously it's probably actually way higher than this makes it appear because shadowlands would continue to drop so I imagine that the the burning Crusade was actually considered to be very succe

ssful if I was to guess but wrath didn't seem to get the work done uh this is also maybe he did hard to tell it's really hard to tell ralich King looks like a little bump but how low was shadowlands at that point cuz realistically this could actually be a huge huge bump it's just that without shadowlands doing anything good cuz dragonflight comes out here right this is still in the shadowlands era so for all we know actually ralich King did extremely well uh and it really say pulled them out of

the [ __ ] with the where shadowland's gone it could have been thata it could have been the case wrath would have been the lowest of the all the bumps we can't tell this is not representative of the reality of how many people went in because I have to imagine the Baseline retail one is continuing to lower so the the classic bumps are less and less each time or the foundation that classic is bumping off is less and less each time either way uh see to kept players from TBC yeah we don't quite know

we don't quite know that too much detail to read from this graph cuz we've really no idea it could have been that shadowlands lost a lot of people but then it kind of leveled out and the people who lik shadowlands were fine there are a lot of people who really like shadowlands I don't know why but they exist and stuck it out till the end like they were like it's you know for me it's fine so um I'm not going to I'm fine I'm happy enough I'm doing whatever I want to do and play my alts and then t

he point three patches come we can swap covenants now we could do all those kind of things I've already leveled all my Renown up so I can just do whatever like that could have happened we don't know only blizzard knows that oh there are definitely people who look back fondly at shadowlands again I don't know why I don't know why but there you go uh it is what happened uh it is what happened it happens people do that people do that yeah I would like to see the previous sub numbers but uh yeah pre

tty good I was talking at 12 sub drinking shadowlands uh mistake I'll never do again yeah one thing I I think is clear they know the value of having a lot of wowow variants yeah I I I mean we this is kind of ironic that's landed now cuz we were talking about all last week wow is doing a very very very good job of keeping people within Warcraft and I think they're got to expand on it more like we've got the plunder storm thing now um which is going to go away in the next 3 weeks um I could see th

em doing more of this I wouldn't be surprised to see a MOA thing coming not here of the storm but like a little MOBA uh temporary event coming I can see a lot of that coming in the future uh little side events to get people in and little game modes based with just little wow characters doing whatever temporary I could totally see that coming I think six weeks tall right and we're like two two weeks of plunder storm something like that so like four or five weeks so plunder stor is temporary yeah

PL stor is a six we event um they should have made it free to play I was talking to Chris about this morning I don't think they knew how this was going to play out with plunder storm so doing it for the wow Subs only right now makes sense I think if they do another event then it's going to be free to play I would imagine I think that's probably the play is this first one keep it within the wow ecosystem it might go horribly wrong we that's why they released it on a servers first right uh so they

can fix it and then next time they they've learned a lot from this one one I don't think these events will be secret again uh cuz that didn't work out cuz as soon as people found out it was PVP they like lost their [ __ ] minds uh or they built up expectations in their head to be too big uh so they probably announced it earlier exactly what it's going to be uh but probably will make it free to play in the future for people to jump in and do things with um it's also perfect with consoles yeah ex

actly like they can now create there's so much Warcraft they could create this bubble of being in Warcraft and keep people there and the subs a sub ultimately uh problem that there is so much good game that could be played of your hours that I don't even have time to play Dr flight I didn't even start it Blizzard's probably fine with that if you're for anybody who stays within wow I mean you got to remember it's a subscription service right and look how gyms work they Thrive they you know in man

y ways gyms don't even want you showing up because that's less equipment for people to use like gym memberships and subscription Services a lot of these ones they rely on you paying your sub and like not even playing although they would like you to play to spend microtransactions but how many people I guess what I'm saying is how many people do you think have a wow subscription and haven't logged in for like several months cuz they've been busy not that they don't want to play so they keep their

sub going but they haven't got time to log in or whatever right or they bought a six month sub to get amount that they might want to play in the future and they just don't log in anymore right I imagine there's a fair few people who have a rolling subscription with World of Warcraft and barely log in too lazy to cancel yeah they give m for the six and 12 months yep they do that don't call me out like that I'm just saying there's a lot of that going on as well uh that big dip after Shon is exact

ly when end Walker came out Subs moved to se yes they did yeah for sure this is like um for office rat rat jamming rat jamming uh it was the perfect St for squeenix shadowlands was atrociously bad I will stand by that uh Absol astronomically bad if you weren't into classic you're not coming back for office R thank you so much t uh and also Final Fantasy 14 was hitting its Heights on the story right which people got to play in but Final Fantasy 14 has lost that edge now with a lot of the players

and for when you end Walker is um I mean we a lot of people have talked about it end Walker hasn't done a great job of keeping people playing dayto day and that's why I think a lot of people have drifted back into wow at this point um a lot of people have drifted back over yeah if edw Walker's not done a great job of that which is what Yoshi P just talked about is we need to be working on these things we didn't have the good day-to-day gameplay that people wanted from end Walker and people looki

ng what to do and so people are like well there's season of Discovery to go and check out I'm technically not playing retail I don't like retail or Classics going on so um it's kind of edging back I'll be interested to see whether of MMOs um start trying to create this kind of environment of miniature game modes uh it's like The Fall Guys event in ff14 it's great temporarily but it needs uh more and more regular than that uh everybody's to give me more fomo fomo works right we could [ __ ] and t

alk about it all we want but fomo works man fomo absolutely Works sub for the there's a reason it exists it absolutely Works fomo totally works uh it's something that's very effective and it works but I've got to say I'm happy for blizz they're doing well uh besides other IP is not um performing as they would H Wow's doing a lot right right now I'm happy for him and I put a lot of it on Holly cuz John's been there for a very long time but it seems to be Holly who's led the way on this and she's

such a lovely person to Tatu as well she's she gives a [ __ ] I really like Holly Holly is giga Chad status for me she really is she's done a she's done so much since she came into the game uh bring back Heroes of the stormy cowards they could start baking that into uh will walk can't say it can't say that about Metson he's only just come back like Metson is not responsible for this Metson might do something wonderful but he's not responsible for where wow is today that's Holly Holly's the one w

ho's been leading this charge Ian's had more free time seemingly and to enjoy his job than I've seen in years years like seemingly I don't know whether the delegation process has changed or whatever but Ian seems to be enjoying his [ __ ] job again which is great myfc implode due to terrible leadership changes 2 years of being in it m so I don't play FF as much as can't find another good FC skeptical yeah it's uh there's always ways Ian seems Unshackled and unstressed because Ian was dealing wit

h this and we'll never know and they won't tell us unless it's in a tell all biography in like 10 years time a lot of the choices in shadowlands that led to this I often wonder this and Ian would never tell me is like how much of it did you fight against even though you're the game director game directors are not the final word on a lot of this stuff and as Ian who was a former Raider himself and all that kind of stuff is how much did you disagree with because it can be like that how much did yo

u like because there's no way I is with his raid background was okay with the Covenant system there's no [ __ ] way I refused to believe it like he was like yeah yeah they get direction from other places is like did they know how early did they know it was doomed like when I spoke to Josh right who used to be the community manager who knew a lot of the features before they came out he was quite open in telling us is like we we all knew this was going to suck I knew as soon as I was told about it

it was going to suck and can you imagine what that's like you're working there you're making a game certainly if you're a community manager and you have to face the public that's your job and you're like oh my God this [ __ ] sucks and I just know I have to deal with the fall out of this like it's terrible like I've got to deal with this and it just [ __ ] blows and I know this in chat are kicking off uh Al lot of MIM during that time well yeah there's a lot that happens here we have all the re

velations of what was going on in blizzard for all the years and removal of all them top staff people outing we had work from home uh everybody left the the Anaheim office you know that's when I went and visited and did all that stuff but um I'll always say it when I was there the stuff were amazing the devs I got to meet and the people making the game absolutely loved what they were doing and were obviously making dragonflight at the time uh for wild though is it also kind of double-edged Sword

to split your player base between so many different versions of the game and as more and more splits happen the smaller and smaller communities get it depends right in a very skeptical process yeah you can be very worried that you're fragmenting your player base into too many different areas however similar to what grinding gear have recently said about poe1 and to in the interviews I had with um Jonathan if for whatever reason season of Discovery does something and the players like this is [ _

_ ] awesome there's no reason you're not like well that should be in war within and we have the tech and we can make that happen or plunder storm for all I know plunder storm is actually designed so they could check out the spectator mode which works pretty [ __ ] well and people are already saying he like why is this not in the race to world first why haven't we got access to this resource it's like well we've made it and we can utilize it now uh and we can make it work is all this Tech is movi

ng around so it's like hey we did something really good in retail that can come down to war within as well or to season of Discovery we can move it all around does feel like a console test especially there's a lot of positives to because it'll never be a strict separation right there's it's always vend diagram there's always overloading there'll be some people who play I do it I've played dragonflight hardcore and season Discovery the only thing I've not touched is classic there'll be people who

are like well I haven't touched retail but I've done this this and this and all overlapping between them they're not trying to get a separation more realistically what I see blizzard is doing here is accepting the fact you cannot create enough content in this world to satiate every gamer in an MMO with a single product I don't think it's possible without poisoning that product it's the exact reason we ended up with all the dailies and daily chores and constant grinding in by time we hit shadowl

ands is trying to make enough content to satiate millions of players to keep playing our game every single [ __ ] day when it's better in fact to say it's okay if you stop playing this one for a bit instead of us overloading it with [ __ ] to keep you interesting and go and play this thing where it's separated it's safe if we do something in seasonal Discovery we don't have to do it in Dragon flight or we can it's our choice but we don't need to just keep pouring [ __ ] into dragonfly to keep yo

u interested in what's the next patch when's the next new thing it's a way better idea is to be like we can separate these things out we can put things over here and that means it's totally okay because the biggest complaint I see right now from dragonflight from the people who are pure retail content creators like my friends who just do retail is that by the end of the season they're a little bored and there's not enough to keep people playing like if they're Arena players like the Arenas have

kind of turned into a bit of a ghost town Battlegrounds are a bit of a ghost town blah blah blah blah blah but that's because people are kind of okay with going playing something else and I don't think blizzard needs to constantly be adding new content every couple of weeks or three months or whatever to dragonflight to keep it interesting uh they'll be a point very soon though the classic doesn't pay for itself yeah I wonder what the move is season of Discovery step one right obviously you can

look at this timeline and see the season of Discovery is the realization that the classic gravy train is running out so what are they going to do next I don't know do they restart classic again do they go back to square one and start it again I mean they kind of just did that with season of Discovery cuz you can argue season of Discovery is is Classic Plus but it's not really like I see season Discovery as a play playground they can't right so it's like well what do we do next this gravy train i

s coming to an end Mr Pandaria and then we're getting into the dubious expansions like I think Mr Pandaria would be okay but then we're getting kind of wad Legion or do you start really experimenting with can we do cataclysm plus is it worth it to make these different now what if we do the burning classic they could do whatever the hell they want they could make some really weird [ __ ] if they want to what is World of Warcraft classic like if we really like went crazy I don't know like this wil

l be the discussions they've been planning over the next few years is all right the classic gravy train is running out what do we do well let's start with something like season of Discovery where we mess around with the abilities and we make the gameplay a bit more fun uh and that does very well but it's seasonal right once you've got your stuff you move away wad plus with a shat raid uh soon as sco should go to TBC it could do it could do you could have uh SE the discovery the burning Crusade o

kay uh could do that as well where does and then what do we do for people who want more long-term gameplay cuz seemingly the people on the classic train uh like Lion's a bit like this right he like classic is a day-to-day game for them uh cataclysm but with harder dungeons than those on release which all the moulders who can't play Break Up St or heroic yeah I'll see I genuinely like to see them go full on to Classic Plus in the sense that imagine they continue the story as if but the dark porta

l never opened right alternative timeline stuff is stuff they could do at any point yeah absolutely they I think that could be really cool and that's like a longevity thing right that I think feel like that's the solution if you want to have something that can in principle go indefinitely I do suspect they don't want to end up in a situation where they're literally making two MMOs uh which is what you'd be talking about there cuz yeah if you did a Time Divergence you're entally you can you reuse

some of the assets but essentially things are going to change and that point you are running to Independent MMOs I think they do want the majority of the focus to be on war within and the retail uh but if it gets to the point that you're right it's like well you know do we now have the revenue and resources to actually instead of making wow 2 which is a huge project as we've seen with Riot yeah right like we've seen this with Riot it's like yeah this is not as easy and we've already spent ion d

oll is like can we just use World of Warcraft classic and just kind of change it a little bit and go it a different way is that cheaper I think it would be data driven right because you'd have to say okay to what degree are the audiences for classic and Retail fundamentally different now MH and if the answer to that is there's a significant Divergence in the millions of players then there may be enough to justify that maybe and it's also definitely cheaper for them although I imagine the devs li

ke I do not want to work with this engine anymore for the love of [ __ ] Christ please can we have a new engine to work with for that's not limited by the backpack size for [ __ ] sake like can we do that uh imic G went through a similar development uh they release more cards every year support different ways of playing which led to oversaturation of the core players got tired of the Endless hype yeah yeah that can happen as well I don't know what their next move is I I I would definitely say th

ey're looking at the classic gravy train ending and they're planning for that whether or not it'll be more stuff like season Discovery or more other game modes coming in but I don't think I would be amazed if they're not like looking at what they've created here with all these different variations of the game which are definitely working we can see that literally in the statistical numbers here and expanding on that in some way without going too far we'll see would do what if they re the talent

tree so you don't have two overpowered specs and useless ones uh I mean I wouldn't put too much faith in Wild balance like they get it right on occasion they get it pretty close to right but uh it's not something I would definitely rely on uh and ultimately that stuff is kind of minor in the grand scheme of things people will play underpowered specs all day every day if they're just having fun it's all about game playay what do end the classic servers at wrath well we're getting cataclysm for su

re uh they shut them down typical classic servers have to end at some point do they nothing with an MMO ever has to end like we've seen era exists and not true there's barely anybody playing it 100% uh but there are people who are playing still just wow Classic on the classic Hera service they're there they're all playing they're doing their thing I can't I have no idea how many people are playing but they're there and they're just enjoying the Original Classic over and over again uh W is like a

painting that starts one corner there's no reason at all to rewatch that was done before that's something wild laxes forever other games that goes pretty well uh they have that Vision now they've obviously realized this and gone back let's start remember this it was only here they said that wow classic would never exist uh now they're here started to look a bit like one of them uh when you find out who makes all the sodas right and then you find out like one company has like 90 different brands

of soda uh all under their things yeah we got hardcore sted ear and ear itself had a great surge of plays even before that yep yeah very good like they've expanded they need to be careful not to go too far I think if you have uh you don't want to fragment the player base into like tens and tens of them uh no we're doing hardcore 60 this year uh we're doing solo sound hardcore at some point this year uh which is going to be a really exciting time yeah it' be interesting it'll be interesting but

I think uh they might be considering certainly a diversions of timelines of stuff uh get cromy in this the clock starts spinning uh and then it changes again but that would likely be if we were to see something like that it would probably be the next BlizzCon because I don't think there's a BlizzCon this year they've not announced it yet and we're already in March so we have to assume it's not uh but year after BlizzCon cuz that's when cataclysm would have been out for a while uh Caesar Discover

y will have wrapped up all moved on to the be burning Crusade while within will be out uh they're not going to show too much about midnight so probably next year's BlizzCon will have whatever the the plan is going forward two years finally they're not going to get rid of what are they going to do with I do disagree though Mike they should keep praking expansions forever I can't wait to relive shadowlands yeah exactly uh do you think BlizzCon literally takes up so much work hours cancel thing to

get work done uh my the last BlizzCon was not intended to take place um like by blizzard I think after it was I think the last BlizzCon was done because the Microsoft deal was going through and they wanted to show that strength and as far as I know don't quote me on this as an absolute fact all right don't be that guy but I'm pretty sure the last bcom was kind of organized by Microsoft on behalf of them is why there was so many changes uh going on begin so there's no BlizzCon this year I don't t

hink blizzard was ready for a BlizzCon like they had very little announcements for Diablo they had very little announcements for OverWatch they it was basically the Work World of Warcraft show right let's get Metson on stage uh but it was I think Microsoft said we'll put on BlizzCon you guys kind of need to show up and uh we'll do the the bulk of the work what will happen next time my good feeling is Blizzard wants control over it again because they weren't happy with the way BlizzCon went this

year uh I don't blame them either there was a lot of things that if you went to BlizzCon and you've been to several BlizzCon you know this year was very different or last year as it was the last BlizzCon was very different uh and it was it was a little weird in places um and they'll probably want to take back control of that so the next BlizzCon which should be 2025 I guess will um will be on yes we're going to F 13 today for sure uh yeah uh what was wrong with it it was just it was presented mo

re like a gaming convention that isn't blizzard blizzard likes to merge all their IPs together there's it's very normal when you go to BlizzCon to see Raina you know Jim Rainer stood next to [ __ ] um Tracer they're all part of one in the same world right it's the blizzard universe that theyve created and you'd see all that this event wasn't like that it was very strictly segmented off this is OverWatch this is [ __ ] Hearthstone this is this and it was all like separated out you had essentially

you could walk between them but essentially they wanted you to come out of Diablo to go into like the warcraft area which felt weird it it was like this I know have these very themed rooms instead of it all being intermingled together uh whoever was running it seemingly had never seen what the Dark Moon fair is like which obviously the blizzard organizers know exactly what the Dark Moon fair is like to the point where the [ __ ] fire brigade had to come and kick everybody out of the heart uh th

e Dark Moon fair and have them queuing for like 4 hours to go trade pins instead of what blizzard usually does is give those guys an entire buildings floor to deal with just for Dark Moon Fair like you you go there and there's thousands of people doing pin trading and all sorts of stuff and having a great weekend just doing that um so yeah there was a lot of things having the opening ceremony in the the star 2 Arena that was so weird because people just couldn't get in uh they didn't they didn't

have enough room for everybody whereas usually they just do it on the main stage and people can sit anywhere they want in the whole show and watch it live uh and it's not a stress people aren't stood out in the sun because it's obviously Anaheim it's baking heat so you had thousands of people stud in baking [ __ ] heat yeah it was uh there was a lot of differences this year which didn't feel like a season people have done it uh they tried to SP OverWatch 2 since it's all monetized it's probably

tracer was next to raer not carrian they might have made people invest the words Tracer OverWatch to spend money no they weren't together you're not understanding what I'm saying they if you were Lilith you were not to be seen in the warcraft area right OverWatch people not in the over uh Warcraft area cuz it's the warcraft area we have Rumble Hearthstone World of Warcraft classic and Retail all in this one area and then there's a wall and then Diablo is over here and then there's a wall and Ov

erWatch is over here that's not how blizzard does things they're very happy to have all their characters near each other so that that was odd it was very very odd and then if you wanted to go and do this it was in a different building and all that yeah they built a wall between it it was very odd let me have a PE and then we'll play some games but um really happy for blizzard actually it's working and GG's to Holly I bet she's getting a fat paycheck at the end of the financial year I bet Holly i

s getting a juicy juicy [ __ ] paycheck and she deserves it reason never looked into two runes escapes uh too many MMOs uh spoils my dinner honestly that's too much time I would have to if I was to play all the MOs that ever existed I'd be sat here at like 60 years old like now we're blind testing the original Dragon Man from back in the day no not not particularly entertaining for my audience or for me I don't think uh so I'll give them a miss and what's wrong with that and what's wrong with th

at look I've got the BBC coming this week to film us all right let's keep it relatively modern for all I know we're still going to be playing ff13 and these people are going to show up saying why are you playing this [ __ ] game from like 20 years ago I be like well you don't understand we're on a journey we're on a journey you see we've been staring here and doing all this stuff right that's that's enough for me let me get a drinky drink