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

[Hag]

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.

Wait, humanity forced them to include microtransactions against their will ? That's bullshit, they chose to create microtransactions, they chose to price it this way, they chose to have a greedy business model for SC2 that was universally condemned at the time, and SC2 itself was not fully-fledged.
This is all fallacy. Nothing stopped people who bought that fucking pony to buy SC2. Furthermore, despite all its shortcoming (and insulting pricing), SC2 was a commercial success.

If you're the most ethical and empathic person, you're not a CEO, you're not working in business, and in particular not at Blizzard after WoW launched.
When you create a game so addictive people pay $15 for a skin, and you profit out of it, you're the asshole.

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

You would be surprised at the number of people who never pirate games. I believe the pirate crowd is made mostly of people who got online first in the first half of 2000s, when it was easy and straightforward. Most younger people I've met buy every games. I seldom pirate games nowadays (only one this year I think), I have money to pay for my entertainment, and Steam made it easy to try and get refunded if needed.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Maybe it would have helped if Starcraft 2 wasn't a pile of trash.

 

[thesheeep]

"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?"

I mean.... at least he knew that N64 was a thing

 

[abija]

You would be surprised at the number of people who never pirate games. I believe the pirate crowd is made mostly of people who got online first in the first half of 2000s, when it was easy and straightforward. Most younger people I've met buy every games. I seldom pirate games nowadays (only one this year I think), I have money to pay for my entertainment, and Steam made it easy to try and get refunded if needed.

The pirate crowd are mostly poor people (and they are only considered if the game needs to have a multiplayer scene). If most young people you met buy games you live in "not poor" circles.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

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).

StarCraft has an estimated player base. But it doesn’t have some huge one. The original game only sold 1.5 million in its first year, and I think beyond that was biggest in South Korea. It did go on to sell much more in the years following its release, but that’s after years.

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty has only sold like 6 million something, with 4.5 million happening within the first five months. It would’ve definitely sold way more on release if it cost like $10 or $15. Something like Diablo 3 wouldn’t need this kind of pricing, since it can sell over 6 million in its first calendar year. But clearly StarCraft needed a different pricing structure. Shit, I’m not even sure people would’ve really cared about Blizzard chopping StarCraft 2 into three different games if the parts were just $15.

The question though becomes, if it was just fifteen bucks, could it sell enough to make it worth it. Could it have hit over 15 million sales?

It’s just an interesting thought experiment I think. Take something like Marvel vs Capcom 3. The original release sold 2.20 million at $59.99, and the original release of the updated Ultimate sold 1.20 million at $29.99. Some people weren’t too happy about Ultimate either because it also came out the same year as the first edition. Some people were also mad about having to buy an updated version as opposed to getting it as DLC, but given the two DLC characters MvC3 did have were being sold at $5.99 a pop, and Ultimate had 12 characters, these people were morons. But let’s say Capcom sold Marvel vs Capcom 3 for like $10.00 in 2011. Could they have made more money? Could they have hit 14 million sales? There were that many Xbox 360s sold in 2011 alone. Ten bucks isn’t anything for a game. People used to spend that much for a magazine with a demo disc. At ten bucks a pop people probably wouldn’t even give a shit that a updated version came so quickly, after all it’s just ten dollars. At ten buck if the licensing deal allowed they could’ve released similar updates in 2012 and 2013 too without pissing people off. At $10 or $15 you’ve basically got the same situation as a free-to-play game. Some Marvel fan that doesn’t know Jack shit about fighting games may not want to jump in at $60 or $30, but they might jump in for $15 and $10. The resale market eating into your sales isn’t really something you’d need to think about at those prices either. If I could buy a new game at that price why would I ever get it used? And if that’s the price new, selling it to some used game place will likely net you so little that it’d be pointless to sell it to begin with.

 

[Ol' Willy]

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

 

[Modron]

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.

Console makers have their hand in the cookie jar to the tune of ~10 dollars for every single copy of a game sold on their systems (or more these days? I haven't really kept up with consoles). Limits low end price points to some degree.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

The consumer base is different. Most people who play games like WoW are not gamers in the way you'd define the term 25 years ago. They might've played a few levels of Sonic or Super Mario, some FIFA or Madden(boys), or maybe the Sims(girls). If the consumer base is different, then the industry will necessarily be different. That's why your bookshop looks different from what it used to be, because nowadays everyone can read but people who can read aren't necessarily literate (surely this was already true 100 years ago, but there's a disparity that keeps increasing).

We've had this discussion before, I don't think there's a reason to despair. We just need to carve space for an industry outside the industry. Forget Blizzard, Activision, etc. That ship has sailed. The happy days where you could get excited for mainstream releases are over. But there's still enough of us to feed a smaller industry the size of the one which existed at least in the early 90s. The late 90s and early 00s where you had a bigger industry that sold games to a larger audience but was still fully steeped in old school design principles was a miracle of circumstance. It might never happen again. Well, too bad I guess.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

The consumer base is different. Most people who play games like WoW are not gamers in the way you'd define the term 25 years ago. They might've played a few levels of Sonic or Super Mario, some FIFA or Madden(boys), or maybe the Sims(girls). If the consumer base is different, then the industry will necessarily be different. That's why your bookshop looks different from what it used to be, because nowadays everyone can read but people who can read aren't necessarily literate (surely this was already true 100 years ago, but there's a disparity that keeps increasing).

We've had this discussion before, I don't think there's a reason to despair. We just need to carve space for an industry outside the industry. Forget Blizzard, Activision, etc. That ship has sailed. The happy days where you could get excited for mainstream releases are over. But there's still enough of us to feed a smaller industry the size of the one which existed at least in the early 90s. The late 90s and early 00s where you had a bigger industry that sold games to a larger audience but was still fully steeped in old school design principles was a miracle of circumstance. It might never happen again. Well, too bad I guess.

I’m going to completely disagree with this. Most people that play WoW, especially now all these years later, probably played a whole fucking lot of videos games...at least before World of Warcraft came around. The WoW audience isn’t some kind that before WoW only played some sports games or something. I don’t even know why anyone would think that. Guy that was just playing EA Sports and Sega’s 2K games in the ‘90s and early 2000s was not the target audience for WoW. The target audience was people that played Diablo 2, and people that were playing Ultima Online and EverQuest.

I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone that played World of Warcraft that also wasn’t fairly deep into video games before World of Warcraft. Nobody was just jumps straight into MMORPGs back in 2004. Just the acronym “MMORPG” is enough to scare off random guy that only plays Madden and maybe played a few arcade games once...which also isn’t really a type of person that exist at all. Unless there’s some other external factor going on like weird parents, being extremely poor and only knowing other extremely power kids, or just living in the middle of nowhere...if you live in America anyways, I’m not sure being a boy who doesn’t really play video games is all that much of a thing as a kid. Maybe before the NES and the ‘90s PC boom that was a thing, but every guy in school you thought only played Madden probably also played Doom, and Duke Nukem, and Quake, and Age of Empires, and they probably played all the big arcade games.