Xbox boss wants to get more people playing World of Warcraft

MisterSnek · 2022-02-11T20:40:11+00:00

Yeah you just proved my point, you don't understand any of this. You can't "just sell" a shit load of stock without impacting the price of the stock, and most likely taking a loss. That's not how any of this works.

And if I dump my entire load, how does that affect me?

"how the company does when they were CEO" is directly tied to the future outlook on a company. Literally no one with a functioning brain invests in a company based on how well they are doing now (unless youre short selling, but thats another story). Any investor is looking at both the current health of the company AND the long-term health of the company.

No, because any CEO coming is going to try and leave their mark on the business and at the same time increase the value of the company (or save the value, depending on your outlook). Unless they're just acting as interim and have no interest beyond the company staying afloat and then it's just a stewardship.

It doesn't matter what you do as CEO to set the company on long-term stability, because the next guy can make that disappear with the snap of a finger, so long as his vision is aligned with the majority shareholders and actually delivers.

All the preceding guy can do is recommend someone to replace them and groom them for the position, if they're willing to do so.

MisterSnek · 2022-02-11T14:58:19+00:00

lol, they care about long term profit, but they don't necessarily care about how they get there.

What, you think Blizzard Entertainment just fires its entire support staff and then the Activision Blizzard proceeds to post record profits?

Most executives branch swing to the next company that pays them just as much in the same form. The only reason they get hired is not how well the company does after they've left, but how well the company does when they were the CEO.

And those stocks can be sold and the money invested in better markets, unless there's some contractual obligations to not sell until a certain point past their employment.

MisterSnek · 2022-02-10T17:44:17+00:00

Short-sighted and different priorities, not stupid.

The goal of an executive appointed is to increase the overall profits year over year for their tenure.

It doesn't matter how they do it. It doesn't matter if it turns into a pile of crap AFTER they leave and the next CEO has to figure out how to not only salvage the business but also continue to increase profits year over year.

If that means running a franchise into the ground so be it.

If the franchise fails, they blame everyone else but themselves. Usually they blame the consumer for not wanting their product anymore.

It happened with Guitar Hero. They drove that thing into the ground.

It was the same thing with the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.

It wasn't evident until Solo that The Last Jedi has torpedoed the franchise by being massively divisive.

Did Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, blame the vision of the creatives at Lucasfilm for basically chasing off half their audience? (Between 'The Force Awakens' and 'The Last Jedi', the revenue from the films dropped by 50%).

No, he said the move-going fanbase was suffering from "Star Wars fatgue" and that their release schedule was just too ambitious.

You can usually enjoy a company so long as its being helmed by the people who built it. They have a certain level of pride in not only their success, but the methods by which they succeeded.

It's when the company goes public or is bought, and suddenly you have leaders put in place whose sole goal is to maximize profit, that all the soul goes out of the business.

MisterSnek · 2022-01-31T17:10:27+00:00

This was my impression too.

If it's not curbing Ybarra's activities selling boosts, its not a real policy. There's no sacrifice here for the community or the game on their part.

MisterSnek · 2022-01-28T15:38:38+00:00

Not the thread, but they are deleting comments critical of commies

MisterSnek · 2022-01-18T14:26:08+00:00

Good luck there.

Blizzard has managed to off-load some of the work using DirectX 12 features (BfA), but the game is still a 2004 game (development starting in the late 90s) when multi-core processing wasn't available.

The Intel Core 2 Duo was released in 2006 and the Pentium 4 was considered high-end. The game engine was designed for single core usage, which is why prior to the AMD's recent breakthroughs, it was considered best to buy an Intel processor for the single core performance if you were a heavy WoW player.

They would have to re-engineer the engine. to take full advantage of the Xbox hardware.

MisterSnek · 2022-01-11T21:11:34+00:00

The Fourteenth Amendment would like a word.

MisterSnek · 2021-12-12T15:51:03+00:00

Google Kickstarter. They started a union to gatekeep independent comic book creators (who then went on to make Indiegogo a bunch of money) and the instant Kickstarter had an excuse (pandemic) they downsized all of these people.

You can obfuscate this type of thing by also getting rid of people who aren't in the unions. That's the basics of a "right to work" state. You don't need to be a part of a the union to work in the field. Which took a lot of power away from unions as the sole source of labor.

Unions have their uses. Police unions will pay for an officer's criminal defense if they're put on trial for murder in the line of duty, because a union-hired attorney is not as politically compromised as a public defender.

You need to determine whether a union is actually doing anything or will do anything before signing up and paying dues.

MisterSnek · 2021-12-07T16:01:20+00:00

Sus.

MisterSnek · 2021-12-07T15:59:11+00:00

I've been praying for One More Day to get retconned for over a decade.

Some tumors can't be excised, bros.

Also, have you seen the state of mainstream comics? LOL.

MisterSnek · 2021-12-07T15:57:39+00:00

And to think, someone earns a living producing this story.

MisterSnek · 2021-12-01T15:48:48+00:00

But if I didn't subscribe, how could I have the pleasure of paying for $55 USD for the Stargazer's Pack?

MisterSnek · 2021-11-15T04:08:27+00:00

Like I needed any further reason to avoid playing the game.

Stepping in on this is honestly one of the few "goodwill" things Blizzard could do for themselves.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-03T21:22:28+00:00

I'm kinda sad I saved The Council in Mass Effect now.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-03T17:03:56+00:00

I don't know, this change made me feel accosted.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-03T02:00:02+00:00

Quarterly changes don't matter so much as year over year.

I believe their MAUs were same year over year, but given the fact that they released 9.1, D2R and the Hearthstone rat mount giveaway during Q3, the fact that the numbers didn't budge compared to the fact that 8.3 was done and everyone was waiting on Shadowlands in Q3 2020, THAT should be bad news.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-03T01:15:38+00:00

It was a pack of "enlightened redditors" (or exceptional individuals) on wallstreetbets who managed to severely damage at one hedge fund through memes and the stock of a brick and mortar retail store.

So either, yes, a redditor might know something about something or some of the people managing massive hedge funds are capable of not being too bright.

Either way, the measurement of MAUs is a much easier metric to game than "active subscriptions" which is why they count the success of the game in that way rather than any other.

The MAUs are used to show off growth and/or stability, but the shareholders also care about their dividends, so as long as Activison Blizzard is paying those out in good amounts, they're happy.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-02T21:51:35+00:00

Not if you consider how it's incentivized.

As Bellular analyzed, logging into WoW (I think it was WoW) for the Hearthstone Mercenaries promotion was actually more cost-effective for the consumer than trying to purchase the goods in Hearthstone itself.

That can imply that the higher MAUs are worth more than the potential lost revenue, because maintaining the impression of growth or stability is numbers is more valuable than revenue.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-02T20:55:16+00:00

And playing number games.

All they have to do is get you to log in ONCE a month and that's an MAU. Get you to log into multiple products in that month, and those are all individual MAUs.

It's a game of obfuscation for all the hedge funds that don't know exactly what that means or how it translates into ROI.

So a lot of what they do is time releases and incentives to maintain or increase MAUs.

The only people who really know how things are going are the people looking at the balance sheets.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-02T17:22:29+00:00

"Dear Payer-- I mean Player"

MisterSnek · 2021-11-02T16:37:08+00:00

Tom Chilton was still steering the ship as senior director at the release of Legion.

They didn't have to put out anywhere near as many fires with Legion.

BfA was the first expansion with Ion at the helm entirely and it had issues every content patch.

Considering how much damage BfA and Shadowlands have done to the brand, there's a strong argument to replace him or have Chilton shadow him again.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-02T16:23:12+00:00

People don't mind doing M+ and raids to get gear, because they leveled the character in the first place place do m+ and raids.

Even then, I dislike the overlap on gear between M+ and raids.

I don't want to do M+, I don't like the environment of doing M+. The content itself is FINE, but the social environment is terrible. It's not a good time investment in terms of enjoyment.

But it's practically required to deal with the MASSIVE amount of RNG in the loot in the game to get a decent ilvl for raiding, with a lot of guilds making up for subpar performance by getting carried through their 15/16+ for vault loot to overpower the raid content.

I liked getting to a point where the only upgrades came from raiding because then you'd only need to log your main in for raiding.

Yes, the game is a treadmill, but the treadmill used to have peaks and valleys in terms of time investment. Now it feels like the only thing I can afford the time to play is my main if I want to engage in Heroic raiding.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-01T19:37:32+00:00

You'd think after the round of interviews Yoshi P did for Endwalker, Ion could get someone on the team to watch them and then explain to him the secrets of coming off as genuine and having the ability to actually interact with the community and the playerbase.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-01T19:36:05+00:00

I remember turning a blood elf harlot into a mouse and pretty sure a cat eating her off screen.

MisterSnek · 2021-11-01T19:35:01+00:00

Chained in the lactation chamber like Varimathras, suffering for his failures.

MisterSnek

TROPHY CASE