Tuesday’s investor call for Activision-Blizzard was not what I would generally call good news for the company across the board, but the reality is that we here are mostly concerned with World of Warcraft, and the rest of Blizzard’s slate is more important insofar as these things inform one another. And what we actually got from the call was… well, not good, but it requires a bit of reading between the lines to really unpack that. Because on the surface, the bad news about WoW is confined to the fact that it didn’t really get mentioned much.
By itself, this isn’t great news but also probably doesn’t look like it’s really much news at all. After all, nobody was expecting a whole lot of movement from the game when nothing new was actually released during the quarter, right? But then you start unpacking what wasn’t said and what’s implied by other things taking place at Blizzard, and suddenly the whole thing starts looking much, much worse.
Let’s start with the obvious element here. What saved Blizzard from reporting another big MAU drop this particular quarter was the fact that Diablo II Remastered turned out to be a big hit in South Korea (a place that is doubtlessly paying less attention, if any, to the lawsuits that Blizzard is embroiled in), and the net result for the company was no movement. That does not in and of itself mean that Blizzard didn’t lose users; indeed, the phrasing implies that the studio definitely did, but the losses were just offset by the remaster.
However, it remains to be seen what kind of legs the remaster has over the long term. And that’s kind of a big deal because both Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV have now been moved off the release slate for 2022 altogether. And it’s here that we can start seeing why things for WoW are looking and feeling pretty dire because at this point the only thing that could possibly be on the table for 2022 is an expansion.
But nobody talked about that at all.
From a corporate side, this is a really bad thing because it means that Blizzard is basically expecting to have no major releases at all in 2022. From a WoW standpoint, though, it’s bad because it confirms something that people have long suspected: that the pipeline behind the scenes is such a mess that 2022 isn’t planned for another expansion after all, which will both make Shadowlands one of the longest-running expansions ever, with dark implications for the future of the game.
Consider the following speculative scenario: Next week, both patch 9.2 and the next expansion are announced. That is already wildly optimistic, but just bear with me. Let’s be even more optimistic and assume that patch 9.2 is slated to be out in three months flat, ignoring how Blizzard has been moving shamefully slow for ages now. And let’s even give more credit by assuming that the next expansion is slated for December of 2022, offering the longest possible window between announcement and launch.
In this situation, the next patch will arrive in February 2022, and the next expansion will arrive about 13 months after announcement. That’s not the fastest turnaround that Blizzard has accomplished, but it’s getting up there, and both of these are assuming that after more than a year of languishing in achingly slow turnaround patterns, Blizzard suddenly manages to get its act together and turn out two major things quickly. It also assumes that an announcement is that close around the corner, something we have absolutely no reason to count on.
Needless to say, I don’t see this as particularly likely, and every week without the announcement of something major makes it less likely. (Just from a gut check, I don’t think we’d have two major releases separated only by a week and have an announcement wedged between them; it’s not strictly impossible but it feels unusual.) It seems far more likely that we don’t get patch 9.2 until March or April of next year, and the expansion has already been pushed back to 2023.
And that is… not good because it means that Blizzard has no major releases whatsoever planned in 2022 with the exception of the long-delayed Diablo Immortal. You can argue that these games need more time to be perfected all you want, but at a certain point the simple reality of the situation starts to creep in.
Not to mention that none of this points to anything good happening as we move forward through Shadowlands.
I’ve seen some speculation in the wake of the latest Hazzikostas interview that a patch 9.3 is not actually off the table just yet, and there’s nothing technically disproving it, but it illustrates the pinch that Blizzard finds itself in right at the moment. Putting out a third major content patch for the expansion could theoretically reduce the amount of time spent waiting for more content, but it also extends the amount of time spent with an expansion that is becoming increasingly disliked as time goes on. But more content droughts are also going to be an issue thanks to how bad Shadowlands has been for actual content.
There are no good choices here. And the investment call didn’t even touch upon this, instead going for just a generic set of platitudes that mostly come down to “we’re looking into milking more money out of our existing but dwindling playerbase.” Something that seems no doubt inspired by the total lack of shame demonstrated with the latest cash shop mount, to boot.
Put more simply, there was nothing in this conference call to give WoW fans a reason to hope for the future. And that’s really a problem because right now confidence and hope is already in the dumpster.
Players aren’t just playing the game for content that exists right now; they’re playing in part with the expectation that there’s going to be something new to look forward to. As soon as a group of players is pretty sure that they’re not getting anything to interest them in the near future, they’re going to leave, and it’s exponentially harder to get back players who already left. You need to put out not only good content but content that makes up for what felt like neglect.
And into this we shove WoW, which is struggling to provide any meaningful content for a large portion of its playerbase and is consistently losing more and more people while trying to milk those who remain with more vigor.
When you toss all of this together, the investor call starts to look really bad on the face of itself. It fails to offer fans any reason to be hopeful about the state of the game at the moment. It doesn’t offer a pipeline or a promise of more content in the near future. It doesn’t even seem to mention content, and we’re left sitting here waiting for any idea about what is even next on the plate after the promised but still otherwise obfuscated mass that will be patch 9.2.
None of this is a good thing. And when you put all of this together, it leads to a call that was in many ways more negative for World of Warcraft than it might have originally looked – especially when the strictest reading is that WoW wasn’t mentioned at all.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with a decade of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre each week for a new installment of WoW Factor as he examines the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
