I was just looking at the PAX East schedule / map and there doesn't seem to be any Blizzard presence at the show this year. Always before they had some sort of panel / announcement with a huge booth containing demo stations and a giant merchandise booth that had a perpetual line around it.
Wonder if the promotional team got axed with the culling? Seems weird since they seemed to be taking in cash with all the merch.
Pax East costs a lot of money. For the amount of space Blizzard had when I went (overwatch year) I can't even imagine how much. I highly doubt they brought enough merch to make their money back. We broke even and sold as much as we did at Gencon.I was just looking at the PAX East schedule / map and there doesn't seem to be any Blizzard presence at the show this year. Always before they had some sort of panel / announcement with a huge booth containing demo stations and a giant merchandise booth that had a perpetual line around it.
Wonder if the promotional team got axed with the culling? Seems weird since they seemed to be taking in cash with all the merch.
I'm looking forward to whatever fills the WOW void when it finally loses its titan grip on the market. BfA was the first time I honestly considered this. We joked back during Cata and the last half of WOD, but then we got Mists and Legion as followup. If highs are followed by lows, the next expac is going to fondle my balls while inhaling my load. Where the fuck are they gonna go from here without fundamentally changing what the game is, as if they haven't already done so with the absurd dumbing down of everything.
A level squish down to 60 on the next expac, post wow classic, what are they going to do, revitalize two vanilla raids (modernized MC/BWL?), with one or two other amazing raids again (like Ulduar and ICC during Wrath)? Might not be bad.
They need to fix how every class plays, though. They fucked that up bad with the removal of artifact weapon abilities. And it felt fucking horrible when the prepatch hit during WOD before you got your artifact weapon, why they didn't revert to WOD style or some derivation makes no goddamn sense. They stripped these key abilities that they redesigned classes around and expected them to play well when they simply removed said abilities.... WRONG.
MMOs are, sadly (if you enjoy them), going the way of the dodo. Only older people tend to play them, all the 'kids' are so caught up in their Battle Royales and whatnot these days. Now, if I could just keep them off of my darn lawn.
I'm curious why people think the MMORPG genre is dead, 10-15 years ago there was WoW and almost nothing else, today there's lots of them besides WoW being "not dead" aka having regular content updates : Final Fantaxy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, EvE Online, Star Wars The Old Republic (okay this one might be dead), and I'm not even talking about Runescape, MP2, and the asian market (Lineage, etc). To me a dead MMO is a MMO which got shutdown, like Warhamer or Wildstar recently. You can argue some of the MMORPGS I cited are barely alive, but I don't think the MMORPG genre is dead. On the other hand, most of the upcoming "interesting" MMORPGs being on crowdfunding development hell, could be a sign big companies don't want to invest in them.
Why invest hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development into a AAA MMORPG skinner box, when you could instead funnel money into a mobile "MMO Lite" skinner box for a fraction of the amount, with a much better profit to cost ratio?
The only new MMO's I see nowadays are on the mobile platform and they all suck and they all make tons of cash. Ex. Lineage 2 Revolutions