A mount making more than starcraft only made activision blizzard go like "well why should we put in effort, these people will just pay for slop". If we want these companies to stop doing shitty things we need to stop buying this kinda shit, but looking at this stuff continuously makes money maybe Im asking too much...
"we" - as in the people who used to enjoy the games, are no longer the target audience for blizzard. "we" have been replaced with something else many years ago.
yup just go play ascension its so much better!!! its like the new version of vanilla i would have wanted wow to provide us!! and if your into SOD then its 100% something you will be into. lol i love the card rotation seasonal server they have where talents and skills are randomly given by draws and cards that you get from quests, dungeons, bg's etc. along with gear and consumables that scale with your level. if you dont like a skill or talent your also rewarded scrolls that will re roll a talent or ability you dont want and at random give you a new one. its cool because you can have roll out talents and abilities that you wouldnt get till lvl 60 but your only a lvl 8 lol
There are two ways to help the situation: 1. Encourage players to not purchase microtransactions. Choose to support companies that make good games and respect their playerbases - aka, "voting with your wallet". 2. Hold companies accountable for shady or manipulative business tactics. That's what I'm doing with this video
I used to work at Blizzard, and I can tell you, it wasn't Activision who did this. It was Blizzard. The changes didn't happen because of the buyout, they happened because Brian Metzen decided to stop focusing on the company to act more as a creative director, and left the Warcraft team to develop Overwatch. The beginning of the end occurred behind closed doors, when shortly after Metzen made this decision, Blizzard stopped caring about quality control and quit internal hiring of their GM, tech support, and forum blues. Instead they were all done by 3rd party vendor. I was on the QC staff, and watched as candidates I had personally interviewed and rejected came strolling in through the door as hired temps. Then my team had a "reorg" and my team was given the option to either relocate to Texas to help build out their new call center, or quit. I chose the latter. The paid mounts appeared not long after.
I do remember reading the dev announcements at the end of the burning crusade, the arrogance was there. They thought they were the best and that every change was automatically an improvement. Dumbing down the single player, chasing esports and ruining pvp were for me their biggest mistakes.
Who is Brian Metzen? Did you mean Chris Metzen, the Warcraft director? Not being a Blizzard apologist as I too worked at Blizzard from '10-'17. I hated the job, hated the customers, but loved the people I worked beside. The sparkle pony debacle was a low point for sure as it made more money than SC2 Wings of Liberty did. Sad times.
Clearly we all have done it at some point. We say what's 20$ just this one time. Now consider the population of gamers is probably in the billions. It's hard to understand how they get so much. All they need is a million at a time.
@meoff7602 I haven't. I refuse to buy this bullshit. If it's cosmetic I don't need it, if it actually affects game play, the game is pay to win and I'm not interested. But I suspect a lot of people say "this is bullshit", then pay $20 here and there for a sparkly horse or skins.
It's probably common even among people who say they don't like micro transactions. Research shows people are poor judges of determining what they will and won't do in a given set of circumstances. In other words, right now, they might say, "I hate micro transactions," but when the new hotness is released in their social experiment RPG, they don't want to miss out, and click "purchase."
that idiot loves to cover this type of shit, but will continue playing and advertising every game from that shit company no matter what. Probably a paid shill.
Lost levels deleted my comment where I said nothing wrong. I simply called wow garbage and asmond a paid shill. Only the blind can't see that he still plays the game, and thus advertises it, despite the obscene practices they have. Also, it was very suspicious that he chose not to stream baldur's gate 3, a game he talked heaps aobut, but played diablo 4, a pile of shit micro transaction infested "game". Activision probably had him by the balls in some contract that didn't allow him to stream it, as it'd look even worse for diablo 4.
@@bodhidaruma2824he probably didn't stream bauldurs because he liked it. Turing your hobbies into work can be an awefull thing for some people. Also you think Blizzard is paying him? dude has been critisising them since wrath . no company want's to pay someone who is shitting on them
I had so many discussion about this topic, back in the day. As if a lot of people are not capable of seing the outcome of their own actions. I remember telling them, that this kind of money making will encourage Blizz and others and they always simply said: "You don't need to buy it! Let others have fun with it!" And thanks to that, it ruined gaming for the majority of people!
Blizzard Entertainment was NOT acquired by Activision in 2008. Vivendi Games, which owned BOTH Activision and Blizzard, bought itself out from Vivendi Universal and merged with Activision to create Activision Blizzard. Blizzard Entertainment was already owned by the same entity since 1998. And even prior to that they were owned by other companies. Blizzard Entertainment has never been independent. Even the name Blizzard came from the fact that their first owner did not like their prior name, Chaos Studios. But Activision-Blizzard may have been more involved after this merger. But I think it's easy for us to blame the "big bad owner" than to realize that Blizzard did this all by themselves. Just like Biowares' failures are mostly self-inflicted.
No, Vivendi and Activision were separate. Yes, Vivendi owned Blizzard. Vivendi did not own Activision. They merged. Bobby and friends through some power games basically powered out any left overs from Vivendi. Then they proceeded to slow cook the cash cow.
Bioware's Failures lay at their own feet yes, but EA is the one who holds their leash. The past 12 years the studio head has been appointed by EA and mostly out of the American Branch of BioWare.
OMG seriously, thank you for explaining this, good Sir! I figured it would have been impossible for Blizzard Entertainment to have been independent at all ever considering how expensive MMORPGs are to run just the servers, but it was a surprisingly difficult thing to research once Hong Kong tried to be great again in October 2019.
Under Vivendi, WoW was the most profitable game in the world and Blizzard had complete freedom, they were completely independent from Activision and Vivendi Paris let Blizzard do as they wish. Activision-Blizzard happened after WoW's peak.
Weirdly I’m kind of thankful blizzard steered in the way it did. They helped me get off the wow smack. I’ve been clean since Legion’s last patch. Never logged in again, never had an urge to. I still kind of follow the lore but it too became so convoluted that I drift away more and more. It feels so good to be free man. I haven’t used battle net for years, I’m done with blizzard. Feels so fkin good bro. So much money and time sunk into this cynical garbage.
It was Shadowlands that finally did it for me. I actually dropped WoW like hot garbage during BfA when I found out City of Heroes was back. But I came back to WoW during the pandemic lockdowns to play the end of BfA and then check out Shadowlands. In every prior expansion, even if I didn't like the overall expansion I at least enjoyed the questing/leveling experience. But Shadowlands questing/leveling was just a chore, and when I got to max level and found out it was just, "Start grinding these six different currencies", I was out, and haven't been back.
The cosmetics were never the reason ppl left the game. Never will be either. Yall really salty over some ppl having more cosmetics, which has no impact on gameplay, than u, sweet life.
That damn sparkle pony. So many of us at the time could not believe the audacity of that price tag. I too was openly mocking it on forums and with friends. Then, on the night it went live, I found out my well-meaning husband had gifted me one in game. Man, that was awkward.
They stopped trying to give their customers quality and started looking at them just as cows to be milked for every cent in their wallet. Diablo Infinite and Diablo 4 were a slap in the face and were the culmination of the excessive monetization trend they had been on for several years before those games were released.
This was a activision ploy , they had been doing it with Call of Duty for years , Thankfully now that Bobby kotick is gone , some of what we remember will come back
@@maxkozak9702 well here's the thing about the company that is infuriating--they want to milk their customers (and as you said there are enough simps to make it profitable) but then when the company starts getting a bad rep because their greed is so transparent, they become shocked and want to "defend the honor" of the company with some ridiculous argument like "providing a service" or "need to recoup the cost of development" or the ever popular "it's not pay to win" etc.Excuses that are just so lame and see-through. Just man up and be honest--that would be refreshing. Just say "yes we made a game with heavy microtransactions in order to maximize profit, and it is our hope that you find the gameplay and the game world so engrossing that you would consider it worth it to invest monetarily in our game." End of story, simple and painless. Just don't come here as a company and try to pull the wool over the gamers' eyes and insult our intelligence.
Exactly. As is pointed out in the video, every time Blizzard announced a new step in microtransactions there were people complaining, but with the money all of these "hated" microtransactions made obviously they aren't that upset. If people are actually bothered by microtransactions, then stop supporting games that use them and only play games with no microtransactions.
They switched players for payers. It's mostly addicts, now. If "surprise mechanics" get banned, these companies will just implode as there's nothing else left.
Time grinds them all. No empire has stood against time. Where is the great empire, Egypt? The last of it's might simply washed away. It has never been a significant super power since. Mongol horde? The Mede's? Rome? *To big to fail, is the statement of someone so arrogant that they hear the sappers undermining the wall, but they've seen it withstand before.* How many champion boxers suffered a humiliating defeat - when they had to prove they still had it after retiring. Turns out everyone else was right. They were washed up, but too self-deceived to realize it. Right now we see the extreme greed that seems to build it's tower endlessly into the sky. But they are becoming a pariah. They are so thoroughly sickening people with their greed tactics, that people will eventually have *nothing* to do with such tactics. As that happens en mass, they won't know how to respond, because they've done everything against that. They won't listen to sound advice, because that's the same advice they trampled to get rich quick. It's against their modus operandi.
@@magicmulderThey also know that many players never make use of their in game money which means the players gave them literally free money (as if it wasn’t free already). And on top of that the store items are often priced in a way that you’ll end up with unspent in game money so either you buy more money and items or it sits there forever in thousands of accounts
@@briankale5977 shareholders aren't the problem because they ultimately answer to our money even if it's indirect. The problem is the people buying all this stuff and then sanitizing it
WoW was already crashing when the "sparkle pony" was released at the end of Wrath. Those of us who had been playing since Vanilla were put off by the dumbing down of gameplay. Classes were being homogenized. "Bring the player, not the class" was the refrain. I quit playing a holy priest when they got rid of downranking spells to save mana, and they had to crank up mana to compensate. This had the effect of taking the challenge out of it.
Also, the consistently making the game easier to level, easier to acquire previously challenging items, easier to travel around made the overall wow experience frustrating for those of us who had spent the time and effort to do those things previously.
I remember spending several years at low levels, enjoying newbie content (1-20), and kinda dreaming about the day I'd decide to actually level up a character to 40 and get a mount. Felt like it would be an Achievement for a person with my playstyle. IIRC, before I did that, they made mounts into level 10 content. Which felt very weirdly off-putting.
I don't understand the "cosmetics" of diablo 4, where the game is so top-down that whatever you buy WON'T even be partially visible nor distinguishable from the base armors anyway
Idiots money. Its all about taking away idiots money. Idiot can help himself. Sees a shiny jpg and buys it thinking " i have that thing on screen now " then he turns the game off and never looks at it again. Its what drove NFT hype and its what drives current AI investment. Its gonna crash when they realize nobody will buy your AI picture when they can generate their own, the whole thing is less valuable than providing them one active email (less than 1$ for a data broker and you can generate forever) and you get no copyright on anything using AI so the second you poison your work with AI you have no protection from the legal system and people can just take and host their private servers at will. You have no recourse because you had no reservations about taking someone elses work without consent, fed to these generators in order to have them work, so now others can take your shit without your consent.
You see cosmetics on loading screens, on character screen, also party can see your armors etc. I couldn't care less but hey, if someone wants to have spirit wings on their character even if they don't affect the game at all, let them have it.
There a so many great-looking transmogs I got from the battle-passes and even some "normal ingame looks" that there really is nothing cosmetic left to desire...
I stopped playing WoW in Feb 2012. Then returned for Classic in 2019 and finally stopped playing in 2021 shortly after the release of Classic Burning Crusade. I will never play a new Blizzard Game again. I grew up with Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft3, Diablo2 and finally enjoyed WoW from Release in 2005 up to 2012 with two Accounts. Greetings from Germany
Why do you think it's hard to criticize a company that's going to donate to charity? I don't think that's the case. Here, the company is trying to USE the charity to deflect criticism of the undefensible acts.
"One of them carries a lot of risk, and the other carries none at all" There ya go, that is modern game development and the micro transaction business in a nutshell. That comment is all I needed. It's all downhill from here guys.
TH-cam decided I needed to be on the ground floor of checking out this video by a brand new channel and I've gotta say this is really well done! Interesting, throughout yet unpadded content alongside clean, entertaining editing? We love to see it! I'm looking forward to what you make next!
My "starry horse mount" moment was when my normal doctor bill of $20 a visit shot up to $120 and my practically free health insurance with no deductible and covered 80% very slowly started charging more and adding s small deductible. I can stop playing WoW. I can't stop existing.
Simply put, I left Blizzard years ago. Some of us saw the writing on the wall and, as painful as it was to leave all of the progress, gold, and items I owned, I left it all behind and felt quite liberated to be honest. Blizzard will just never be the same.
Shadowlands was the last expansion I could take, mainly because of that. I started during the Wrath of the Lich King days, back when Blizzard actually seemed to genuinely care for their customers and devote themselves to ensuring that they had fun playing their games. Nowadays, all they seem to care about is making sure all the weirdos who don't even play their games - and probably never will, aren't offended. So after I finished the last Shadowlands raid and finished up the last bit of questing, on each character, I took them back to Stormwind; where I said my goodbyes to them and logged them out for the last time. (I still enjoy Warcraft fan art though, and occasionally commission art of my characters, to remember the good old days. And I have WC3 Reforged, since there are some good fan projects, like Chronicles of the Second War.) Starcraft I didn't really develop much hate for, just got bored with it and eventually had to uninstall SC2 because it took up a lot of disk space. Diablo I stopped playing after 3, because of how terrible its story was and how annoying it was, having to have an online connection to even play its *single player* story mode. Not to mention the fact that Blizzard have the nerve to claim that they're all about showing respect and courtesy to women now; after having hit Adria with the villain bat, made Leah get turned into the monstrosity you have to kill - with no sign of any redemption for her anywhere in sight, and don't even get me started on what they did to the D2 sorceress.
I think the most sad part of this all, is you're totally right at 3:38 . I make 3d models for a living and the low poly shit blizzard makes is honestly super easy, even an amateur could do it. Yet it raked in 4 million in the first 4 hours, just goes to show why they haven't stopped the store. The players are a big part of the issue. Only a small portion actually care about the MTX as a bad thing.
Honestly, World of Warcraft destroyed Blizzard. The company changed before the buyout, because WoW printed money so fast. They stopped doing anything BUT WoW, much to the consternation of pre-WoW Warcraft fans and people that liked anything else they ever did. Activision didn't buy them because they were a famous developer with a legacy of fantastic games, they bought them because they had already figured out how to print money with WoW.
My favorite moment involving the winged horse was in a quest addition to Silverpine. I haven't played WOW in 7 years but any time I see a shiny flying horse in games I'm playing, I still say, 'They killed Sparkles!'
I went through a period of being hooked on in game currencies for games like Clash of clans. But when I realized that I pretty much got absolutely nothing for that investment, it snapped me around real fast.
Charity is a scam, the very concept is, most of the money goes to paying administrative salaries, a very small percentage actually is used on the thing that they say. Have you noticed that only rich people start charities? isn't it at least a little suspicious?
It depends on the charity. Some genuinely do good work, and spend the vast majority of their donations on that work. This is not denying that others are massive money holes with absurd overhead. Also, most rich people start charities for the tax breaks and not to hoover up donations.
ima go on a whim here and say, starting any kind of organization isn't cheap. of course financially-well people start charities. otherwise you'd have to ask for charity to start a charity, wtf?
@@magicmulder You are misunderstanding the issue. Used to be if you want X you take out wallet and you get X. Now you need to enter a lottery with a chance to get X. And it is the only way you can get X. You have no avenue to just buy X, you have to enter this lottery, over and over if you really want to get X.
@@Rustie_za Or, hear me out here, you could just decide not to play the lottery to get X. I want 50 million bucks too but I don't play the Powerball lottery. See? You have a choice. You have free will.
@@magicmulder "Leave alone the multimillion dollar company!" Jeez man, you are supposed to lick it, not shove it down your throat. People like you are the reason why we can't have nice things. Luckily for us there are still good studios out there and also a lot of people supporting them.
@@magicmulder haha I was thinking the same reading all the posts of people who buy this crap. I spent money on a mobile game transaction years ago, immediately saw the trap and never did it again. I have friends who are hooked. I go to casinos with people and just walk around, I don't see the appeal. It's crazy how easily people get sucked in without knowing it. 🐑
Wrath of the Lich King WAS the beginning of the end. I remember playing the dungeons and thinking 'wow, these are too easy - let's farm them before they fix them' They did not, next the pvp was changed to fit esports, limited battles and massive class balancing making iconic classes boring. Resulting game play was aoe heavy. Then the final nail in the coffin they added was giving out the best previous season raid armour for easy points, the game felt like a ever faster conveyer belt. There was microtransactions, but no power so whatever... But the base gameplay to me was dead.
there were some of the old-school crowd left still when the warpstalker mount for the TBC classic pre-order special edition was added. blizzard literally had to remove the ability for players to /spit directly at each other because so many people were doing /spit at warpstalker riders
I didn't even notice that this video is from a new channel until I was mid 3 minutes and decided to look at the comments, it felt like I was watching some of those hundred of thousands of views channels that document things like this by the quality of the video
I remember the Celestial Steed. I remember the decline of WoW foretold as a consequence of this. That it was a slippery slope. I remember everyone being told that these concerns were unfounded. In retrospect, I believe we were all correct about those initial concerns.
You could go back and find dozens of such doom predictions. Just because one happens to coincide, doesn't indicate causation, as much as coincidence. All games fade/die. WoW's initial player base aging, along with the rise in e-sports games probably played more into the downfall of WoW, than the (coincidental) sale of one horse. Not to mention the changing landscape for MMORPGs and Online gaming, in general.
I was mocked 15 years ago when I said that microtransactions will ruin gaming as we know it. Games should be either a one-time purchase for a full game or subscription-based for those with rolling content. Nowadays, its all pay-to-win and gambling 101. Sad world.
You know what is funny. Back then I defended this and the OW loot boxes. In my mind, "They were all cosmetics, it's not pay to win." Which rings true but Blizzard's greed corrupted them. I didn't know until last year that the damn Celestial Steed, sold MORE than Starcraft 2. Starcraft freaking 2. That sent a message to Blizzard. That players were willing to spend money on cosmetics and not give a crap about quality content, story, etc. Now look where we are today.
Worst part is, the gaming industry is woefully under-regulated. So it essentially bypasses all the gambling laws. Scumbag business CEOs found a cheatcode in the market and has been exploiting the world ever since.
@@alexrompen805 I don't need to give them ideas. You need to understand that Activision is a company running online casinos. They aren't a gaming company. They only do games because it makes for more interesting and legally sustainable slot machines.
For a long time gamers have been treated worse than gamblers. Guess you know why. Back then when you play some games, then some uncle or auntie tell you that you should not play games as an adult, no I mean teenager, because it is childish, yet at the same time those flashing lights in the casino that looks even more "childish" than a pinball machine is completely fine.
Thank you all for the support and feedback - I didn't expect the channel to grow so fast. Consider subscribing if you'd like more content like this, and thank you again! There are two ways to help the situation: 1. Encourage players to not purchase microtransactions. Choose to support companies that make good games and respect their playerbases - aka, "voting with your wallet". 2. Hold companies accountable for shady or manipulative business tactics. That's my goal with this video.
dont believe all BS, the cosmetic did cost 25$, SC2 60$. they sold over 6 million copys of SC2. so even if every WoW player bought that horse (I know nobody), they couldnt get the same money as with SC2. 10 million players * 25$ is less then 6 Million * 60$
@@LostLevelsYT yet even if they told 1 million copys which I wouldt doubt.. still not possible. and the ex blizz guy didnt talk about profit. even if u would guess that the development of SC2 did cost 50million, it still won't fit.
Thanks for the info, great summary. Have you happened to watch any information about the Actavision, now Microsoft matchmaking patent. It was a big deal several years ago Jim Sterling's take is linked th-cam.com/video/ZSpP3Ge-dq0/w-d-xo.html . I think that it is linked to this issue and the current online matchmaking systems we have today but is much less discussed. People are assuming the game the buy is offering "fair" matchmaking, but most of the games are fixed so you become fodder for someone who has payed more money to the company. This is designed to only occur after the player has become familiarized with the game, you would think that level of manipulation and how much of the game is soft locked "AKA 10 years to get to higher SEASONAL level" would just be mass . Overwatch 2 is a golden example, the matchmaking was too difficult to control 6v6 so they took away a player on each time to have decided matches. When I see complaints about rank online I often wonder if they have bought look boxes or other "shop" items.
Well, somebody DID buy that fokken horse. In fact, lots of people did. Just like they did when diablo came out. Those people are to blame. Did you cancel your WOW subscription when things started to go south? Did you ignore Diablo despite the fact that all your bois were online having fun (allegedly)? Do you have the balls to ignore "free" loot boxes they send in order to lure you in? I'm not gonna advocate the devil, but yeah, if it wasn't for sinners he would've been out of business a long time ago.
The thing is, we oldschool players are not the target market anymore. Braindead people, rich spoiled kids and such are the target market. Unfortunately this inspires other companies... My favourite mobile game changed its buy options some Time ago. Before it was fair. One character free to play. One additional could be unlocked by watching a certain numbers of ads. Additional characters - they had around 8 in total - were one dollar each, or a bundle with ads remove and some gimicks for five bucks. No ingame currency or items or so. Since i liked the game verry much i spent these five bucks and had lots of fun. Nearly first time ever i paid for mobile apps. Then they changed it to use a special currency instead of paying directly. Still not the biggest issue since there were packages for every sum you needed, so no need to buy more then you needed. But the price increased so no one character is over four dollar. Which means i wont buy the new character. Not because i could not afford it, but because i dont like this change.
This is the same bifurcation that many other artistic disciplines have faced. Take music for example. Real musicians generally cannot stand pop music (especially today's) as they see it as a no-skill perversion of their craft. Nevertheless, pop music is where the money is and that's what the labels produce en masse while real musicians live in the world of nightclubs, small concert venues, and niche labels. I don't see the big gaming labels ever coming back to the true art, and from now on, as with music, we'll rely on indies and smaller niche companies to craft the great games of the future. Great games, like great music, are works of passion and will remain the domain of real gamers, not businessmen, since they won't be nearly as profitable as Candy Crush.
Only problem is that even indie games are not immune to the Greed Syndrome. For example, Minecraft - the instant Markus sold the game, the Big Corpos started making new ways to make money with it, to the point where now almost every server has some kind of loot boxes. MARK MY WORDS: at some point, it will be against the terms of service to use any MODs or Modpacks that are not on the Official Store.
actually i also bought the horse, but in a subscribtion format, which was in that time cheaper to subscibe a 1 year +get horse mount +get diablo 3, than actually subscription itself (if i remember correctly) but i would have never thought this would lead to the end of my most adored, most favoured, most beloved game...
Funny how these videos never mention WoW has the least predatory in game shop of any MMO in existence. They make too much money echoing blizzard bad blizzard bad like their heroes Asmongold and Bellular.
@@86Corvus I wouldn't call the permanent profession tools, mailboxes and such cosmetic, as well as things like the transmog charges which means you have to pay if you wanna be fashionable. Let's also not forget the loot box keys. I'm a GW2 fan as well and played it instead of WoW for years but lets not kid ourselves, the GW2 shop is incredibly egregious, only balanced out by its incredibly fair free to play model.
@@virkon3208 As any game in which you pay a sub should, which is why I have a big problem with FF14 as it needs a sub AND has an enormous ingame shop. Granted FF14 was of higher quality than WoW for a long time, but it does feel hypocritical when WoW haters go off about the Sparkle Horse when I've lost count of how many items are on the FF14 store.
I totally agree with you on this video, I actually quit right after WotLK but mostly because I burned myself out. But, if buying something that is purely cosmetic and doesn't apply to the "pay-to-win" style of gaming, I think that's fine. Loot boxes, or literally gambling, I think is a gross business tactic since it's mostly marketed to minors. Back when I used to play "free to play" MMORPG's they had all sorts of stuff you could buy, like XP boosters, or cool outfits. I one day found out that these companies actually made more money than games that were a one time purchase, like Guild Wars 1 & 2, and even monthly subscription games like WoW or EvE Online. This was before the term "Microtransaction" even existed. I do agree if you're paying a subscription or $50 to $70 for a game you should get the whole ass game, but if the updates that come with it are free, that's another thing. Don't dangle a carrot on a stick in front of us and make us pay to eat it when we bought the carrot and the stick in the first place.
Bruh has 700 subs and this might be one of the best edited videos on the platform. DAMN I’m impressed. Let’s get that to 700k people. Try to keep your soul along the way dude man. Well done
I play turtlewow. Which has done classic+ better than blizz ever will. Its insane that the only thing that can stand between me and a good wow experience is blizzard. Turtlewow servers has been up for years and is still doing good, but if they do it too good we risk blizzard shutting it down and release a bad version of it with an expensive sub.
@@enrarenrok1605Legitimately just started playing thanks to Barney and Uber… The game is far from dead, and that comes from an original Overwatch fan. At least they let you play classic… I can’t play Overwatch 1 period.
As someone who has been gaming since 2000, and have never once bought a micro transaction in any game, I am perpetually ashamed in my fellow man that we have allowed this travesty to devastate our hobby. Seriously, this might be the biggest black pill I've had to swallow thus far in my entire life.
Most people moaning about cosmetics in any game are absolute morons who just have no control over their impulsion to buy shiny crap. If people didin't buy this stuff like I never have then blizzard and other companies wouldn't make so many cosmetics
Imagine playing MARIO 1 but now you have to pay $$$ before you get to punch a brick to get either a fire flower/star/mushroom. Absolutely insaaaaanee!!!
Wow. I just wanna say man, this is a good video and you clearly knocked it out of the park. This is your first video on this channel and it has 561k views (as of now) and you have almost 2k subscribers! Either you got other channels and the experience, or you just are this good naturally (could be both)! But good video, nonetheless.
The bit at the end about how crappy mobile game earnings have killed quality video games is wild. It's akin to how big budget crappy super hero movies have killed comedy movies. Sad days.
All in all, the players do hold responsibility for "whaling" and in that way promoting these practices. Hence, anyone with common sense stopped associating themselves with Blizzard fanbase/community. This is well reflected in how anti-social it is across all games for a long while now.
Recently they had a deal that included Auspicious Arborwyrm & a pet.. Retail gets the Mount, classic the pet. Months later they sell the same mount to classic for $$ & it was planned, I logged in, the day it was available & saw people on classic on the mount and wondered how they got it. Everyone said it was a glitch. Yet months later it ends up in the shop. Blizzard double dip.
@@belinus7180 When Robert A. Kotick appraoched Vivendi, he was making an offer to buy WoW / Blizzard from them. However, they denied that and offered him to merge Blizzard Entertainment with Activision while Vivendi maintains majority share thus have the upper hand in decision making and control. Bobby was hesitent but Michael Morhaime persuaded him by showing him the potential that the Chineese market has in terms of revenue. Did a thorough analysis on Blizzard a few weeks ago on my channel regarding the history of the company, so its still pretty fresh in my memory.
dude, activision owned blizzard since 1998 so before they were "great"... stop that bullshit. Acitivion was part of Vivendi and they bought Blizzard 1998... google it. its all Bullshit that acitivision ruined blizzard. its blizzard themselfs
Money talks, for better and for worse. In this case, definitely for worse. But buying is essentially voting for what you want more of, and apparently people want more overpriced horse skins and candy crush puzzles. And they wonder why many have started playing games from the past without the micro rot.
This is a well explained video. Blizzard are people making amazing games held hostage by higher ups who ruin those games with greedy monetization and not hiring people for customer service.
@@michaelharder3055 Nerd fact: Blizzard did NOT make Diablo: Skibidi Toilet edition. The game was outsourced. And even then I heard it had pretty good gameplay outside being ridiculously p2w.
@@86Corvus Hots team was really good. It was their maybe best balanced game while also being super fun. Overwatch isn't bad either, all the bad things about it is the monetization and scrapping the co-op missions which were supposed to be selling point of Overpatch 2. I can't tell how Dragonflight is but I hear it's way better than BFA and Shadowlands.
Blizz is my childhood and formed me as an adult, from forming broodwar clans and meeting my first GF in a Final Fantasy themed clan to playing D2 every night doing cow runs for my javazon to playing wow every night to eventually playing d3 at launch and then playing overwatch at launch, d3 at the expo I was just finished. Im never giving Blizz another dime, it's sad how things have changed.
We need a complete system crash. These companies all have to go down. They will never put out good games anymore, they have an aquarium with you as fish, they throw food in the water and you buy a $65 horse :D
if only 200,000 of blizzards million + players spend 10$ in the store that = 2,000,000 So even if 80% of their player base swore off micro transactions they still make buckets of cash.
I don't even play this type of games, but from my old years of having played the -World of Scams- World of Tnks online game, this model is the exact same as the one used by Wargaming (and Gaijin too). Let's hope the new Chinese laws that regulate online games will spread to the rest of the World. It is said that mobile games company have already lost 80 billion dollars in revenue because of the new lws which prohibit almost everything we hate in gacha-type games
Loved the video. Please do a follow up on Kalganism. One wow devs personal vendetta against an entire class in game resulted in nerf after nerf to Warlocks and buffs to his personal classes warriors and mages. He also let slip to his guild in game he was a wow dev. He gave insider knowledge to his guild on mechanics and changes as well as listening to their feedback for class balancing in PvP. He would also personally troll Warlock players on the official WoW Warlock forums as Kalgan and would end up banning players just for fun off the forums.
Some additional context on the Celestial Steed: while the mount's aesthetic was themed after Algalon the Observer in Ulduar, it used the model from Invincible, an otherwise-unique mount model in the game. Invincible was obtained by defeating the Lich King on the 25-player Heroic difficulty, which was WoW's most challenging content at the time. Invincible was still VERY DIFFICULT to obtain at the time the Celestial Steed was released. Releasing a sparkling lookalike Invincible struck many raiding guilds at the time as Blizzard undermining their accomplishments, since unique mounts had often been used as a reward for completing the most difficult content in the game.
I played a little of Wrath. My main was a warlock, and just about the time I was comming into my own with my skills and gear, they nerfed the fuck out of the class, then every other asshole gets an OP deathknight. I finally said fuck it when they added Kung-Fu Panda: could they make the shit any more cartoonish?
"you guys dont have wallets?"
How can you have a wallet when you game from your moms basement whole life, not seeing the light?
Also calling these endgame items is disingenuous. Click bait here.
For real though. Why do you expect free content?
In the case where you were paying a monthly fee you do expect 'free' content.@@paulmcf1115
Yup I like to get better at a game with skill, fuck lil wallet warriors.
"And I looked, and behold, a sparkle horse: and he that sat upon him, his name was Greed; and Failure followed with him"
You tell em I'M COMING!!! AND HELLS COMING WITH ME!!!
Wearing elderscrolls horse armor.
Success*
There's a man going round taking names... 🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶 ps good song btw lol
You mock firstly Revelation, careful.
A mount making more than starcraft only made activision blizzard go like "well why should we put in effort, these people will just pay for slop". If we want these companies to stop doing shitty things we need to stop buying this kinda shit, but looking at this stuff continuously makes money maybe Im asking too much...
"we" - as in the people who used to enjoy the games, are no longer the target audience for blizzard. "we" have been replaced with something else many years ago.
@@halloni damn yeah thats a good point
yup just go play ascension its so much better!!! its like the new version of vanilla i would have wanted wow to provide us!! and if your into SOD then its 100% something you will be into. lol i love the card rotation seasonal server they have where talents and skills are randomly given by draws and cards that you get from quests, dungeons, bg's etc. along with gear and consumables that scale with your level. if you dont like a skill or talent your also rewarded scrolls that will re roll a talent or ability you dont want and at random give you a new one.
its cool because you can have roll out talents and abilities that you wouldnt get till lvl 60 but your only a lvl 8 lol
Gamers are degenerates innit
There are two ways to help the situation:
1. Encourage players to not purchase microtransactions. Choose to support companies that make good games and respect their playerbases - aka, "voting with your wallet".
2. Hold companies accountable for shady or manipulative business tactics.
That's what I'm doing with this video
I used to work at Blizzard, and I can tell you, it wasn't Activision who did this. It was Blizzard. The changes didn't happen because of the buyout, they happened because Brian Metzen decided to stop focusing on the company to act more as a creative director, and left the Warcraft team to develop Overwatch.
The beginning of the end occurred behind closed doors, when shortly after Metzen made this decision, Blizzard stopped caring about quality control and quit internal hiring of their GM, tech support, and forum blues. Instead they were all done by 3rd party vendor. I was on the QC staff, and watched as candidates I had personally interviewed and rejected came strolling in through the door as hired temps. Then my team had a "reorg" and my team was given the option to either relocate to Texas to help build out their new call center, or quit. I chose the latter.
The paid mounts appeared not long after.
I do remember reading the dev announcements at the end of the burning crusade, the arrogance was there. They thought they were the best and that every change was automatically an improvement. Dumbing down the single player, chasing esports and ruining pvp were for me their biggest mistakes.
Who is Brian Metzen? Did you mean Chris Metzen, the Warcraft director?
Not being a Blizzard apologist as I too worked at Blizzard from '10-'17. I hated the job, hated the customers, but loved the people I worked beside. The sparkle pony debacle was a low point for sure as it made more money than SC2 Wings of Liberty did. Sad times.
Who buys this stuff? Everyone I talk to hates microtransactions and says they never buy them, but the company is making billions.
exactly, OP
Clearly we all have done it at some point. We say what's 20$ just this one time. Now consider the population of gamers is probably in the billions. It's hard to understand how they get so much. All they need is a million at a time.
@meoff7602 I haven't. I refuse to buy this bullshit. If it's cosmetic I don't need it, if it actually affects game play, the game is pay to win and I'm not interested. But I suspect a lot of people say "this is bullshit", then pay $20 here and there for a sparkly horse or skins.
Content creators. People who like to brag. Rich fools. Pretty much any gamer that needs everything available in game.
It's probably common even among people who say they don't like micro transactions.
Research shows people are poor judges of determining what they will and won't do in a given set of circumstances.
In other words, right now, they might say, "I hate micro transactions," but when the new hotness is released in their social experiment RPG, they don't want to miss out, and click "purchase."
asmongold will watch this and mention that he was against the horse back when it was released
asmongold is cancer of the viodeogame, pure negativity and hate, obvious froma guy that spent 12 yrs playing trhe same game lol
that idiot loves to cover this type of shit, but will continue playing and advertising every game from that shit company no matter what. Probably a paid shill.
Please get this to top comment for the memes
Lost levels deleted my comment where I said nothing wrong. I simply called wow garbage and asmond a paid shill. Only the blind can't see that he still plays the game, and thus advertises it, despite the obscene practices they have. Also, it was very suspicious that he chose not to stream baldur's gate 3, a game he talked heaps aobut, but played diablo 4, a pile of shit micro transaction infested "game". Activision probably had him by the balls in some contract that didn't allow him to stream it, as it'd look even worse for diablo 4.
@@bodhidaruma2824he probably didn't stream bauldurs because he liked it. Turing your hobbies into work can be an awefull thing for some people. Also you think Blizzard is paying him? dude has been critisising them since wrath . no company want's to pay someone who is shitting on them
I was there as it happened. People warned the players. The players laughed. Look where we are now.
its really interesting to look at old forum posts, a lot of players unknowingly predicted what was to come
I remember this as well, it's sad to see how ended.
I had so many discussion about this topic, back in the day.
As if a lot of people are not capable of seing the outcome of their own actions.
I remember telling them, that this kind of money making will encourage Blizz and others and they always simply said:
"You don't need to buy it! Let others have fun with it!"
And thanks to that, it ruined gaming for the majority of people!
We all ignored the trans woman Jim
They always tell you about the "it's just a slippery slope fallacy" Then it happens.
I saw the thumbnail and thought "is this about the glitter-pony?"
It's the glitter-pony.
Same 😂
Blizzard Entertainment was NOT acquired by Activision in 2008. Vivendi Games, which owned BOTH Activision and Blizzard, bought itself out from Vivendi Universal and merged with Activision to create Activision Blizzard. Blizzard Entertainment was already owned by the same entity since 1998. And even prior to that they were owned by other companies. Blizzard Entertainment has never been independent. Even the name Blizzard came from the fact that their first owner did not like their prior name, Chaos Studios. But Activision-Blizzard may have been more involved after this merger. But I think it's easy for us to blame the "big bad owner" than to realize that Blizzard did this all by themselves. Just like Biowares' failures are mostly self-inflicted.
@@MrRavmoor You need to write a book about this shit man! Honestly. I’d buy it!
No, Vivendi and Activision were separate. Yes, Vivendi owned Blizzard. Vivendi did not own Activision. They merged. Bobby and friends through some power games basically powered out any left overs from Vivendi. Then they proceeded to slow cook the cash cow.
Bioware's Failures lay at their own feet yes, but EA is the one who holds their leash.
The past 12 years the studio head has been appointed by EA and mostly out of the American Branch of BioWare.
OMG seriously, thank you for explaining this, good Sir! I figured it would have been impossible for Blizzard Entertainment to have been independent at all ever considering how expensive MMORPGs are to run just the servers, but it was a surprisingly difficult thing to research once Hong Kong tried to be great again in October 2019.
Under Vivendi, WoW was the most profitable game in the world and Blizzard had complete freedom, they were completely independent from Activision and Vivendi Paris let Blizzard do as they wish.
Activision-Blizzard happened after WoW's peak.
Weirdly I’m kind of thankful blizzard steered in the way it did. They helped me get off the wow smack. I’ve been clean since Legion’s last patch. Never logged in again, never had an urge to. I still kind of follow the lore but it too became so convoluted that I drift away more and more. It feels so good to be free man. I haven’t used battle net for years, I’m done with blizzard. Feels so fkin good bro. So much money and time sunk into this cynical garbage.
AMEN
You'll be back we always come back
@@siulyeoj yeah no
true. i quit shortly after the first money mount.....i just remember looking at them all in Dalaran and thinking, what the F are we doing?
It was Shadowlands that finally did it for me. I actually dropped WoW like hot garbage during BfA when I found out City of Heroes was back. But I came back to WoW during the pandemic lockdowns to play the end of BfA and then check out Shadowlands. In every prior expansion, even if I didn't like the overall expansion I at least enjoyed the questing/leveling experience. But Shadowlands questing/leveling was just a chore, and when I got to max level and found out it was just, "Start grinding these six different currencies", I was out, and haven't been back.
very sad, its like watching your childhood be sucked dry by a financial vampire
The cosmetics were never the reason ppl left the game. Never will be either. Yall really salty over some ppl having more cosmetics, which has no impact on gameplay, than u, sweet life.
@@thorialol youre a child
@@thorialol of course, the cosmetics were never the reason, microtransactions were. So sit back down and zip it.
@@jakenguyen1150people played wow because they were nerds with no life at all.
@@runerune-_-9727 By that logic everyone is a nerd today, you're out of touch
That damn sparkle pony. So many of us at the time could not believe the audacity of that price tag. I too was openly mocking it on forums and with friends. Then, on the night it went live, I found out my well-meaning husband had gifted me one in game. Man, that was awkward.
That was sweet of him at least.
@@lbeard7661 Oh, absolutely. He has always been like that ♥
I was the same way, I did later have an online friend buy me the moonkin pet though.
Your husband is a shill and needs to be jailed. Lok'tar ogar!
Oddly the same happened to me. A few wow friends gifted me the mount so we could ride together. Still shaking my head when I think about it.
They stopped trying to give their customers quality and started looking at them just as cows to be milked for every cent in their wallet. Diablo Infinite and Diablo 4 were a slap in the face and were the culmination of the excessive monetization trend they had been on for several years before those games were released.
This was a activision ploy , they had been doing it with Call of Duty for years , Thankfully now that Bobby kotick is gone , some of what we remember will come back
Well, aren't customers cows ready to be milked? All their profit says so...
They did that to Diablo immortal because there were enough players buying microtransactions that it worked. Blame the customers, not the company.
@@maxkozak9702 well here's the thing about the company that is infuriating--they want to milk their customers (and as you said there are enough simps to make it profitable) but then when the company starts getting a bad rep because their greed is so transparent, they become shocked and want to "defend the honor" of the company with some ridiculous argument like "providing a service" or "need to recoup the cost of development" or the ever popular "it's not pay to win" etc.Excuses that are just so lame and see-through. Just man up and be honest--that would be refreshing. Just say "yes we made a game with heavy microtransactions in order to maximize profit, and it is our hope that you find the gameplay and the game world so engrossing that you would consider it worth it to invest monetarily in our game." End of story, simple and painless. Just don't come here as a company and try to pull the wool over the gamers' eyes and insult our intelligence.
I have seen these videos about blizzard the last 8 years. And still people keep buying their games. I doubt anything will change.
Exactly. As is pointed out in the video, every time Blizzard announced a new step in microtransactions there were people complaining, but with the money all of these "hated" microtransactions made obviously they aren't that upset.
If people are actually bothered by microtransactions, then stop supporting games that use them and only play games with no microtransactions.
because of the chinese market. Simple as that. And addiction. Some people have trouble leaving behind something they invested their best years on
They switched players for payers. It's mostly addicts, now. If "surprise mechanics" get banned, these companies will just implode as there's nothing else left.
Time grinds them all. No empire has stood against time.
Where is the great empire, Egypt? The last of it's might simply washed away. It has never been a significant super power since.
Mongol horde? The Mede's? Rome?
*To big to fail, is the statement of someone so arrogant that they hear the sappers undermining the wall, but they've seen it withstand before.*
How many champion boxers suffered a humiliating defeat - when they had to prove they still had it after retiring.
Turns out everyone else was right. They were washed up, but too self-deceived to realize it.
Right now we see the extreme greed that seems to build it's tower endlessly into the sky.
But they are becoming a pariah.
They are so thoroughly sickening people with their greed tactics, that people will eventually have *nothing* to do with such tactics.
As that happens en mass, they won't know how to respond, because they've done everything against that. They won't listen to sound advice, because that's the same advice they trampled to get rich quick. It's against their modus operandi.
The added the in game currency to the horse because it voids the refund laws in the EU
didnt know that, but im not surprised to hear it. thanks for the info
No it doesn’t. You can’t get around legal barriers by making up your own currency.
@@magicmulderThey also know that many players never make use of their in game money which means the players gave them literally free money (as if it wasn’t free already). And on top of that the store items are often priced in a way that you’ll end up with unspent in game money so either you buy more money and items or it sits there forever in thousands of accounts
To be fair, highest grossing mobile game “honor of king” is not paid to win (provided you don’t hire people to play for you)
@@magicmulderLOL!!!!!! Never used bitcoin huh?
Please make a sequel dedicated to Reforged. The world deserves to know what they did.
The same fate happen to bethesda, legendary horse armor for oblivion... horsers are true curse of gaming
always the horses
"It just works" 😂
Shareholders are the problem with gaming today. That's why all my top hours played on Steam are indie $15-20 games. They focus on making a GOOD game.
Forsen's curse.
@@briankale5977 shareholders aren't the problem because they ultimately answer to our money even if it's indirect. The problem is the people buying all this stuff and then sanitizing it
WoW was already crashing when the "sparkle pony" was released at the end of Wrath. Those of us who had been playing since Vanilla were put off by the dumbing down of gameplay. Classes were being homogenized. "Bring the player, not the class" was the refrain. I quit playing a holy priest when they got rid of downranking spells to save mana, and they had to crank up mana to compensate. This had the effect of taking the challenge out of it.
like back when you actually had to manage your class, build it properly and run it, I quit not long after cataclysm
Also, the consistently making the game easier to level, easier to acquire previously challenging items, easier to travel around made the overall wow experience frustrating for those of us who had spent the time and effort to do those things previously.
I remember spending several years at low levels, enjoying newbie content (1-20), and kinda dreaming about the day I'd decide to actually level up a character to 40 and get a mount. Felt like it would be an Achievement for a person with my playstyle.
IIRC, before I did that, they made mounts into level 10 content. Which felt very weirdly off-putting.
I don't understand the "cosmetics" of diablo 4, where the game is so top-down that whatever you buy WON'T even be partially visible nor distinguishable from the base armors anyway
Idiots money. Its all about taking away idiots money. Idiot can help himself. Sees a shiny jpg and buys it thinking " i have that thing on screen now " then he turns the game off and never looks at it again. Its what drove NFT hype and its what drives current AI investment. Its gonna crash when they realize nobody will buy your AI picture when they can generate their own, the whole thing is less valuable than providing them one active email (less than 1$ for a data broker and you can generate forever) and you get no copyright on anything using AI so the second you poison your work with AI you have no protection from the legal system and people can just take and host their private servers at will. You have no recourse because you had no reservations about taking someone elses work without consent, fed to these generators in order to have them work, so now others can take your shit without your consent.
You see cosmetics on loading screens, on character screen, also party can see your armors etc. I couldn't care less but hey, if someone wants to have spirit wings on their character even if they don't affect the game at all, let them have it.
There a so many great-looking transmogs I got from the battle-passes and even some "normal ingame looks" that there really is nothing cosmetic left to desire...
Like when people spend an hour on character creation in a first person game.
I'm glad I got my gaming done in 1996-2006, with a limited come back for sc2 WoL. Now back to my SimCity2000 campaign
yeah, i'm still planning on perfecting my simtower. og for life
I stopped playing WoW in Feb 2012. Then returned for Classic in 2019 and finally stopped playing in 2021 shortly after the release of Classic Burning Crusade. I will never play a new Blizzard Game again. I grew up with Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft3, Diablo2 and finally enjoyed WoW from Release in 2005 up to 2012 with two Accounts. Greetings from Germany
Why do you think it's hard to criticize a company that's going to donate to charity? I don't think that's the case. Here, the company is trying to USE the charity to deflect criticism of the undefensible acts.
"One of them carries a lot of risk, and the other carries none at all"
There ya go, that is modern game development and the micro transaction business in a nutshell. That comment is all I needed. It's all downhill from here guys.
TH-cam decided I needed to be on the ground floor of checking out this video by a brand new channel and I've gotta say this is really well done! Interesting, throughout yet unpadded content alongside clean, entertaining editing? We love to see it! I'm looking forward to what you make next!
My "starry horse mount" moment was when my normal doctor bill of $20 a visit shot up to $120 and my practically free health insurance with no deductible and covered 80% very slowly started charging more and adding s small deductible.
I can stop playing WoW. I can't stop existing.
Actually, it is really easy to stop existing. It is, however, not recommended.
@@CptJistuceIs it? I can’t afford a doctor visit to find out if it’s recommended or not.
@@Military-gradenutella3068 I am not a medical professional, but I feel qualified to say that a ceasing of existence is not recommended.
Simply put, I left Blizzard years ago. Some of us saw the writing on the wall and, as painful as it was to leave all of the progress, gold, and items I owned, I left it all behind and felt quite liberated to be honest. Blizzard will just never be the same.
Shadowlands was the last expansion I could take, mainly because of that. I started during the Wrath of the Lich King days, back when Blizzard actually seemed to genuinely care for their customers and devote themselves to ensuring that they had fun playing their games. Nowadays, all they seem to care about is making sure all the weirdos who don't even play their games - and probably never will, aren't offended. So after I finished the last Shadowlands raid and finished up the last bit of questing, on each character, I took them back to Stormwind; where I said my goodbyes to them and logged them out for the last time. (I still enjoy Warcraft fan art though, and occasionally commission art of my characters, to remember the good old days. And I have WC3 Reforged, since there are some good fan projects, like Chronicles of the Second War.)
Starcraft I didn't really develop much hate for, just got bored with it and eventually had to uninstall SC2 because it took up a lot of disk space. Diablo I stopped playing after 3, because of how terrible its story was and how annoying it was, having to have an online connection to even play its *single player* story mode. Not to mention the fact that Blizzard have the nerve to claim that they're all about showing respect and courtesy to women now; after having hit Adria with the villain bat, made Leah get turned into the monstrosity you have to kill - with no sign of any redemption for her anywhere in sight, and don't even get me started on what they did to the D2 sorceress.
I think the most sad part of this all, is you're totally right at 3:38 . I make 3d models for a living and the low poly shit blizzard makes is honestly super easy, even an amateur could do it. Yet it raked in 4 million in the first 4 hours, just goes to show why they haven't stopped the store. The players are a big part of the issue. Only a small portion actually care about the MTX as a bad thing.
So true. Activision destroyed Blizzard and their games. Have not played any of them in last 10 years.
Kids who are spending their parent's money.
Honestly, World of Warcraft destroyed Blizzard. The company changed before the buyout, because WoW printed money so fast. They stopped doing anything BUT WoW, much to the consternation of pre-WoW Warcraft fans and people that liked anything else they ever did.
Activision didn't buy them because they were a famous developer with a legacy of fantastic games, they bought them because they had already figured out how to print money with WoW.
My favorite moment involving the winged horse was in a quest addition to Silverpine. I haven't played WOW in 7 years but any time I see a shiny flying horse in games I'm playing, I still say, 'They killed Sparkles!'
I went through a period of being hooked on in game currencies for games like Clash of clans. But when I realized that I pretty much got absolutely nothing for that investment, it snapped me around real fast.
Charity is a scam, the very concept is, most of the money goes to paying administrative salaries, a very small percentage actually is used on the thing that they say.
Have you noticed that only rich people start charities? isn't it at least a little suspicious?
It depends on the charity. Some genuinely do good work, and spend the vast majority of their donations on that work.
This is not denying that others are massive money holes with absurd overhead.
Also, most rich people start charities for the tax breaks and not to hoover up donations.
Like the other comment said it depends. You can look up charities to see how much money actually is used to help people on charity navigator.
ima go on a whim here and say, starting any kind of organization isn't cheap. of course financially-well people start charities. otherwise you'd have to ask for charity to start a charity, wtf?
The part that really hit home is his explanation of how lootboxes work by fucking with your mind thinking its all OK - its criminal.
Gee it’s almost like you cannot decide not to buy. What happened to free will?
@@magicmulder You are misunderstanding the issue. Used to be if you want X you take out wallet and you get X. Now you need to enter a lottery with a chance to get X. And it is the only way you can get X. You have no avenue to just buy X, you have to enter this lottery, over and over if you really want to get X.
@@Rustie_za Or, hear me out here, you could just decide not to play the lottery to get X.
I want 50 million bucks too but I don't play the Powerball lottery. See? You have a choice. You have free will.
@@magicmulder "Leave alone the multimillion dollar company!"
Jeez man, you are supposed to lick it, not shove it down your throat. People like you are the reason why we can't have nice things. Luckily for us there are still good studios out there and also a lot of people supporting them.
@@magicmulder haha I was thinking the same reading all the posts of people who buy this crap. I spent money on a mobile game transaction years ago, immediately saw the trap and never did it again. I have friends who are hooked. I go to casinos with people and just walk around, I don't see the appeal. It's crazy how easily people get sucked in without knowing it. 🐑
Wrath of the Lich King WAS the beginning of the end. I remember playing the dungeons and thinking 'wow, these are too easy - let's farm them before they fix them'
They did not, next the pvp was changed to fit esports, limited battles and massive class balancing making iconic classes boring. Resulting game play was aoe heavy. Then the final nail in the coffin they added was giving out the best previous season raid armour for easy points, the game felt like a ever faster conveyer belt.
There was microtransactions, but no power so whatever... But the base gameplay to me was dead.
there were some of the old-school crowd left still when the warpstalker mount for the TBC classic pre-order special edition was added. blizzard literally had to remove the ability for players to /spit directly at each other because so many people were doing /spit at warpstalker riders
I didn't even notice that this video is from a new channel until I was mid 3 minutes and decided to look at the comments, it felt like I was watching some of those hundred of thousands of views channels that document things like this by the quality of the video
bro same hahaah I looked at 2:42
same 2:32
I remember the Celestial Steed.
I remember the decline of WoW foretold as a consequence of this. That it was a slippery slope.
I remember everyone being told that these concerns were unfounded.
In retrospect, I believe we were all correct about those initial concerns.
Ultima Online player here.... We warned them about Trammel also... The rest is history and the game went into a downward spiral right after.
You could go back and find dozens of such doom predictions. Just because one happens to coincide, doesn't indicate causation, as much as coincidence. All games fade/die. WoW's initial player base aging, along with the rise in e-sports games probably played more into the downfall of WoW, than the (coincidental) sale of one horse. Not to mention the changing landscape for MMORPGs and Online gaming, in general.
I was mocked 15 years ago when I said that microtransactions will ruin gaming as we know it.
Games should be either a one-time purchase for a full game or subscription-based for those with rolling content.
Nowadays, its all pay-to-win and gambling 101.
Sad world.
It's CRAZY this is your first video. It's so well done I would have assumed you had done hundreds already
Thanks for making this video to spread the awareness.
You know what is funny. Back then I defended this and the OW loot boxes. In my mind, "They were all cosmetics, it's not pay to win." Which rings true but Blizzard's greed corrupted them. I didn't know until last year that the damn Celestial Steed, sold MORE than Starcraft 2. Starcraft freaking 2. That sent a message to Blizzard. That players were willing to spend money on cosmetics and not give a crap about quality content, story, etc. Now look where we are today.
Smart people learn from their mistakes. Wise people learn from the mistakes of others. You're among the smart people .
Lot of people say that it makes sense for gaming to be like that because it makes money.
But games don't make this money, gambling does.
Worst part is, the gaming industry is woefully under-regulated. So it essentially bypasses all the gambling laws. Scumbag business CEOs found a cheatcode in the market and has been exploiting the world ever since.
@@Metron455 do NOT give Blizzard any ideas... next thing there will be lootboxes in WoW
@@alexrompen805 I don't need to give them ideas. You need to understand that Activision is a company running online casinos.
They aren't a gaming company. They only do games because it makes for more interesting and legally sustainable slot machines.
For a long time gamers have been treated worse than gamblers. Guess you know why. Back then when you play some games, then some uncle or auntie tell you that you should not play games as an adult, no I mean teenager, because it is childish, yet at the same time those flashing lights in the casino that looks even more "childish" than a pinball machine is completely fine.
Naaah makes no sense when you're already paying a subscription for it.
Thank you all for the support and feedback - I didn't expect the channel to grow so fast. Consider subscribing if you'd like more content like this, and thank you again!
There are two ways to help the situation:
1. Encourage players to not purchase microtransactions. Choose to support companies that make good games and respect their playerbases - aka, "voting with your wallet".
2. Hold companies accountable for shady or manipulative business tactics.
That's my goal with this video.
dont believe all BS, the cosmetic did cost 25$, SC2 60$. they sold over 6 million copys of SC2. so even if every WoW player bought that horse (I know nobody), they couldnt get the same money as with SC2. 10 million players * 25$ is less then 6 Million * 60$
you are discussing revenue. i am talking about profit.
revenue-cost = profit
the cost of game development is very high
@@LostLevelsYT yet even if they told 1 million copys which I wouldt doubt.. still not possible. and the ex blizz guy didnt talk about profit. even if u would guess that the development of SC2 did cost 50million, it still won't fit.
Thanks for the info, great summary. Have you happened to watch any information about the Actavision, now Microsoft matchmaking patent. It was a big deal several years ago Jim Sterling's take is linked th-cam.com/video/ZSpP3Ge-dq0/w-d-xo.html . I think that it is linked to this issue and the current online matchmaking systems we have today but is much less discussed. People are assuming the game the buy is offering "fair" matchmaking, but most of the games are fixed so you become fodder for someone who has payed more money to the company. This is designed to only occur after the player has become familiarized with the game, you would think that level of manipulation and how much of the game is soft locked "AKA 10 years to get to higher SEASONAL level" would just be mass . Overwatch 2 is a golden example, the matchmaking was too difficult to control 6v6 so they took away a player on each time to have decided matches. When I see complaints about rank online I often wonder if they have bought look boxes or other "shop" items.
Lol, Skinner Box...
Well, somebody DID buy that fokken horse. In fact, lots of people did. Just like they did when diablo came out. Those people are to blame. Did you cancel your WOW subscription when things started to go south? Did you ignore Diablo despite the fact that all your bois were online having fun (allegedly)? Do you have the balls to ignore "free" loot boxes they send in order to lure you in? I'm not gonna advocate the devil, but yeah, if it wasn't for sinners he would've been out of business a long time ago.
The thing is, we oldschool players are not the target market anymore. Braindead people, rich spoiled kids and such are the target market. Unfortunately this inspires other companies...
My favourite mobile game changed its buy options some Time ago. Before it was fair. One character free to play. One additional could be unlocked by watching a certain numbers of ads. Additional characters - they had around 8 in total - were one dollar each, or a bundle with ads remove and some gimicks for five bucks. No ingame currency or items or so. Since i liked the game verry much i spent these five bucks and had lots of fun. Nearly first time ever i paid for mobile apps.
Then they changed it to use a special currency instead of paying directly. Still not the biggest issue since there were packages for every sum you needed, so no need to buy more then you needed. But the price increased so no one character is over four dollar. Which means i wont buy the new character. Not because i could not afford it, but because i dont like this change.
This is the same bifurcation that many other artistic disciplines have faced. Take music for example. Real musicians generally cannot stand pop music (especially today's) as they see it as a no-skill perversion of their craft. Nevertheless, pop music is where the money is and that's what the labels produce en masse while real musicians live in the world of nightclubs, small concert venues, and niche labels. I don't see the big gaming labels ever coming back to the true art, and from now on, as with music, we'll rely on indies and smaller niche companies to craft the great games of the future. Great games, like great music, are works of passion and will remain the domain of real gamers, not businessmen, since they won't be nearly as profitable as Candy Crush.
Yup. Most of the games and musicians I enjoy these days are indie. Takes some effort to find them, sometimes, but it's always worth it.
Only problem is that even indie games are not immune to the Greed Syndrome. For example, Minecraft - the instant Markus sold the game, the Big Corpos started making new ways to make money with it, to the point where now almost every server has some kind of loot boxes.
MARK MY WORDS: at some point, it will be against the terms of service to use any MODs or Modpacks that are not on the Official Store.
actually i also bought the horse, but in a subscribtion format, which was in that time cheaper to subscibe a 1 year +get horse mount +get diablo 3, than actually subscription itself (if i remember correctly) but i would have never thought this would lead to the end of my most adored, most favoured, most beloved game...
And yet WoW is still has the smallest shop of any MMO worth mentioning, the whole industry is rotten.
And yet gw2 has no sub fee, sells only cosmetics, and is the best mmo on the market rn easily beats wow and ff14 and eso.
Funny how these videos never mention WoW has the least predatory in game shop of any MMO in existence. They make too much money echoing blizzard bad blizzard bad like their heroes Asmongold and Bellular.
@@86Corvus I wouldn't call the permanent profession tools, mailboxes and such cosmetic, as well as things like the transmog charges which means you have to pay if you wanna be fashionable. Let's also not forget the loot box keys.
I'm a GW2 fan as well and played it instead of WoW for years but lets not kid ourselves, the GW2 shop is incredibly egregious, only balanced out by its incredibly fair free to play model.
@@virkon3208 As any game in which you pay a sub should, which is why I have a big problem with FF14 as it needs a sub AND has an enormous ingame shop. Granted FF14 was of higher quality than WoW for a long time, but it does feel hypocritical when WoW haters go off about the Sparkle Horse when I've lost count of how many items are on the FF14 store.
@@86Corvus this x1000
9:57 one hour video bashing Warcraft 3 Reforged? I'd watch that!!!
I totally agree with you on this video, I actually quit right after WotLK but mostly because I burned myself out. But, if buying something that is purely cosmetic and doesn't apply to the "pay-to-win" style of gaming, I think that's fine. Loot boxes, or literally gambling, I think is a gross business tactic since it's mostly marketed to minors.
Back when I used to play "free to play" MMORPG's they had all sorts of stuff you could buy, like XP boosters, or cool outfits. I one day found out that these companies actually made more money than games that were a one time purchase, like Guild Wars 1 & 2, and even monthly subscription games like WoW or EvE Online. This was before the term "Microtransaction" even existed.
I do agree if you're paying a subscription or $50 to $70 for a game you should get the whole ass game, but if the updates that come with it are free, that's another thing. Don't dangle a carrot on a stick in front of us and make us pay to eat it when we bought the carrot and the stick in the first place.
hey now we cant joke anymore about bobby needing his 30th yacht. who is his replacement?
How Ironic... MICRO!! Soft.
Phil spencer.
Or Satya Nadella maybe.
Bruh has 700 subs and this might be one of the best edited videos on the platform. DAMN I’m impressed.
Let’s get that to 700k people. Try to keep your soul along the way dude man. Well done
I love the rise of small TH-camrs dropping bangers of videos like this. The editing quality is excellent!
thank you very much!
Great vid! Hoping you add more content soon!
Good video. Damn that horse and the state of the industry.. It's wild that people consume content like this.
Such a shame World of Warcraft is held hostage by this terrible corporation.
The hostage is dead for a long time my man.
Yeah not anymore
Forget WoW, bring back classic RTS Warcraft
I play turtlewow. Which has done classic+ better than blizz ever will. Its insane that the only thing that can stand between me and a good wow experience is blizzard. Turtlewow servers has been up for years and is still doing good, but if they do it too good we risk blizzard shutting it down and release a bad version of it with an expensive sub.
@@enrarenrok1605Legitimately just started playing thanks to Barney and Uber…
The game is far from dead, and that comes from an original Overwatch fan.
At least they let you play classic… I can’t play Overwatch 1 period.
I made the huge mistake of buying Diablo IV.....no freaking more. Good lore, boring and repetitive game..... Blizzard has truly died years ago.
There is no Blizzard. Only MICROSOFT!
As someone who has been gaming since 2000, and have never once bought a micro transaction in any game, I am perpetually ashamed in my fellow man that we have allowed this travesty to devastate our hobby.
Seriously, this might be the biggest black pill I've had to swallow thus far in my entire life.
Great video!
Most people moaning about cosmetics in any game are absolute morons who just have no control over their impulsion to buy shiny crap. If people didin't buy this stuff like I never have then blizzard and other companies wouldn't make so many cosmetics
If there's a demand companies will aim to provide supply. The problem lies with consumers.
@@wlink639 Absolutely
@Bla27385 Go take some English lessons because you desperately need them. After that go read a book on supply and demand.
Good luck
Agreed
Wow you're stupid. No joke
Imagine playing MARIO 1 but now you have to pay $$$ before you get to punch a brick to get either a fire flower/star/mushroom. Absolutely insaaaaanee!!!
how did this vid get pushed on my feed. shit might blow up. good vid
It's bobby's world,
we're just living in it.
Wow. I just wanna say man, this is a good video and you clearly knocked it out of the park. This is your first video on this channel and it has 561k views (as of now) and you have almost 2k subscribers! Either you got other channels and the experience, or you just are this good naturally (could be both)! But good video, nonetheless.
0:15 ZOOS! YOUR SON HAS RETURNED! I BRING THE DESTRUCTION OF OLYMPUS!
The bit at the end about how crappy mobile game earnings have killed quality video games is wild.
It's akin to how big budget crappy super hero movies have killed comedy movies.
Sad days.
that analogy is on point, never thought about the movie industry that way
All in all, the players do hold responsibility for "whaling" and in that way promoting these practices. Hence, anyone with common sense stopped associating themselves with Blizzard fanbase/community. This is well reflected in how anti-social it is across all games for a long while now.
Activision has been anti game from the beginning. All their games were hollow shells. I’ll remember Blizzard (north) for D2 and D2r, and nothing else.
Great Production!
Recently they had a deal that included Auspicious Arborwyrm & a pet.. Retail gets the Mount, classic the pet. Months later they sell the same mount to classic for $$ & it was planned, I logged in, the day it was available & saw people on classic on the mount and wondered how they got it. Everyone said it was a glitch. Yet months later it ends up in the shop. Blizzard double dip.
never heard of this - that's interesting, thanks for sharing
Selling to activision is what ruined Blizzard.
It ended when Blizzard North ended 😂
Blizzard was never "sold" to Activision. They were both owned by Vivendi. Bobby got the money together to convince Vivendi to sell to him.
@@belinus7180 When Robert A. Kotick appraoched Vivendi, he was making an offer to buy WoW / Blizzard from them. However, they denied that and offered him to merge Blizzard Entertainment with Activision while Vivendi maintains majority share thus have the upper hand in decision making and control. Bobby was hesitent but Michael Morhaime persuaded him by showing him the potential that the Chineese market has in terms of revenue.
Did a thorough analysis on Blizzard a few weeks ago on my channel regarding the history of the company, so its still pretty fresh in my memory.
dude, activision owned blizzard since 1998 so before they were "great"... stop that bullshit. Acitivion was part of Vivendi and they bought Blizzard 1998... google it. its all Bullshit that acitivision ruined blizzard. its blizzard themselfs
Blizzard used to be my purest love of PC gaming… now I haven’t touched a blizzard game in years. It’s sad to see the greats fall
Money talks, for better and for worse. In this case, definitely for worse. But buying is essentially voting for what you want more of, and apparently people want more overpriced horse skins and candy crush puzzles. And they wonder why many have started playing games from the past without the micro rot.
Respect. Comment to bump your signal.
This is a well explained video. Blizzard are people making amazing games held hostage by higher ups who ruin those games with greedy monetization and not hiring people for customer service.
So THE DEVELOPER who asked "don't you have phones?" is making amazing games? WTF are you on about?
@@michaelharder3055 Nerd fact: Blizzard did NOT make Diablo: Skibidi Toilet edition. The game was outsourced. And even then I heard it had pretty good gameplay outside being ridiculously p2w.
No, the people who made good games left blizzard long ago
@@86Corvus Hots team was really good. It was their maybe best balanced game while also being super fun.
Overwatch isn't bad either, all the bad things about it is the monetization and scrapping the co-op missions which were supposed to be selling point of Overpatch 2.
I can't tell how Dragonflight is but I hear it's way better than BFA and Shadowlands.
was genuinely surprised when while watching this I saw such a small subscriber count and so few views. very well made :)
Idk how this was pushed on my feed, but I'm glad it did. The video is spot on. Keep up the good work.
thank you, will do!
Wait, this your first video?!?!
This is amazing stuff.
Blizz is my childhood and formed me as an adult, from forming broodwar clans and meeting my first GF in a Final Fantasy themed clan to playing D2 every night doing cow runs for my javazon to playing wow every night to eventually playing d3 at launch and then playing overwatch at launch, d3 at the expo I was just finished. Im never giving Blizz another dime, it's sad how things have changed.
great video. you need more subs.
thank you!
We need a complete system crash. These companies all have to go down. They will never put out good games anymore, they have an aquarium with you as fish, they throw food in the water and you buy a $65 horse :D
The masses love their opiates, though.
if only 200,000 of blizzards million + players spend 10$ in the store that = 2,000,000 So even if 80% of their player base swore off micro transactions they still make buckets of cash.
I don't even play this type of games, but from my old years of having played the -World of Scams- World of Tnks online game, this model is the exact same as the one used by Wargaming (and Gaijin too).
Let's hope the new Chinese laws that regulate online games will spread to the rest of the World. It is said that mobile games company have already lost 80 billion dollars in revenue because of the new lws which prohibit almost everything we hate in gacha-type games
Loved the video. Please do a follow up on Kalganism. One wow devs personal vendetta against an entire class in game resulted in nerf after nerf to Warlocks and buffs to his personal classes warriors and mages. He also let slip to his guild in game he was a wow dev. He gave insider knowledge to his guild on mechanics and changes as well as listening to their feedback for class balancing in PvP.
He would also personally troll Warlock players on the official WoW Warlock forums as Kalgan and would end up banning players just for fun off the forums.
How is 2 subscriber channel with a single sub 100 view video in my feed lol.
He made a good video, but im wondering too lol
Wait, I thought the problem with youtube was that it only puts overrated videos from overrated channels in your feed? Pick a lane!
Needed to wait a little bit as It is no longer a 100 view video. TH-cam algo magic.
@WGSeries yea, I was more shocked the Algo worked. I was sub number 4 to this channel.
Players in Belgium: "Which loot boxes!?"
Start of a WoW series?? Maybe??
Some additional context on the Celestial Steed: while the mount's aesthetic was themed after Algalon the Observer in Ulduar, it used the model from Invincible, an otherwise-unique mount model in the game. Invincible was obtained by defeating the Lich King on the 25-player Heroic difficulty, which was WoW's most challenging content at the time. Invincible was still VERY DIFFICULT to obtain at the time the Celestial Steed was released. Releasing a sparkling lookalike Invincible struck many raiding guilds at the time as Blizzard undermining their accomplishments, since unique mounts had often been used as a reward for completing the most difficult content in the game.
If people didn't buy it this wouldn't be a problem, but clearly people want the sparkly horses!
Imagine...free to play trash, manages to pull 1 million dollar per day.
Insane, absolutly insane!
Modern gaming is an IQ test.
More like a line from the old movie Wargames - "The only way to win, is not to play".
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian... that seems very apprpriate here.
Decent video, Bravo!
This is a great video dude, why you have only 1k subs? I ve subscribed.
The edit is insanely good for a "little" channel of 537 subscribers. 81k views is the proof. Well done!
I played a little of Wrath. My main was a warlock, and just about the time I was comming into my own with my skills and gear, they nerfed the fuck out of the class, then every other asshole gets an OP deathknight. I finally said fuck it when they added Kung-Fu Panda: could they make the shit any more cartoonish?
Activision ruined blizzard for me... the bigger these companies get, the worse everything is
it's really a sad state we're in for gaming right now.
Good stuff man 🎉🎉🎉🎉