Give the Gift of Crack: World of Warcraft's Holiday Deals

[The Rascal King]

A WOMAN shaman? YOU MEAN A WITCH? AAAAAHHHHHH BURN HER! BURN HER WITH THESE HOT DEALS. RAAAAAARGGH!

Deliciously sexy jokes aside, I wish I could buy these games but I have a netbook. Sad life for me! Do they really charge 25 dollars for a fucking mount?

 

[Brett Caldwell]

Isn't the Warcraft Battle Chest a little redundant; after all the regular WoW already contains all the Burning Crusade content... Right?

Oh and love the title.

Wrong, no Blue Orcs or Belfs, no access to Outland, and level 60 cap.

They changed the core to include BC content a few months back. Well, let's be accurate, they made it so the 'core' purchase was the battle chest with the BC content, and anyone who only had vanilla got the BC content added on for free.

Was done at the end of June.

 

[Gather]

Isn't the Warcraft Battle Chest a little redundant; after all the regular WoW already contains all the Burning Crusade content... Right?

Oh and love the title.

Wrong, no Blue Orcs or Belfs, no access to Outland, and level 60 cap.

Ah, they just upgraded all those who owned WoW without Outlands to have Outlands and made it impossible to buy "WoW" as just plain "WoW" (It has to come packaged with Burning Crusade)

 

[Panayjon]

Though, to be fair you do get a month with each expansion right?

Nope. Just with the first box. WOTLK and CATA do not come with free months.

Well that blows. I was almost sure I had gotten a free month with WotLK but that was a long time ago and I haven't picked up Cata.

I think everyone saw the promo trailer for the next expansion, laughed and said fuck that. I almost fell over when I saw that thing, and than I went on and read about the talent changes(again) and then decided that I quit months ago. WoW is a dying game.

But yes for 50 dollars it is a good deal that you get all the content, plus two achievements, a retarded sparkle pony, and a pet that actually amuses people.

You have no idea what you're talking about. You(The vocal minority) are the only ones who had a problem with Pandaria. Dying game you say? Last I checked 10 million still means it is winning. It's nowhere CLOSE to dying. When it dips below 1 million, call me, and I'll agree the game is dead.

That's "active subscriptions", not individual players. Given their revenue when parsed through GAAP when they had "12 million active subs" their actual player base was somewhere between 6.5 and 8.5 million. Of which 1/4 to 1/3 were Chinese players. Also remember, the 10.5 million act subs number was released before the Kung Fu Pandaren expansion was announced. All of which means their non-Chinese playerbase is probably somewhere south of 4 million at this point in time.

I understand why you're separating the Chinese from the non-Chinese, but some of them just play too and don't sell gold

The Chinese in China don't play through individual subs. WoW is handled through a NetCafe company in China. As such, the number of players is a fixed variable that is reported by the company. The only variable come in on Blizzard's end because they don't release the money made off of microtransactions vs the money made off of individual subscriptions. The fact that they are 1/3 to 1/4 of the total player base is entirely dependent upon how much money WoW makes through MTs. In january of this year China had about 2.4 million players.

http://daeity.blogspot.com/2011/02/active-subscriptions-revisited-part-2.html

Part one merely explains his methodology, but the numbers from at the start of this year are all there. Remember that immediately prior to MoP their active subs had dropped to 10.5 mil and that western subscribers have been leaving in droves after the announcement.


As for why I differentiated, the MoP is facing much more backlash outside of China than within it. Thus you are much more likely to see dropped subs in that part of the world at this time.

That's neat and all, but I was just commenting that its not like the Chinese don't matter, even if their money is literally worth less to Blizzard. Especially if that NetCafe company hosts and handles their own servers, that is a HUGE burden off the backs of Blizzard. Though, I'm skeptical about the Mists of Pandaria announcement making people leave in droves.

My view may be skewed as I listen to "The Instance", a WoW podcast (funny thing is I haven't played WoW myself in years) run by guys who are terribly optimistic. Their view is that people who actually went to Blizzcon and tried out MoP liked it, but people who only heard of it through hearsay are skeptical. We'd need to see numbers really, although any numbers you see right now are probably inflated because they released the "You can kill Deathwing" patch not too long ago.