Microsoft Wins Court Case Against FTC, Allowing It to Move Forward with $69 Billion Activision Blizzard Deal

[Brian_B]

I'm just thinking with such luminaries of the MMO arena as World of Warcraft, and Bethesda's Elder Scrolls Online. (Though today if you google Bethesda MMO all you get are starfield articles. lol)

Very true. MS has owned ESO for a while now and hasn't really done anything differently there - they've more or less let Bethesda do what they had been doing with it, and it still gets content releases on about the same cadence.

But supporting and maintaining and existing title that already has a player base is a world of difference from starting a new one up. I imagine they will treat WoW much the same - let Bliz more or less do what they had been doing with it.

I'd love to see WoW 2.0 (or maybe I dread it, not sure), but I don't think we will - I don't think Bliz was headed in that direction before the merger and I don't think MS will push them there. If the court cases and current actions of Microsoft reveal anything - they value Call of Duty and Mobile above everything else... and I think that if they could, they would just buy CoD and King and leave the rest on the table.

 

[Grimlakin]

Very true. MS has owned ESO for a while now and hasn't really done anything differently there - they've more or less let Bethesda do what they had been doing with it, and it still gets content releases on about the same cadence.

But supporting and maintaining and existing title that already has a player base is a world of difference from starting a new one up. I imagine they will treat WoW much the same - let Bliz more or less do what they had been doing with it.

I'd love to see WoW 2.0 (or maybe I dread it, not sure), but I don't think we will - I don't think Bliz was headed in that direction before the merger and I don't think MS will push them there. If the court cases and current actions of Microsoft reveal anything - they value Call of Duty and Mobile above everything else... and I think that if they could, they would just buy CoD and King and leave the rest on the table.

COD, King, and WOW all bring in the most valuable thing to a company for investors today... RMR. Or if you're not familiar it's Recurring Monthly Revenue.

Lets do a quick google with WOW subscriber numbers.

WOW is estimated to have about 127 million subscribers... (that boggles my mind and must include free accounts.) Lets say 1/3rd of that number actually have paid subscriptions. That's over 42 million. 42 million people lets say their RMR is only 10 dollars a month for easy math. (The cheapest sub but longest lasting sub.) We're talking about 1 game (expensive I imagine to maintain) bringing in 420 million a month, or 5.04 billion dollars a year. WOW alone would put blizzard well into the fortune 500 category. Of course that's well within their 70 billion market cap. Of course that market cap is inflated because of the MS acquisition.

So my point being is that you don't throw away 5 billion in RMR. YOU NEVER do that. But you also need to plan on the next... so a little creative freedom from the Activision/King portion of the company to let the Blizzard people work on something NEW would be awesome.

It feels like to me that all of the MMORPG's in the market are focused on some version of high fantasy. Even the combat in games like genshin impact... Or what I like to call it... thigh gate. I swear to god no character in any material I've seen for that game wears pants that cover the legs. Anyway... we need a good modern or sci fi MMO. Blizzard with their relationship with the Warhammer crew and the push that Amazon is reportedly doing with Henry Cavil... you could establish a MMO in the Warhammer future universe and Blizzard could be a great Shepard for that... and call it StarCraft the MMORPG.

Please dear god not another looter shooter called a MMO.

 

[Denpepe]

WOW is estimated to have about 127 million subscribers... (that boggles my mind and must include free accounts.) Lets say 1/3rd of that number actually have paid subscriptions. That's over 42 million. 42 million people lets say their RMR is only 10 dollars a month for easy math. (The cheapest sub but longest lasting sub.) We're talking about 1 game (expensive I imagine to maintain) bringing in 420 million a month, or 5.04 billion dollars a year. WOW alone would put blizzard well into the fortune 500 category. Of course that's well within their 70 billion market cap. Of course that market cap is inflated because of the MS acquisition.

You may want to rethink that nr, there are around 1.2 milion active players, the 127 milion is the amount of people that played the gazme in some form over the last 20 years and is nowhere near accurate for subscribers.

Wow at it's peak iirc had around 15 milion active accounts.

 

[Grimlakin]

You may want to rethink that nr, there are around 1.2 milion active players, the 127 milion is the amount of people that played the gazme in some form over the last 20 years and is nowhere near accurate for subscribers.

Wow at it's peak iirc had around 15 milion active accounts.

I blame the source I used: https://mmo-population.com/r/wow

 

[Brian_B]

Lets do a quick google with WOW subscriber numbers.

It's not a small number - but it's not nearly as much revenue as you are thinking, and remember they just pulled out of China recently / this year, so that's going to be a decent hit on top of the steady decline you already see.

 

[Grimlakin]

Btw the FTC filed an appeal. The show gos on.