World of Warcraft just had a classic release, which I would hardly call stale. h...

MLpractitioner · on Oct 31, 2019

Ironic we are calling not stale a company that rereleases a game after 15 years

arkades · on Oct 31, 2019

Re-releasing your old content to spike subscriptions with a nostalgia crowd might be the very definition of stale.

schaefer · on Oct 31, 2019

I was definitely the target demographic for WOW classic: nostalgic as heck.

Instead with the Hong Kong dust-up, I faced the facts. The blizzard I grew up with and loved is dead. Even with Wow Classic released, the world has moved on.

Instead I initiated a full Battle Net account delete, which nuked all my Wow characters, Hearthstone decks, etc.

mulletbum · on Oct 31, 2019

I would do this if their p2p voice chat didnt work better than everyone else, including Hangouts and Discord.

radcon · on Oct 31, 2019

Classic will never have the same revenue potential because players would revolt if they added in-game transactions.

Those transactions were a massive source of profit in later expansions and completely eclipsed subscription revenue. Even as the WoW playerbase dwindled, revenue grew thanks to things like game-time tokens, level boosts, mounts, cosmetic items, etc.

All of those things are 100% antithetical to the premise of Classic WoW.

j-c-hewitt · on Oct 31, 2019

Blizzard accidentally stumbled on the biggest business model of the 2020s-2050s: digital retirement homes combined with the GenX/Millennial equivalent of re-releases of Beatles albums.

I realized I was aging when I figured out that WoW Classic is Oldies Radio but for people in my age bracket.

EMM_386 · on Oct 31, 2019

> I realized I was aging when I figured out that WoW Classic is Oldies Radio but for people in my age bracket.

I was a hardcore Everquest player prior to WoW. I actually ran the biggest market site at the time, EQPrices.com.

So you want to talk about aging ... but yes, WoW Classic, while interesting, was not enough to get me back in.

And I played at launch. So I know all about having to carry around arrows and all that other jazz.

j-c-hewitt · on Nov 1, 2019

I played EQ as a young kid and I remember EQPrices! Really cool. Never bought anything, though, not having money and all that.

LIV2 · on Oct 31, 2019

Digging a game out of the archives is pretty stale imo

sleepybrett · on Oct 31, 2019

Let's not forget that their next big release is a WC3 remaster .. womp womp.

krzyk · on Oct 31, 2019

And earlier Starcraft Remastered :)

Blizzard is as stale as it gets right now.

It is very sad that Blizzard was:

- the creator of Warcraft, which popularized RTS,

- Starcraft which basically created esports (and popularized RTS even more)

- Diablo which popularized hack-n-slash RPGs

And now all they do is remaster after remaster (or "classic").

Fnoord · on Oct 31, 2019

I agree, but there is one person who's not in the market for an out of date game but is for a remaster: youth who were too young to play the original. Case in point: my kid.

magashna · on Oct 31, 2019

It might be making money, but I wouldn't say re-releasing an old version is progress.

urda · on Oct 31, 2019

Re-releasing old content is not something you consider "stale" ?