Can the Starcraft 2 Franchise succeed financially?

[honage]

It's a simple answer.

Will it be financially successful?
Very, very much so.

Will it be more successful than WoW so that Blizzard can make RTS games instead of MMOs?
It will not be, and cannot ever be as monetarily successful. It's not that type of game. Blizzard makes over 165 million dollars a month from WoW. Plus the cost of the actual game and expansion. Plus all the other paid services available for WoW. Finite content cannot ever be more successful than infinite content.

And as far as the next MMO being very different from WoW. It won't be. It will be the same casual junk that WoW currently is. Blizzard has found a cashcow bigger than all other cashcows. They won't ditch that strategy. Their past performances are indicators of this result.

[DemolitionSquid]

And as far as the next MMO being very different from WoW. It won't be. It will be the same casual junk that WoW currently is. Blizzard has found a cashcow bigger than all other cashcows. They won't ditch that strategy. Their past performances are indicators of this result.

That's pretty narrow minded. MMO's all follow the same line, but there are multiple features they can define and improve. SW:ToR from Bioware will have every NPC and all characters voiced-over, that's ~1600 hours of voice-over work. And there are MMO's like Runescape with nigh complete control over how you develop your character. Given that my inside sources suggest Blizzard's next MMO may be steampunk related, I think we'll see noticeable improvements at the least.

[honage]

Demo squad. Youre being unrealistically optimistic. It would be nice, but it's not the way the world works.

If you are a PUBLICLY TRADED company who needs to make as much money as possible as immediately as possible to keep shareholders, you will always take the option that you KNOW is the most profitable. Risk isn't worth it, when you have already made the best-selling and most profitable MMO ever (by far). There's a reason that most of WoW's key designers are moving over to the new Blizzard MMO. This is something that follows WoW's model of casual friendly, low-skill requirements, grinding-heavy model. 1600+ hours of Voice Work is not cost effective.

And ToR will be not so good. I won't buy it.

[DemolitionSquid]

Demo squad. Youre being unrealistically optimistic. It would be nice, but it's not the way the world works.

If you are a PUBLICLY TRADED company who needs to make as much money as possible as immediately as possible to keep shareholders, you will always take the option that you KNOW is the most profitable. Risk isn't worth it, when you have already made the best-selling and most profitable MMO ever (by far). There's a reason that most of WoW's key designers are moving over to the new Blizzard MMO. This is something that follows WoW's model of casual friendly, low-skill requirements, grinding-heavy model. 1600+ hours of Voice Work is not cost effective.

And ToR will be not so good. I won't buy it.

Unrealistically optimistic? Obviously you haven't been around her long enough to know I'm the most pessimistic person on these boards aside from Nicol Bolas.

Seeing as Blizzard just confirmed no LAN for SC2, I feel its safe to say that their profit choices are a lot different than you think.

As for ToR, it's Bioware. They have quality standards on par with Blizzard. They don't release bad games. You are completely ignorant and misinformed, ToR will be incredible.

[honage]

How does Blizzard deciding not to develop for LAN play disprove my earlier point? It is not the most unit time per unit money effective way of developing for Starcraft II. The small (The petition has something like 100,000 signatures, some of which are duplicates and some of which are advertisements) number of players who would be alienated by a "No LAN" decision (not close to all of those who would sign that sort of a petition would refuse to buy the game simply based on it not having LAN, no matter what they may say) are just a drop in the bucket. Even 100,000 people refusing to buy Starcraft II is monetarily worthwhile. Let's crunch numbers for a "worst case" scenario here. Only 1,000,000 copies of Starcraft II are sold. (1/11th of the original game's sales.) The lost 100,000 are a whole 10% of the final sales. As things are currently, due to concerns over a release delay for Starcraft II, Activision's stock has dropped enormously (over 30%). When Blizzard originally made the no-LAN decision, it was partially due to the fact that developing for LAN would likely delay their intended release date for the game. Delays are loss in profits for ATVI. And that's bigger than 10% of Starcraft II's sales. A whole lot bigger. Now that Starcraft II has been delayed (for other reasons), Blizzard very well might rethink their decision if they end up having extra development time. But I doubt it. No LAN also reduces the threat of Piracy as, while Singleplayer can still be accessed in hacked versions of games, a valid account is needed for BattleNet access - the real heart of the Starcraft II experience. Most people buy Starcraft for that multiplayer fun. Anyways. My point is that the marginal cost of adding LAN support for Starcraft II does not justify the required time and money investments. It was a marketing decision, not a development decision to not develop for LAN. As such your assertion is erronious.



By the way, on a slightly side note, I feel a bit offended that you would compare Bioware's quality control to Blizzard's. I have enormous respect for Bioware, they have made some INCREDIBLE games. Blizzard has, of course, done the same, however their recent trends with World of Warcraft's simplification and stupidification seem to indicate a preference of making as much money as is possible over making the best game possible. (Note: I firmly believe that Starcraft II will be incredible, partially because its monetary draw, unlike Wow's, is that it IS so hard at high levels of play).

Anyways, on to ToR. You seem to think that I think ToR will be terrible. It won't be. The words I used were "not so good." Truthfully, I will most likely buy it and play it as if it were a singleplayer game for a month. Meh. I think that it will be a fantastic RPG and a not very good MMO. While Bioware does have a history of making awesome RPGs (Baldur's Gate series, Kotor Series, Mass Effect, etc.) with immersive storylines, they do not have large amounts of MMO balance experience. Even early WoW had some serious balance problems (PvE and PvP). Some still exist to this day. It could afford them since it did everything else so well and there was no 11 million subscriber monster already on the market. And a history of impossible balance is exactly what Bioware has inherited. Ever played Jedi Knight online? It's a force power spam. Compare how easy it is to play a gun-slinger to a force user in Kotor? It's like taking the difficulty slider and upping it from "Cakewalk" to "Ouch." When some characters have almost unlimited capabilities compared to everyone else, it's kindof hard to balance. And if you nerf those powers, then suddenly the story no longer becomes the Star Wars trilogy that we all saw and loved as kids. Bioware's good, there's no doubt. But everything that they seem to be putting tons of effort into is what they are calling the fourth pillar: story. They can't just neglect the other three and hope that the roof still stays up.




On a side note, I'm not saying that Blizzard will stop making RTS games. That's ridiculous. They cannot release more than one MMO at a time without competing with themselves (it's like the concept of ecological niches, except in video games), due to the time demanding nature of a MMO. The other genre that they do well is RTS, something that, while not nearly as economically profitable, has a lot of potential with a massive die hard built in Korean fanbase, as well as the fanbase in the rest of the world. It's a game that, due to their RTS reputation, will make lots of money. Nowhere near MMO dough, but still a lot. To give you some idea the raw income from all sales of Starcraft (some of which goes to the vendors), assuming a generous average price point of 20 dollars would be 220 million dollars. That's less than what WoW makes in 2 months. Heck, assume a 50 dollar price point if you want. Still less than what WoW makes in 4 months. There's a reason that Starcraft II has been in development for so long. When the devs began to realize the cashcow they had in WoW, basically the entire Starcraft II dev team moved over to work on WoW.

Thanks for stimulating thoughtful deliberation!

[DemolitionSquid]

It makes me sick how wrong you are. I pity you if you really believe all that.

[Nicol Bolas]

If you are a PUBLICLY TRADED company who needs to make as much money as possible as immediately as possible to keep shareholders, you will always take the option that you KNOW is the most profitable.

Then why isn't Blizzard charging for Battle.Net? Why is Blizzard developing StarCraft II at all? Why is EA developing anything other than MMOs?

When Blizzard originally made the no-LAN decision, it was partially due to the fact that developing for LAN would likely delay their intended release date for the game.

No, it was not.

To give you some idea the raw income from all sales of Starcraft (some of which goes to the vendors), assuming a generous average price point of 20 dollars would be 220 million dollars. That's less than what WoW makes in 2 months.

Perhaps, but you're forgetting costs.

Supporting StarCraft, in the span of 2 months costs... what? 2 Programmers for 2 months? That's maybe $33,000 total, assuming ~$200,000 a year for each programmer (which is rather high for the videogame industry).

Supporting WoW for 2 months? Millions. Each server "machine" costs lots of money in maintenance and electricit. Each server costs bandwidth. Each server must have a staff of GMs up 24/7. Remember, this is all per server; WoW had hundreds of servers world-wide.

And all that doesn't even deal with the constant development of new content; you've basically got a StarCraft II-size team of support constantly.

Now, WoW rakes in big profits, certainly. But don't go thinking that the gross take isn't largely taken up by the costs of keeping the game alive.

[honage]

First of all, saying "your wrong" does nothing to support your point. I'd like ToR to be great, but I think that that won't happen, despite everything that I've seen so far, due to the reasons I outlined. If the game is great I'd love to eat my words, I just don't see that happening.


Nick, the reason that Blizzard is developing Starcraft II at all is outlined in my last paragraph in my previous post. A company cannot have more than one MMO without competing with themselves. For the same reason companies like EA make more than just MMOs. Also, they aren't Blizzard. It's much less risky for Blizzard to make MMOs than other companies as they already have 11 million people who they can easily transition into new a new MMO. Other companies are just looking to cut a slice out of Blizzard's pie.

Why not charge for BattleNet? Changing BattleNet to a paid subscription model will affect Stock Prices. People won't be pleased. It's also a game that, while popular, only the truely hardcore continue to play after a certain amount of time. It's not like everyone who buys it keeps a BattleNet account constantly active. Most of them don't. They still are considering using a Microtransaction based system, however.

Furthermore, perhaps you did not read the word "raw" before my income figures. I'm not talking about net income - obviously a MMO costs more to maintain. Sure, it costs millions a month to maintain, but the profit each month is still tens of millions of dollars. Over its lifespan, it WILL still earn more money. World of Warcraft is by far the most profitable PC game ever released. And it has no competition.

[Norfindel]

They don't charge for Battle.net, because that would be seen as a scam by their users, and they would loss lots of them. Online player numbers would drop like flies, and cause the whole idea to fail badly. They would have no justification to charge any money for playing an RTS game. They can do that with MMORPGs, because of the huge bandwidth, server, and content costs.

[honage]

Norf is exactly right - They would charge for BattleNet if it would increase profits. But it wouldnt. ATVI would suffer, and few players would keep their subscriptions renewed. Some might not even buy it over that, I know that I would.

They weren't taking a risk making WoW subscription based, because other companies had tried that before and proven it to work due to the "infinite" content. But making an RTS subscription based...