How A $25 Horse Ruined Blizzard Entertainment 

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.

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.

"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

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."

@@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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Same 😂

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.

yeah, i'm still planning on perfecting my simtower. og for life

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

bro same hahaah I looked at 2:42

same 2:32

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.

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.

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 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZSpP3Ge-dq0.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...

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. 🐑

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.

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?

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.

Smart people learn from their mistakes. Wise people learn from the mistakes of others. You're among the smart people .

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

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.

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.

How Ironic... MICRO!! Soft.

Phil spencer. Or Satya Nadella maybe.

thank you very much!

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

thank you, will do!

The masses love their opiates, though.

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.

More like a line from the old movie Wargames - "The only way to win, is not to play".

never heard of this - that's interesting, thanks for sharing

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

that analogy is on point, never thought about the movie industry that way

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. RU-vid algo magic.

@WGSeries yea, I was more shocked the Algo worked. I was sub number 4 to this channel.

thank you!

Looks like more than half of the people in the comments are parrots, repeating the same thing for over a decade now. While none of them take an action. They think theyre taking 'action' by not buying the cosmetics etc. The real action comes imo by not buying the game at all. EA has lost lots of gamers over the year and then they brought Star Wars Fallen Order out, a singleplayer game without any crap mentioned in this video. Tbh i do take that action by playing indie games and also actually having fun and getting lost in them, like i did when i was much younger

@@RidoDrago oh I have already dropped Blizzard back with BfA and I don't see myself returning either.

And there are people who will spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on bags or shoes. They're paying 10-100 times more for a technically "useful" product. But this is the same kind of waste. My wife isn't buying expensive brands. But she stil owns like 20 "cute" outlet bags that she's not even using and throws them out every few years when they start looking old from just sitting in a closet… It's not even to show off. She just wants to own a dozen bags that look nice, even if she's never going to use most of them. So I think that these video game cosmetics are basically the same.

@@med2904found one for you 😂

Or as a one off thing. If the original charity panda in WoW hadn't been followed up by anything else, they would have had a big payday (50% of those proceeds) and not ruined future experiences. Hell, they could even do it once a decade and still get positive PR from the large amounts donated to charity