Breaking news
- March 30, 2023
With the cat mount Sun-warmed furball, the developers of WoW have recently brought a new mount to their MMO, which can only be purchased via the ingameshop. The high-resolution mount, which cannot be earned in any other way, costs 25 euros. With every new store mount, there is a big outcry from the community, because special mounts should rather be given for achievements or the like, instead of taking money out of the player's pocket.
It is also mentioned again and again that Blizzard would make so much money with it and is so greedy. How useful these exclusive mounts are and also the price is debatable. But is Blizzard seriously trying to plug financial holes with this, or is this too far-fetched? This debate has recently been reignited by the new store mount, and redditor cenago wanted to point out that store mounts make virtually no difference to Activision Blizzard's overall bottom line.
Recommended editorial contentAtthis point you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external embeddings will only be displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content":Load all external contentIagree to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. More about this in our privacy policy. External content Read more in ourprivacy policy.In his calculation, he assumes that ten percent of all players with an active subscription always buy the latest store mount, which is very high.
"Last quarter, Blizzard itself had a profit of about $460 million. While it's clear based on the release dates that these store offers should drive up quarterly revenue, even at an astronomical conversion rate, that barely makes a dent in the total. Blizzard itself will make about $1.3 billion this year, so if every mount they release in 2022 converts like that and we end up with "10% of the population has this mount" at the end of the year, they would make $20-30 million. We can even double that amount to get even crazier, which would be $40-60 million. That's ~4-5% of their total revenue."
60 million dollars is not nothing, even if we assume three million subscribers and 10% players willing to buy. So are mounts in the store a goldmine or not?
First of all, the redditor miscalculated by two decimal places and made the profit of store mounts smaller than they are, but he has since corrected that.
Yes, 10 percent buyers per year is a lot, and probably WoW (now buy 14.99 € )
no longer has 3 million subscription payers, but perhaps rather 2 million or less. But those store mounts are very likely still being bought after a year and are part of several quarterly reports.The original Reddit post was a real upset because it propagated that store-mounts would not bring in 4-5% but only 0.05% of total revenue. 5% is decent for store mounts alone, even 2% or 1% would be huge. The main point here is that you have to factor in the labor to revenue ratio. If you put one or two designers to work on a new mount for WoW and it increases annual revenue by 1%, that's a very good deal. Store mounts are a minor annoyance in WoW and certainly not peanuts, even if some Reddit users think so as in the post above.
Recommended editorial contentAtthis point you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external embeds will not be displayed until you confirm this by clicking "Load all external content":Load all external contentIagree to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. More about this in our privacy policy. External content Read more in ourprivacy policy.And Blizzard would be foolish to cut back on microtransactions. As you can read out from the third Q3 report for 2021, Activision Blizzard earned $1.2 billion from microtransactions from their player base from July to September 2021.
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