Blizzard’s investment call was all bad news for World of Warcraft

Tuesday’s investor call for Activision-Blizzard was not what I would generally call good news for the company across the board, but the reality is that we here are mostly concerned with World of Warcraft, and the rest of Blizzard’s slate is more important insofar as these things inform one another. And what we actually got from the call was… well, not good, but it requires a bit of reading between the lines to really unpack that. Because on the surface, the bad news about WoW is confined to the fact that it didn’t really get mentioned much.To get more news about buy wow gold classic, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

By itself, this isn’t great news but also probably doesn’t look like it’s really much news at all. After all, nobody was expecting a whole lot of movement from the game when nothing new was actually released during the quarter, right? But then you start unpacking what wasn’t said and what’s implied by other things taking place at Blizzard, and suddenly the whole thing starts looking much, much worse.

Let’s start with the obvious element here. What saved Blizzard from reporting another big MAU drop this particular quarter was the fact that Diablo II Remastered turned out to be a big hit in South Korea (a place that is doubtlessly paying less attention, if any, to the lawsuits that Blizzard is embroiled in), and the net result for the company was no movement. That does not in and of itself mean that Blizzard didn’t lose users; indeed, the phrasing implies that the studio definitely did, but the losses were just offset by the remaster.
However, it remains to be seen what kind of legs the remaster has over the long term. And that’s kind of a big deal because both Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV have now been moved off the release slate for 2022 altogether. And it’s here that we can start seeing why things for WoW are looking and feeling pretty dire because at this point the only thing that could possibly be on the table for 2022 is an expansion.

From a corporate side, this is a really bad thing because it means that Blizzard is basically expecting to have no major releases at all in 2022. From a WoW standpoint, though, it’s bad because it confirms something that people have long suspected: that the pipeline behind the scenes is such a mess that 2022 isn’t planned for another expansion after all, which will both make Shadowlands one of the longest-running expansions ever, with dark implications for the future of the game.

Consider the following speculative scenario: Next week, both patch 9.2 and the next expansion are announced. That is already wildly optimistic, but just bear with me. Let’s be even more optimistic and assume that patch 9.2 is slated to be out in three months flat, ignoring how Blizzard has been moving shamefully slow for ages now. And let’s even give more credit by assuming that the next expansion is slated for December of 2022, offering the longest possible window between announcement and launch.

In this situation, the next patch will arrive in February 2022, and the next expansion will arrive about 13 months after announcement. That’s not the fastest turnaround that Blizzard has accomplished, but it’s getting up there, and both of these are assuming that after more than a year of languishing in achingly slow turnaround patterns, Blizzard suddenly manages to get its act together and turn out two major things quickly. It also assumes that an announcement is that close around the corner, something we have absolutely no reason to count on.

Needless to say, I don’t see this as particularly likely, and every week without the announcement of something major makes it less likely. (Just from a gut check, I don’t think we’d have two major releases separated only by a week and have an announcement wedged between them; it’s not strictly impossible but it feels unusual.) It seems far more likely that we don’t get patch 9.2 until March or April of next year, and the expansion has already been pushed back to 2023.