Comments on: Solo WoW One Day?

By: The death of the death of WoW and WoW blogging rumours « Armaggedon's coming!

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:01:39 +0000

[...] on another occasion when the death of wow was imminent), about whether they would ever turn WoW into a single player game when they shut down all the servers (OMG, I had a quick scan when I hunted for the link… I [...]

By: gnomeaggedon

gnomeaggedon — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:01:33 +0000

Hey Stripes, yes you are right even if they only get 1% of the current player base then they will still pull in money on a legacy system.

With the move to Battle.Net they could also make an inclusion if you have all the other products.

I guess the old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” would be the simplest model.

By: Stripes

Stripes — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:19:55 +0000

I doubt they will do it.

It would take a fair amount of effort to rejigger the end game to work solo. Enough work that if there were enough folks that wanted to buy that last box then there would be enough folks to justify at LEAST one realm sticking around collecting $15/month from the folks who still love WoW more then whatever Blizz is trying to sell that year.

I expect that at some point when WoW does begin to wane Blizz will get good at doing server merges and the game will continue to be playable for 5+ years as it fades out. When active development stops the cost goes down (no paying for new art, new code for new buffs and debuffs, no testing of new encounters). No new development means no new bugs, so the cost of bug fixing will go down a lot (sure there will be the same bugs that it had for a long time, but if they weren’t important enough to fix before do you think they will fix ‘em when the product is on life support?). No new development is also no new nerfs/buffs to fine tune things. Even product support costs will drift downwards (they tend to spike up with new releases, and scale directly with number of players anyway).

So when WoW does someday stop being under active development and go onto “life support only” the cost drops a lot, leaving your $15 a month to go farther. So they could actually keep a server farm afloat with fewer players they they currently need to keep it profitable. The main reason to do server merges is to keep populations high enough that things don’t seem too depopulated (lower electricity bills, more physical space to expand other servers into and maybe some reclaimed hardware will just be icing on the cake).

I bet WoW on life support would be profitable with less then 1% of the current population.

By: Pellex

Pellex — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:25:13 +0000

I’ve been thinking for a while now that a solo WoW RPG would be a very smart move on Blizz’s part after the MMO runs its course, as it inevitably will. I would think it wouldn’t take too much tweaking to turn at least the solo-questy part into something that could be played on a home computer. I know some people who would definitely buy it! They like the sound of the game but don’t do MMOs for one reason or another–money, time, or whatever.

By: gnomeaggedon

gnomeaggedon — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:26:35 +0000

Ahhh not one, but 3….

I have already deposited the 2nd one…. a little closer to your home… and the 3rd will be unleashed in a few hours…

By: sylus

sylus — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:21:01 +0000

Yes! A gnomageddon pitch for me blog! Thanks bud, now I promise nit to punt your gnome!