My only theory is that they didn't want to cannibalize the WoW playerbase, but that's how you get stuck in a rut as a corporation.

They scrapped it and its corpse ended up becoming Overwatch.

It's not (or at least, primarily not) that they're scared of cannibalizing WoW's playerbase: it's that MMOs are incredibly hard to get right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Blizzard_Entertainment_...

An MMO might not work, but with regards to Blizzard, there is the example of Starcraft Ghost where they got to the point of releasing trailers and sending empty boxes to stores as advertisements for the upcoming release. I'm sure they'd have sold it if there was a way to do so without damaging the brand.

Ahhhh the good days....

Since then, the MMO market, to my knowledge, has shrunk, as other genres have become popular. There's no indication that a World of Starcraft released today would be anywhere near successful.

Their last Blizzcon was pretty bad ("Diablo for mobile: Don't you all have phones!?") and they somehow managed to make things worse right before this Blizzcon.

Things are looking grim for a company that used to be an industry game changer.

Eventually they rage quit because they never actually wanted to get better at the game.

This same thing happened with Dust 514, where there was nothing at all for the person who couldn't aim, (unlike EvE which has some barely passable PvE).

I'm guessing that Blizzard is looking at these stats, and noticing that people log back in for the limited pve content in OW.

I absolutely love the artwork and characters also, but only from what I've watched on Twitch or seen in images.

I won't play it, because it's a twitch shooter and that is simply not my genre anymore ... too old for that sort of thing.

If they could pivot off that idea into something that isn't a shooter, perhaps I'd jump in.

It's really not that simple. An analogue in software would be "Ford could have just made a fully self-driving car."

MMOs are both technically hard and artistically hard, and even Blizzard has failed at making them in the past:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Blizzard_Entertainment_...

Also, keep in mind that they don't even use subscriptions as a metric anymore, since now they have the in-game store with micro-transactions and the WoW Token which sells for more than the price of a subscription.

I wonder about this though. While Overwatch as a game has been successful, I've heard some people say that they feel like Blizzard has lost their magic after Overwatch and Hearthstone. I used to always be interested in any new game Blizzard was working on, but those days are gone.

ON the flip side when I was a child, we had no internet and I remember long boring weeks of Summer (In a rural area, meant I spent a lot of time alone). But as an adult I basically am never bored. Is this because of having more stuff to do? Or because of being older?

I don't think they lost their magic.

I was a WoW hardcore player for years. I won't play Overwatch due to it being a twitch shooter but I love the art direction.

Hearthstone is awesome. Can be played lightly, whenever, and is extremely well built for a "card game".

https://www.newsweek.com/world-warcraft-subscriptions-triple...

Instead with the Hong Kong dust-up, I faced the facts. The blizzard I grew up with and loved is dead. Even with Wow Classic released, the world has moved on.

Instead I initiated a full Battle Net account delete, which nuked all my Wow characters, Hearthstone decks, etc.

Those transactions were a massive source of profit in later expansions and completely eclipsed subscription revenue. Even as the WoW playerbase dwindled, revenue grew thanks to things like game-time tokens, level boosts, mounts, cosmetic items, etc.

All of those things are 100% antithetical to the premise of Classic WoW.

I realized I was aging when I figured out that WoW Classic is Oldies Radio but for people in my age bracket.

I was a hardcore Everquest player prior to WoW. I actually ran the biggest market site at the time, EQPrices.com.

So you want to talk about aging ... but yes, WoW Classic, while interesting, was not enough to get me back in.

And I played at launch. So I know all about having to carry around arrows and all that other jazz.

Blizzard is as stale as it gets right now.

It is very sad that Blizzard was:

- the creator of Warcraft, which popularized RTS,

- Starcraft which basically created esports (and popularized RTS even more)

- Diablo which popularized hack-n-slash RPGs

And now all they do is remaster after remaster (or "classic").