World of Warcraft Classic: A Success Story
Classic World of Warcraft continues to dominate the Warcraft news cycle. The game’s release and packed servers have proven that World of Warcraft is still a huge draw even with a game engine that’s 15 years old.
Classic is a huge hit on Twitch, hitting over 1 million viewers on its opening day. The Esports Observer is reporting that WoW is on track to being the most watched game of the year, with more than 32 million hours watched. Viewers’ interest in both the race to the world’s first level 60 character and the world first race to clearing the Molten Core raid kept viewership high. Shortly after Swedish player jokerd reached level 60 with his Gnome mage, he was offered a Twitch partnership, taking him from relative obscurity to being one of the most-watched WoW streamers.
The popularity of WoW Classic is also evident by taking a look at one of the most popular World of Warcraft fan-sites, wowhead. For weeks now, the majority of articles and updates have involved WoW Classic, with the site even creating a Classic portal on the site to put all the tools and guides needed by players together in one spot.
Moving over to the technical side of things, Blizzard Game Director Ion Hazzikostas did an interview with Forbes regarding the log-in queues and server technology used to handle the massive load of players. Every few days Blizzard is adding more servers to handle the huge numbers of players trying out Classic. Some servers are still having waiting lines of over 10,000 players trying to log in. As Hazzikostas said in the interview, if you log in and see you’re number 12,000 - 19,000 in line, you’re not going to be playing that day. This is why he stated Blizzard also tries to let players know which servers are the least populated as well, to try and take off some of the pressure from the more packed servers.
On the business side, the overwhelming popularity of WoW Classic has had the financials saying Acitivision Blizzard could see quite a windfall from the release. Reuters is reporting that Barron’s believes that Classic’s popularity, among the success of other titles, will boost Acitivision Blizzard’s stock value. Barron’s went on to say that, having a $15/month subscription model was very profitable, and that if Classic brought in a couple million subscribers a month for the next few months, that would be quite the windfall for Acitivision Blizzard. The company’s had a rough last year or so, having to lay off 800 employees.
In regards to news relating to the current World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth, players are currently waiting to find out more details on the upcoming 8.2.5 patch. With much of the patch being heavily encrypted, the usual data mining has not turned up much new info. With Blizzcon coming November 1st, and ostensibly news of the next expansion, dubious leaks are starting to pop up on various sites. Most of these are entirely unsubstantiated, but as we get closer to Blizzcon, the likelihood of an actual leak will get higher. Right now, understandably, Classic has been dominating the Warcraft news cycles, but September should see updates and speculation for the current iteration of WoW start picking up, with some believing the 8.2.5 patch may even release in late September.
As for my personal take on Wow Classic and BfA, I played through World of Warcraft Classic when it was first released back in 2004. I personally haven’t spent much time in Classic this last week. But I do understand the appeal, both to old school WoW players, and to first-timers wanting to see where it all started. My days of hard-core raiding are for the most part behind me (even though I do still feel the urge to look for a raiding guild from time to time), but I do log in and play from time to time when I have some time to kill. I mostly level alts or do world quests and bosses for gear upgrades. At this stage, I’m more interested in just experiencing the story WoW has to tell rather than pushing cutting edge raid content. But I do think the massive success of Classic can only do good things for WoW as a game. It will bring renewed interest, and income, to Blizzard, which can in turn lead to more resources available for development as well as Blizzard potentially bringing back systems or talents or whatnot that have since fallen to the wayside after seeing how popular they are in Classic. Perhaps we'll eventually see Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King servers as well, for nostalgic fans of those expansions.
Between the direction Classic development will take, and the big announcements coming at Blizzcon, WoW can go in a lot of directions. This is a great time to get into the game, either iteration. The community’s seen a resurgence of activity, there are many streamers, podcasts, and sites about the game. So has Classic sparked your interest in WoW? Has it recaptured your interest if you’re a veteran of WoW?
Classic is a huge hit on Twitch, hitting over 1 million viewers on its opening day. The Esports Observer is reporting that WoW is on track to being the most watched game of the year, with more than 32 million hours watched. Viewers’ interest in both the race to the world’s first level 60 character and the world first race to clearing the Molten Core raid kept viewership high. Shortly after Swedish player jokerd reached level 60 with his Gnome mage, he was offered a Twitch partnership, taking him from relative obscurity to being one of the most-watched WoW streamers.
The popularity of WoW Classic is also evident by taking a look at one of the most popular World of Warcraft fan-sites, wowhead. For weeks now, the majority of articles and updates have involved WoW Classic, with the site even creating a Classic portal on the site to put all the tools and guides needed by players together in one spot.
Moving over to the technical side of things, Blizzard Game Director Ion Hazzikostas did an interview with Forbes regarding the log-in queues and server technology used to handle the massive load of players. Every few days Blizzard is adding more servers to handle the huge numbers of players trying out Classic. Some servers are still having waiting lines of over 10,000 players trying to log in. As Hazzikostas said in the interview, if you log in and see you’re number 12,000 - 19,000 in line, you’re not going to be playing that day. This is why he stated Blizzard also tries to let players know which servers are the least populated as well, to try and take off some of the pressure from the more packed servers.
On the business side, the overwhelming popularity of WoW Classic has had the financials saying Acitivision Blizzard could see quite a windfall from the release. Reuters is reporting that Barron’s believes that Classic’s popularity, among the success of other titles, will boost Acitivision Blizzard’s stock value. Barron’s went on to say that, having a $15/month subscription model was very profitable, and that if Classic brought in a couple million subscribers a month for the next few months, that would be quite the windfall for Acitivision Blizzard. The company’s had a rough last year or so, having to lay off 800 employees.
In regards to news relating to the current World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth, players are currently waiting to find out more details on the upcoming 8.2.5 patch. With much of the patch being heavily encrypted, the usual data mining has not turned up much new info. With Blizzcon coming November 1st, and ostensibly news of the next expansion, dubious leaks are starting to pop up on various sites. Most of these are entirely unsubstantiated, but as we get closer to Blizzcon, the likelihood of an actual leak will get higher. Right now, understandably, Classic has been dominating the Warcraft news cycles, but September should see updates and speculation for the current iteration of WoW start picking up, with some believing the 8.2.5 patch may even release in late September.
As for my personal take on Wow Classic and BfA, I played through World of Warcraft Classic when it was first released back in 2004. I personally haven’t spent much time in Classic this last week. But I do understand the appeal, both to old school WoW players, and to first-timers wanting to see where it all started. My days of hard-core raiding are for the most part behind me (even though I do still feel the urge to look for a raiding guild from time to time), but I do log in and play from time to time when I have some time to kill. I mostly level alts or do world quests and bosses for gear upgrades. At this stage, I’m more interested in just experiencing the story WoW has to tell rather than pushing cutting edge raid content. But I do think the massive success of Classic can only do good things for WoW as a game. It will bring renewed interest, and income, to Blizzard, which can in turn lead to more resources available for development as well as Blizzard potentially bringing back systems or talents or whatnot that have since fallen to the wayside after seeing how popular they are in Classic. Perhaps we'll eventually see Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King servers as well, for nostalgic fans of those expansions.
Between the direction Classic development will take, and the big announcements coming at Blizzcon, WoW can go in a lot of directions. This is a great time to get into the game, either iteration. The community’s seen a resurgence of activity, there are many streamers, podcasts, and sites about the game. So has Classic sparked your interest in WoW? Has it recaptured your interest if you’re a veteran of WoW?
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