Thought this was interesting, came up in an interview question at Blizzcon yesterday.
Audience:
Kind of a follow up question. What about the newest, newest, newest players that are going to find out so many options — and they should try Classic, they should try Forever, how [have you] managed to move that energy towards the right direction, or the direction you believe is the best?
Blizzard Entertainment
Holly:
It’s a wonderful question. I don’t think we have it fully perfected yet, but I think we’re gonna be directing our messaging… “messaging” sounds terrible. But, our thoughts, kind of like last night — if you’ve never played, please try Forever because you’ll get in on the ground floor with other people just like you. Like, you’ll all be essentially going at the same pace, at the same time. So we want to make sure we’re communicating that out more broadly — and please, if you could help us send that message out, that would be great.
And then, secondarily, we’re experimenting in other spaces like on Discord where we have the portal room where we want to try and get players to go there to meet our players all around the world, covering all of our languages to say, you know, here’s how you can get a start. This is what I love about what we do, is that if we just nurture a little bit, we get global community members making guides for people that speak in their language, who’ve never played before and want to understand more about it. So, I think we want to really generate more focus there as we move forward, and now that Forever is announced, we can start leaning into that more with the WoW Portal to really give an entry point. And then, create two-way conversation — what does a new player need? You need to ask those questions.
Ion:
Yeah, I think I would say Forever in November is going to be an excellent starting point for anyone who’s never experienced WoW before just because of the pace and the revisiting where it all began narratively, but to your other question — I think another strength of the way WoW exists today is that this is all covered under your same subscription. So, no one’s forcing you to make a hard, rigid choice. If someone comes in and is playing Forever and they want to check out Modern World of Warcraft and see what’s going on in the Worldsoul Saga, they can play all the way to level 80 without needing to buy Midnight or anything, experience all of that, see what that flavor of the game is like, and decide what’s best for them.
Interesting! Sounds like Blizzard might be pushing for “WoW Forever” to eventually be on par or close to with retail and gaining more subs. Not just about the money though, it does make sense to have completely new players start on the newest undiscovered version of the game.
Forsaken Paladin
It is curious that Forever is a sub-only game where you don't actually buy it, you just need a running subscription. Meanwhile most other MMOs out there outside of the big juggernauts, like Guild Wars, go the opposite route of - buy the game once and keep playing it.
Though I guess at this point it would be silly for Blizzard to pivot to a different model when the one they have works.
Makes sense as there's surely no chance they'd be spending so much time and money developing something so new and to keep developing new content for years, potentially and hopefully, decades to come, to see little monetary gain. I personally hope this becomes THE MMOKnoxtane wrote: ↑1 day agoInteresting! Sounds like Blizzard might be pushing for “WoW Forever” to eventually be on par or close to with retail and gaining more subs. Not just about the money though, it does make sense to have completely new players start on the newest undiscovered version of the game.
Im sure eventually they shut down the least populated versions of classic in favour of just keeping forever/retail/possibly 1 classic
Forever gonna be the new favourite child
