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. Let’s start with the obvious element here. 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. Because on the surface, the bad news about WoW is confined to the fact that it didn’t really get mentioned much.īy itself, this isn’t great news but also probably doesn’t look like it’s really much news at all. 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.
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.
