The Business: Official Classic Plus Is A Sure Bet

Archvaldor is notorious for his clever use of game mechanics in WOW Retail and Classic. His Patreon has more devious such stuff.

He cut this video last Wednesday. He shows why he comes to his conclusions and how; he's on to something here and folks ought to be paying attention to what he's saying.

People routinely ignore Second Order effects as a mechanism. Archvaldor shows one such example in action; Forever ressurected entire sections of YouTube and Twitch that had been withering on the vine due to how Retail and Classic had been and how hostile Blizzard is to private servers.

Furthermore, Forever fulfills the promise of a fully-enclosed Walled Garden that Preach explained years ago when they launched Classic.

The reason Forever will do this where Classic relaunches do not? No resets. No vertical progression, only horizontal.

The issue is that vertical progression--raised level caps, raised item level caps, new abilities, gear upgrades--means that content tied to a past tier gets abandoned and thus induced Fear Of Missing Out in players who could access it but aren't with the cresting wave and those too far behind might as well (and do) quit until the reset hits and then they can attempt to catch up to ride the wave thereafter.

This is a nightmare. It's stupidly expensive to run, only going up over time, and it is no surprise that this always results in a seasonal business model just like Fortnite or any other multiplayer game with a meta-driven endgame mode. Better and cheaper to avoid it entirely.

That's what Forever does. That's the source of the appeal.

For Blizzard it is the catch-basin. Retail/Classic turndowns are now caught by Forever, since the same subscription fee pays for access to all three modes. Retail players, finished for the patch, can come over to Forever and pick up where they left off without missing anything. Classic players, ready for another Wrath relaunch or the rumored (but WHY?) release of "Classic Warlords of Draenor") can safely bench their Forever toons knowing that whatever they're doing will be fine while they're rushing to punch Arthas in the face one more time or reliving why WOD was such a shitfest.

And for the aging core player audience, having a mode where they can fuck off for weeks or months at a time and not lose anything is HUGE. That's why we're seeing this do big numbers. This is a win for Blizzard, and that's going to reflect well beyond what is obvious; the new Official WOW D&D releases are going to do even better because of this, which makes that alliance between WOTC and Blizzard look even better now.

Don't be surprised to see Hearthstone rolled into Magic in the future because of this.