I have a business question...

Not that I'd expect those of you who monitor and maintain these forums to have this kind of information but, I had a business questions I'd like to throw out there...

I was wondering if any of you were privy to some statistics on how many accounts have been canceled as a result of this patch? I'm genuinely curious how much monthly revenue Blizzard is losing as a result of piss-poor QA. Lets run some numbers!

This is, of course, purely hypothetical but say that 0.1% (1 in 1000) users are fed up with not only the numerous (numerous, numerous) technical issues that are persisting since release, but the lack of communication and generally good PR associated with those issues (IE damage control). WoW recently published that they had reached 12 million subscribers (congratulations Blizzard btw!) which makes for some easy math (again, purely hypothetical):

12000000 * 0.001 = 12000 lost subscribers @ approx. $15.00 USD/mo comes out to roughly 180k/mo lost revenue! Yikes indeed.

Now I realize that even 0.1% of the population abandoning this wonderful game is very unlikely but say it was one in ten thousand; that's still 18k/mo in lost revenue. Sure, that's couch change in Blizzard's terms but nothing to be frivolously pissed away no less. Maybe you'll recover some of those subscriptions, maybe you'll lose more to continued careless releases, who knows...

Yeah, obviously there's a hint of cynicism in here (okay, maybe more than a hint), but I am legitimately curious about the numbers :)

Now that that's out of the way I'd like to express that I am generally enjoying the new features and challenges (intended game-mechanic challenges; not technical ones) that have come along with 4.0.1. Sure there's been some appropriate growing pains associated with this patch but I don't think I'm at all alone in thinking that some aspects of this release have been grossly mishandled. Can it really be said, with all honesty, that this patch was adequately QA'd? Honestly? Having worked in IT for the past decade, for a very sizable employer no less, I'm not accustom to rushing things out the door like this; particularly when it's not a mission-critical release. I understand the limitations of a test environment very well but even with that understanding, I've never seen anything blow up on this scale. I digress...

No, I wont be canceling my subscription. I genuinely love this game and I don't expect there's a better team of developers out there anywhere; you guys are awesome considering what you have to put up with in this customer base :) But, I don't know if I could say the same of the person who made this business decision and I sincerely hope that there's some serious egg on someone's face over there in the big machine that is Activision Blizzard or whatever ya'll are called now :)

Anywho, good luck with the bugs and ravenous subscribers! Oh, and again, I'd really like some of those numbers if anyone has them :)


Toodaloo,

P