Did Blizzard just kill off Warcraft Rumble LESS than 1 year after launch?

Intro and previous video so I feel really bad making this video um I'm not making a video titled I quit Warcraft Rumble because I haven't quit I I still play the game occasionally I just haven't really made much content on it because I don't really feel like there's much content for me to make um and I'll still keep playing the game I I enjoy playing it casually last week I made a video basically looking at the year of development in Warcraft Rumble and what's happened since launch to now I recommend that you go and watch it if you want a history of this game since launch I recommend that you go and check it out because it has a lot of detail in there but the one big takeaway is that I think everybody knows it did not have a blockbuster smash success on the mobile market it had a really core dedicated audience it had a good launch but it just didn't quite take off there were lots of reasons for that um I think blizzard relied on their Brand Power a little bit too much they kept a lot of their marketing around BlizzCon and candidly like BlizzCon viewers and that obviously have the warcraft interest crossover but most of them just aren't mobile Gamers so I just don't think blizzard quite hit the mark in terms of the way that they initially tried to mark it up on launch and if you talk to like a lot of video game marketers especially mobile game marketers they will tell you if you're not successful in the first three months you're never going to be successful now that's a bit of a you know simp simplifying it just a little bit but it has some weight to it if you have a look at most mobile games launch patterns in terms of Google search Trends Peak down and then it stays down forever or Peak up stays up stays up and continues to go up usually you know you can define whether a game is going to do well pretty soon after it's launch this is why supercell is so notorious for launching a game and then killing it because if they launch a game and it just doesn't have the success they won't drag it out you know they they tend to be quite Cutthroat in that now you may have seen a lot of content creators creating videos saying I qu arite Rumble did it ages ago Bava today I'll show you I quit Rumble um basically the tldr is that he said that he kind of been faking enjoying the game for a long time um basically said he doesn't recommend anyone plays the game which you know I think is fair enough given that the game has been in a pretty poor state but uh also I still I would still personally recommend playing the game as a new player if you've never played it it's got a really fun PVE campaign you don't need to spend any money to enjoy it and there's a lot of good fun puzzle solving there which hopefully isn't affected by bugs U but for like veteran players who are interested in PvP and are really engaged there's a lot of frustrating things in the game but I would as you know someone that just wants to experience the game first time play through probably won't play it for a very long time I would 100% recommend that you try Warcraft rol I think is a good PVE game I would imagine that Bava is just speaking from an area of frustration as well the man put his soul into this game like he was one of the most dedicated content creators on the planet and as I said in the last last video that I made sometimes a game just doesn't work out and then you become more and more negative towards the game because you really want it to be successful so that you can be successful and then it doesn't become successful and therefore your channel doesn't get successful I've seen it happen on my channel several times trust me I've been through that process a lot I'm now so jaded that I just don't care um but look yesterday some news came out that Blizzard Layoffs Microsoft is laying off 650 more Xbox employees which mostly actually meant blizzard employees now what what happens with and if if you're you're not aware and you've been living under a rock Microsoft acquired blizzard in a quite a big relatively controversial deal it was worth billions there was a lot of antitrust anti-competition lawsuits that popped up across the world especially in Europe and the UK and uh yeah essentially it went through when a business merger and acquisition usually happens the average Workforce reduction tends to be around 30% uh that's an average not always that way but that's an average so you're always expecting layoffs when a merger or an acquisition happens you just don't know when and maybe don't know where and it takes a time to work out the inefficiencies is the most corporate HR word ever inefficiencies it takes time to work out where there is maybe some crossover en rolls you don't need as many people for that particular job you make the existing employees do more and you cut the people that you think you don't need it's rubbish it's a it's it's crap trust me it's crap so in this this video you can see that in January or this this article January this is Forbes by the way so you know reputable um journalist reporting area 1900 and Xbox Activision Blizzard workers in January 2024 they had a massive round of layoffs and now 650 which is an additional 3% so you can work out from this we've probably laid off 10% of the overall Workforce this year 10% of a company of the size of Microsoft blizzard Activision huge huge amount of uh people that have been uh laid off which is I hate it I absolutely hate it there are people that have just worked worked and put so much passion into these games and they you know especially on the American side of things you don't get much notice like in the in the UK If you're laid off they have to usually respect your notice period which tends to be on average about a month so you usually get a month's notice before you go some people get three you get a bit of time now that works in both ways I'm not going to get into it but when you want to move jobs it means you can't just up and leave you have to serve your notice period but it also offers you Protections in America no protections often often you don't have notice periods and you can just be told on the day that you're not turning up to work anymore CU you don't have a job which happens to a lot of people which I hate I think it's an awful awful way of doing it because people could just be relying on a job for their income and their mortgage and their their rent and then they just don't have a job anymore hopefully they get some sort of severance package though I assume that's going to be the case um what Phil Spencer said in his in his uh statement is there 650 roles across Microsoft gaming mostly corporate and supporting function to organize our business for long-term success um not just Microsoft gaming it was obviously as we know blizzard Activision and the reason we know this is because the top post on the warcraft Rumble thread talking about this there was a tweet from a journalist that basically said um they're laying Warcraft Dev Comments off people in the warcraft AR light team and they consider the game in postlaunch live Ops which I'll talk about in a moment Dev came on and said I just got disconnected from my work machine this morning I was an environment artist for the team and I was respons ible for a lot of the maps that you'll play through basically they also said that the President says the game is now considered a live service and no longer in development and so there's now loads of important bug fixes and are shuttered and locked away in an unfinished State and there made an edit about an hour afterwards that said about half the team was gutted if Microsoft is trying to spin the only non-developer roles were effective then that is false Engineers producers artists and managers were affected that is half the rumble team sending an email to the rumble team saying they consider it to be in a post launch live Ops phase now before we get into that I want to show you this person's art this is this is the the art of um Monica Bower this is their art station um and they produced a lot of the art for the game which you can see here I just I want to give credit where credit is due this person was fantastic they contributed a huge amount to the game and they should be respected for for for making the game so amazing to look at some of the levels so gorgeous to to play through massive massive respect for Monica so I really hope she I don't know if it's she obviously you can never can never make assumptions but Monica sounds like a a she name so I hope that they land on their their feet and um and they can find a new role so postlaunch live Ops what does that Post-Launch Live Ops mean well I can tell you this I used to I used to create content for a game called Command and Conquer Rivals that game after about six months got canned by EA so we didn't even get the the nine months that wraft Rumble got because wraft Rumble by the way is not even year old um Commander conquer Rivals got canned off by EA it went into postlaunch liveops which essentially involved exporting the entire liveops team to India and having an Indian essentially agency team look after the live Ops of the game and this Indian team uh did not do a huge amount of develop development of new content and they mostly just did like day-to-day operations and sometimes did some balancing maybe twice a year and I think there might have been like four or five new units in three years so small amount of content small amount of balancing mostly live Ops and server focused that to me is what post-launch live Ops says now when a game completes its development and it launches often you'll have a lot of De developers leave that team because their job is done uh this happened with wild drift for instance when wild drift was completed a lot of the devs left wild drift because you get a bonus for completing a game and when it goes to launch a lot of the development team that needed for backend development and building of the game are no longer needed Etc but Rumble clearly had still had a lot to do so it still had a big development team and still needed a lot of work on it gutting half of the development team is not a good thing so there are people in this thread that are spinning post-launch live Ops is potentially a good thing you know this is this is normal this is this is what we we expect from a game that's at this stage still going to get new content yeah I'm I'm pretty certain we'll get new content but we're definitely not getting it at the speed that we were getting it before and we're definitely not potentially getting all of it that we thought was coming I mean I I I can't say but I know stuff was coming because I've talked to people that that have that kind of information I knew some cool stuff was coming for season 9 and season 10 whether we get that now who knows so I don't think you can spin postlaunch live Ops as a good thing it's not a good thing it is it is in my opinion Microsoft way of saying you are not you are not worth investing any money into from a development point of view because you don't you don't make us enough money so we are going to keep the game alive for the time being for everyone that's playing it we'll hopefully get milk out a bit of money over time um but yeah we're not that interested in developing a whole load of new content for the game because we don't think it needs it you know and that it's Heroes of the Storm basically Heroes of the Storm has kept going but has it really it's like a lifeless husk of what it once was and that's kind of what they're doing to Rumble in my opinion now I'm happy to create a video in 3 months time where I say hey I was wrong there's loads of new content this is great but I just don't see that happening I don't think you can got half the development team who were in the middle of working on things as we can see from this uh this post here and say that there's you are going to get exactly the same service for the game that you got before you won't it just won't happen unless they're going to do a fire and rehire thing sometimes when it comes to like Financial quarter updates or whatever they sometimes do a fire and rehire so they say that they've cut a load of what's the word you know cut a load of costs from their p&l sheet and then they just rehire after they've published the p&l sheet that sometimes happens um but yeah like this this to me seems at the end of Warcraft Rumble at least for the way that we knew it and obviously now touching on the Bulava Quitting content creators like balava he's now quit he's one of the most loved um one of the most loved creators he said uh I'm in contact with the devs trust me you all quit very soon so he seems to think he knows something from behind the scenes whether that's just the case of like hey the devs have now lost left a team and we're not going to get any new content whether that's we're going to start seeing some more predatory monetization try and milk the player base or whatever we can um I don't know but belava going is a big deal obviously as you know like ARL battery he went a month ago I think the only person um the only person still going I think regularly is old guardian and actually I'm I'm kind of interested in seeing what old Guardian says about this we'll look we'll look at that in a minute hello everyone it's OD the tldr of balava was basically he hasn't really enjoyed the game anyway and like he can't keep forcing himself to play it and I think that's very fair um gosh is it Guardian that's creating content now consistently obviously spoggles is doing some stuff but that's I think a sponsored Old Guardian Reaction thing so separately as part of running the business some impacts to other teams as they adapt to shifting priorities and manage the life life cycle and performance of games okay so that was part of a quote that I maybe just completely missed off did did he say this separately as part of running the business there are some okay fair enough so they are totally spinning they tried to make the headline and that is supportive functions but yeah shifting priorities and managing the life cycles and performance of games so basically the performance of rool is not great and they are shifting the priorities to manage the life cycle of it um and you can see here like he's pulled up a couple of tweets and a couple of Reddit posts um pretty big deal like loads of more tweets here there are only now 10 recruiters for blizzard well so they've cut off cut out recruiters for blizzard as well um post launch live so this is this is where I think I think that I think I personally think that or guardian's huffing a bit of copium post launch live thoughts is a perfectly normal state for a game to be in um yes agreed but I think that it's a bit early to have shifted like Hearthstone had active de development for a long time still gets still gets expansions like every two three months um and it gets a lot of content I think the half Stone team is probably bigger than the warcraft Rumble team um yeah I I think like ultimately the second half of this this paragraph is is is correct already had difficulties delivering content and delivering it well that will now be way harder with half the resources um you know maybe they cut much more on the art side of things because they don't see themselves implementing any new big environments in anytime soon they're going to focus purely on bug fixes and and and behind the- scenes stuff but yeah you know I think let's just listen to what old Guardian has to say actually yes so the next thing that we have coming is season 9 in just a couple of weeks and season 9 content of course on blizzards and that should be quite ready by now so for season 9 we can see what kind of pacing they were thinking about for the future of the game and then we can compare that once we get to season 10 and see okay well what are they going to be able to deliver for season 10 obviously already season 9 is is somewhat worrying like okay what can you actually deliver you have no delivered most of the stuff that was talked about that Bisson all the all the main PVE content definitely and except for no replays that's my biggest thing like I wish we had private matches and replays but I talked about that in the last video do you have in store for season 9 and now there's even further concerns for season 10 now for previously I was thinking okay if season 9 looks good then okay maybe the game is going to look all right but now even if season 9 looks good then we don't know what season 10 is going to look like but yeah tough day Rumble obviously had not performed up to Blizzard's expectations I mean we all knew that but I was hoping that they would give the team a little bit more time to try to turn things around because getting new content out there at a proper Pace would be one of the very very important key features of making Rumble more attractive and getting getting new players we'll see what team's going to be able to do a tough day for sure even though this is actually not the end for rumble now that I have no and I think Is this the end for Rumble? what he does say there is fair this is not the end for rumble but I don't think rumble's not going going to become huge and I think that's why you're seeing a lot of content creators pack their bags because no one wants to spend their time creating a video every day for a game that is super Niche especially if you have a full-time job and a family and you for me that's why I couldn't keep it up I got a full-time job I've got family to look after can't spend all my days playing Rumble uh when there isn't that the the net rewards for putting my time into it are just not that great I think you know we'll need to see not the end for rumble but also candidly not a great sign that's you know that that's that's the the real takeaway here like it's it's it's not it's not not the end for rumble blizzard doesn't tend to kill games they don't they've never really taken games offline uh but they also tend to just leave them out to dry like Heroes of the Storm it's been left out for a long time I don't think I would consider Hearthstone postlaunch live Ops personally um I think that's I don't think that's the the correct way of looking at Hearthstone I think who is of the storm is postlaunch live Ops hearthstone's actually still in active development they've had plenty of new game modes they've had uh loads of expansions I don't think half zone is post-launch live Ops I think I think that's still in somewhat active development because they're still developing new things for it I like I said here's the storm is a good example of postlaunch live UPS War CFT 3 reforged is is post-launch live Ops Diablo 2 remastered is post-launch live Ops these are the types of games where you're not expecting any new content at all but the servers just keep running that's what to me what postlaunch live Ops means to an extent um I do think we'll get some new content I think we'll get a reduced amount of content compared to what we were expecting and it'll come more fewer and far between we'll have to see what the announcements are going to be from the rumble team we will get announcements soon I know that for sure so we keep very is peel we'll cover the news when it comes out and Yeah sad day I'm not sad about myself or another Rumble creators I'm just sad for the blizzard team that's all I can say it's just rubbish really really hard on people who have poured a lot of time and love into a game to find out just one morning you're not turning up to work that all right guys I'll see you soon