You've probably already read this blog article entitled "Stop Supporting Broken Games". It's in regards to Bethesda's pattern of releasing games that are incomplete or crippled with bugs.

As a gamer you should expect a completed game when you purchase it. A final, working product is not something to be created with patching. There is no excuse for this pattern of disrespect to gamers.

I realize that Bethesda is not the sole perpetrator of these kinds of acts. But Bethesda also shows a repeated history of abuse with no plans as far as I can tell to change the course of their development process. They stand as a testament to the broken game release -> patch -> repatch cycle.

I agree with it and it's something that I personally do myself. I never buy a game on the first day and I will usually wait until the first or second major patch before I consider purchasing it. The trick is to ignore the hype (of new releases) and build up a game queue that you still need to play first before moving onto something new. There are many players doing this already, but like the blog said - there should be a lot more. Enough to the point where it forces game developers to strengthen their Quality Assurance process and ensure that "complete games" are released. It will never happen (consumers are impulsive and businesses are cheap), but it's a nice idea.

I've seen this "repeated history of abuse" before though and it's even worse with another big-name corporation. =]

When I was in the World of Warcraft closed beta, the bugs and issues were terrible. Constant crashes, application hangs (requiring frequent reboots), server instability and resets, server lag and latency problems, screen tearing and video bugs like what you've seen in FNV, and incompatibilities with many system builds, operating systems, video/audio cards. The game was unplayable by many.. that is unless they were technically skilled and had a few different computer systems available. The game was awesome but the bugs were absolutely crippling. I believed that Blizzard would fix the worst of the bugs before the RETAIL release, but they didn't.. they released WoW incomplete and still with the bugs that were present in the beta for MONTHS.

So, right now there are players complaining about Bethesda bugs that take a week (or a couple weeks) to fix. But imagine if critical issues and crippling bugs took MONTHS and even YEARS to fix? What if each "patch" would fix some small issues, but cause even MORE problems? Blizzard did it and they still do it.

To make matters even worse, Blizzard's online games are PERMANENT. With single-player games, there are issues that you can fix yourself, methods to continue progress that might have been lost, unofficial patches, or temporary workarounds available. But with Blizzard's online games, you can't fix the issues yourself and any changes made to your account are permanent.

Since time is considered a commodity, bugs in online games are significantly more damaging.

In 2009, Blizzard announced that they were tracking approx. 180,000 bugs in WoW. Keep in mind that these were the "official" bugs on record that they were troubleshooting. Their bug tracker would have a different definition and scope then that of other companies.. unofficially, there are probably 10 times that number but it would all depend on what you classify as a "bug".

So right now FNV has one serious graphics related bug, game saving issues, and quest related bugs. Blizzard games have also had those same issues (not specifically "game saving", but they've had WoW/Diablo character resets that could not be recovered) but they have ALSO:

- melted video cards and destroyed gaming PCs (that severe bug was actually discovered during February beta testing and remained in the retail) which took 7 months for a non-Blizzard workaround to be released
- allowed an insane DPS exploit (Global Cooldown Hack) for 6 years
- WoW & SC2 corrupted video (1-2 years for WoW, 1 month for SC2)
- random PC resets & application hangs for 2 years
- random server crashes, severe client drops (to the point where a user couldn't play for weeks at a time and there was no time reimbursement), latency issues for 2 years
- unfair PVP due to mass cheating and exploitation
- WoW duping bugs that destroyed economies for 7 months (and then there are bots = 6 years of damage)
- the infamous "Corrupted Blood" incident which resulted in several server restarts, populations being wiped out, Blizzard quarantines, players unable to play (1 month to fix)-
- the similar WOTLK zombie plague (1 week to fix - was it really intended?)

.. the list just goes on and on. Most recently, there was the "cogwheel issue", BG/Dungeon crashes, stuck on loading screens, broken Glyphs, valuable recipes randomly deleted, the Hallows Eve event issue, and players who join an in-progress BG do not receive honor or the daily reward (this has been going on for a month now). And there are also INTENDED changes that have completely ruined a player's gameplay experience and/or increased the amount of time they play the game.

It just never ends.. with each new patch comes brand new issues and sometimes very severe bugs.

A Blizzard fanboy will be quick to point out the EULA to me however. The excuse is that we're not really entitled to anything, we're not a special snowflake, Blizzard can do whatever they want to our PC or our time and they're not responsible for what happens to our PCs. Does that make it alright though? What does it say about a company that makes it clear in their contract that they don't stand by their products or their services?

I do what I can though. When there are major game-breaking bugs, I simply cancel my subscription and wait until things improve before I continue playing. Blizzard never knows this though. I don't think they would really care either.. history has shown that Blizzard takes their time in fixing game-breaking issues or severe bugs. That's the beauty of a monthly subscription based model.. they still have my money even though I only played for the first week before giving up and they know I'll be back.

With everything Blizzard has been bragging about over the past several months (e.g. successful WOTLK China launch, largest ever "12 million subscribers", huge number of people returning to WoW in anticipation of Cataclysm, etc.) you would expect this quarter's World of Warcraft earnings to be highly successful.

I think you'll be shocked by the results:

World of Warcraft revenues were $289 million for the 3rd quarter.

That's the exact same amount of revenue as their previous quarter.

In 2009 during the same quarter, they made $306 million (even though they have much larger subscription base in 2010).

During the 2nd Quarter (Ending June 30 2010), they released the Celestial Steed, the RAF Flying Mount, and introduced the Remote/Mobile Auction House service at the end of the quarter (so revenues for that new service actually carried over to the 3rd quarter.)

To help put things into perspective: even with ALL OF THAT FANFARE, the China launch, the "huge climb" of subscriptions, and Cataclysm coming soon, they still only made the same amount of revenue that they did during a quarter when absolutely NOTHING happened.

This is bad news indeed.

It gets much worse though. According to ActiBlizzion, they raked in $745 million in revenue with only $51 million in actual profit. That's a huge amount of expenses that cut deep into their revenue. (Although, they put a very positive spin on their Q3 results.)

World of Warcraft generated $289 million in revenue but their own expenses (staff costs, server operating costs, etc. according to Blizzard) were only about $13 million for that quarter.

So, WoW generated over $270 million in profit - but the Activision side of the family laid a gigantic smackdown on their overall profit, They must have some pretty insane expenses and I wonder what the investors feel about this? Look at it this way: if there was no "Activision", that $51 million profit would have been over $270 million instead.

World of Warcraft, by the way, is ActiBlizzion's flagship product and amounts to almost 40% of the entire company's revenue stream. You can see that Vivendi is incredibly dependent on Blizzard, but without WoW there would be a massive deficit. (See "What Vivendi Fears Most".)

* Addendum: Back in March 2010, Kotaku had an interesting article.. Activision's reports pointed out that World of Warcraft amounted to 98% of Blizzard's revenue which was up from the previous two years (97%). WoW also accounted for ~70% of Activision's net revenue. 'nuff said.

During the Q3 earnings presentation, Activision also kept bringing up Starcraft 2 and how successful the launch was. They mentioned everything else I said they would, but I was surprised they kept talking about Starcraft 2. Details had already been announced during the previous quarter and was talked about at great length at the time. But, I didn't think they were desperate enough to bring it up again ("SC2 launch! SC2 launch everybody!".. you know, even though the information was released already last quarter.)

Starcraft 2 sales figures were also very disappointing. They only sold 3 million units to date. By comparison, Red Dead Redemption (a more recent release) sold 5 million units in less than a month and it was considered a moderate success. Using that same time frame as a basis of comparison, the original Starcraft sold almost 2.5 million units (SC1 launched in 1998 plus BW units which launched 8 months later during that same year). Tiberian Sun (1999) sold 3 million units by year end, and Red Alert (1996) sold 1.5 million in under 4 weeks - and another million more over the next few months.

Keep in mind that those sales were from over a decade ago, and they're comparable to Starcraft 2 sales as they are now!

Worldwide, the video game industry revenues in 2007 were about $41.9 billion, in 2004 they were $25.4 billion, and in 1994 they were $7 billion. So, since 2001 video game revenues have almost tripled in size (2.7x actually), and even with that explosive growth, SC2 still only sold the same amount as Tiberian Sun from over 10 years ago (within the same timeframe, the only difference is that SC2 sold more on opening day).

"Professional Analysts" had initially predicated that SC2 sales would be significantly higher: 7 million sales within the first 5 months, 4 million within 3 months, 6.5 million within 5 months, 5 million in 5 months, and finally 6 million in 5 months. Apparently, Cataclysm is also supposed to sell 6 million copies on the first day, according to one of the analysts.

Keep in mind that these "professional analysts" are the best and brightest in this field. Man, were they off.

So anyhow.. overall the Q3 conference turned out just as depressing as Blizzcon 2010 - no news, no major announcements, just very boring and disappointing. If I was a major investor in the company, I would be very angry and asking a lot of questions.

* Quick Update:

One of the readers didn't understand the comparison of Blizzard's "3 million in the first month", compared to analyst predictions of "7 million sales within 5 months", etc. If you read back over past posts, this makes more sense as I've talked trends and sales figures.

What happens is that the largest amount of sales occur on the first day. And then the numbers steadily drop each follow day. SC2 for example sold 1.5M on the first day, on the next day they sold half that amount, and then 50% of that figure, and so on.

Almost all game releases follow the same trend, here's an example:

5 million during the first week (largest amount on the opening day)
800,000 during the second week
600,000 during the third week
400,000 during the fourth week
200,000 during the fifth week
150,000 during the sixth week
100,000.. 70,000.. 50,000 etc.

As of right now (4 months after release), Starcraft 2 is at about 3 million units sold. With only 1 month to go, there's a very unlikely chance that SC2 will suddenly sell 4 million units within the next few weeks. I hope that clarifies.

The whole Halloween event has been crippled so badly for the past couple weeks, Blizzard should seriously consider extending the event for their faithful customers.

The Hallow's End event takes place between Oct 18 and Oct 31.

However, between Oct 18th and Oct 26th there was a nasty bug taking place. Players on all realms would freeze, disconnect, and crash when trying to summon the Headless Horseman. The same issue impacted battlegrounds and other "dreaded cogwheel" items that could normally be interacted with.

On Oct 26th, a new fix was implemented to correct the issues. However, it did even more harm. Immediately after the fix, BG/dungeon/event queues crashed and the HH event couldn't even be accessed anymore. Also, the Shade could not be summoned by the Matron in most locations for the "Putting Out the Fires" daily quests.

I don't even think the Halloween event was truly fixed until around Thursday the 28th. That really only leaved 3 actual days for the players to participate in the Hallow's End event. There have been no extension announcements so far and no free game time for the millions of players that were impacted or unable to participate in the event over the past couple weeks.

I'm not sure why it took so long to "fix" the issue, but I suspect it's because everyone at Blizzard was so busy with Blizzcon and their support staff were directed by Sr. Management to prioritize Blizzcon gaming events over everything else.

So, here were the big highlights of past Blizzcons.

I'm including the Worldwide Invitational as well, since it was the EU version of Blizzcon. (Note: There was no Blizzcon 2006, and WWI was cancelled in 2009 in favor of Blizzcon moving forwards.)

* Oct 2005 Blizzcon - World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Announced

* May 2007 Worldwide Inv - Starcraft 2 Announced

* Aug 2007 Blizzcon - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Announced

* Jun 2008 Worldwide Inv - Diablo 3 Announced

* Oct 2008 Blizzcon - Starcraft 2 Trilogy Announced

* Aug 2009 Blizzcon - World of Warcraft: Catacylsm Announced

* Oct 2010 Blizzcon - Some guy in a red shirt asks a question

I hope this isn't going to be a trend.