To put things into perspective - in its heyday - WoW was half as profitable as Tesla is now...
It's hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice.
They made WoW. It was insanely profitable. Their valuation soared. They sold. They declined.
It's hard to say if its reversion to the mean or the Activision acquisition - but it's hard to argue Blizzard hasn't declined by every metric.
The paid stuff was a monetization tactic after the decline.
Considering the cost to create and amount of reputation damage it caused, YES. Diablo immortal was a massive failure.
According to the article they generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as the previous record breaking game did in an entire year. I wish I had that kind of reputation damage.
That is a good point, the amount of raid shadow legends adverts on the internet have become a meme at this point. I haven't seen any ads for Immortals here in the US and the financial report doesn't break down marketing spend by property.
That’s the calculation you need to look at, not earnings as if expenses prior to release was 0$.
According to the article I linked Immortal generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as Raid Shadow Legends (the previous record holder) did in their best year. That is a domination of that gaming niche.
Do you have a source on this $7B a year profit figure? I've tried to find it and can't find anything even close to $7B revenue let alone profit going back to 1994.
Also fyi, WoW was originally released in 2004, not 1994.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-revenue-does-World-of-Warcraf...