[citation][nom]Jprobes[/nom]Yeah, a very very very bad year. That revenue generated from 9 millionish subs isn't even worth it anymore. IMO Blizzard should just blow up their servers and every employee should eat some cyanide.[/citation]
No one said Blizzard wasn't profitable. But to ignore the fact that in the first six months following the release of an expansion they LOSE nearly a million subscribers is hard to ignore, and I guarantee you shareholders aren't ignoring it.
It would be one thing to lose subscribers in the year leading up to a new expansion, where there is very little to no real content updates such as there was with Wrath and soon will be with Cataclysm (4.3 brings out Deathwing, the last boss in Cataclysm and will probably be released when SW:TOR is released in December), but there is no way to spin losing that many subs just after the release of an xpac. If Blizzard doesn't make some dramatic changes in things, the slide will continue. Burying one's head in the sand and pretending all is well won't stop it.
You will also notice I am not blaming true Blizzard employees. Had you even bothered reading the post of mine you quoted, I am wishing Mike Morhaime, a VP of Activision Blizzard who has been over Blizzard for several years to replace Bobby Kotick. Do you support Kotick, the man who in interviews has said he sees gamers as "resources" while companies they partner with, such as Facebook, as being their true customers?
If people have been long time fans of Blizzard, they know that Blizzard pre merger was all about EXPANDING choices for gamers. Why else would a game developer who really only makes 3 titles be so successful. Any one who has any knowledge of Blizzard's and Bobby Kotick's histories can easily tell where ideas such as online only play and the RMAH come from, and it isn't from true Blizzard employees.
So you can keep on with smart remarks about how much money they make from 9 million subs, which according to the last shareholder's conference call 3 months ago was 11 million (which by the way, over half of them are from Asia where they do not make nearly as much per sub as they do on North American and European subs). So if they are down to 9 million, that means they lost 2 million in just the last 3 months. The fact is when you see a problem you fix it BEFORE your product stops being profitable, not after.