07/20/2018

07/20/2018

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Blizzard Releases Hotfixes for Troublesome WoW Battle for Azeroth Patch 8.0

Blizzard has released several hotfixes for the World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth patch 8.0 that was released earlier this week.  The 8.0 pre-patch for World of Warcraft was released this Tuesday, and offers class changes, Battle for Azeroth’s upcoming War Mode, artifacts, DX12 support, and stat squishes that reconfigure the game’s stats and damage numbers.  The community was vocal about their disappointment and Blizzard responded with apologies to their fans.  WOW next big release is the PC and Mac versions on August 14th.

Epic Unreal Marketplace Passes on More Money to Creators

Epic is passing along more marketplace sales to Unreal Engine developers.  Rather than keeping 30% of revenues, the new developer/store split is 88%/12%.  CEO Tim Sweeney sited growth and financial success of the Unreal Engine Marketplace and Fortnite to enable this decision.

Xbox Ultimate Game Sales

Xbox is following the Amazon Prime Day sale with its own sales event.  Xbox will be holding the Ultimate Game Sale starting July 19 and running through July 30.

Over 700 Xbox games will be on sale at discount of up to 65% off.

X-Box Live Gold customers will receive an additional 10% off.   Titles include select Call of Duty games, as well as Battlefield, Dark Souls, Lego Star Wars, Overwatch and PlayerUnkown’s Battleground titles.  In addition, hardware items such as consoles, headsets and hard drives will have special offers during the sale.

High Volume of Games on Switch eShop

With an anticipated volume of 20-30 new games being released each week, there is a growing sense that the Switch eShop is oversaturated.

To improve the customer experience, marketplace providers can focus on tools and processes to enable better categorization and prioritization of high quality games.  For game developers where oversaturation may be occurring, platform developers can focus on bettering their own pull through for your titles with targeted marketing campaigns through behavioral segmentation.