---
title: 'Blizzard Are Their Own Worst Enemy'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=TiiWDeE7PWY'
video_id: 'TiiWDeE7PWY'
date: 2026-08-19
duration_sec: 1272
channel: 'Bellular Warcraft'
---

# Blizzard Are Their Own Worst Enemy

> Source: [Blizzard Are Their Own Worst Enemy](https://youtube.com/watch?v=TiiWDeE7PWY)

## Summary

The video criticizes Blizzard's decision to sell a $75 housing bundle in World of Warcraft, arguing it's a tone-deaf monetization experiment that capitalizes on player investment while the feature is still buggy and its future is uncertain. The creator analyzes the strategy as 'whaling' and suggests it damages player trust and long-term revenue for short-term gains.

### Key Points

- **Overpriced Housing Bundle** [00:02] — Blizzard is selling a housing bundle for 7,500 Hearthstone ($75), which is more expensive than the base game of Midnight. This is seen as an attempt to test the upper limits of player spending on housing items.
- **Whaling Strategy** [03:59] — The pricing is described as 'textbook whaling,' where Blizzard uses data to find the highest price point players will pay. The strategy involves testing with smaller, inoffensive items before introducing more expensive ones.
- **Poor Timing and Trust Deficit** [06:26] — The video argues this is the worst possible time for such a move due to a 'busted patch' and a general loss of player trust. The creator suggests that Blizzard's internal structure lacks a process to delay monetization for the sake of public perception.
- **Housing's Unrealized Potential** [12:12] — While the housing tools are praised, the feature is held back by persistent bugs, a lack of clear roadmap, and uncertainty about future updates like loadouts. This makes players hesitant to invest time and money.
- **A Better Path Forward** [16:59] — The creator suggests Blizzard should have delivered on its roadmap and built trust before increasing monetization. A costly, visible action like pulling the bundle would be a high-signal move to rebuild player trust.

## Transcript

sparkle pony, haven't we? You probably didn't miss this bit of news. Blizzard are already pushing their luck with the housing shop where there's a new bundle on the store that costs 7,500 Hearthstone. That's $75.
A hell of a lot of money for a bundle in a game that of course we're paying a sub out, it's more expensive than Midnight itself. Oh, the Midnight base edition than that. And only one thing in the entire store's
history has been more expensive, and that is obviously the Brutosaur. That was a massive success by um I guess financial accounts, and I guess helped prove to Blizzard that big special items can actually bring in the cash even if
they have exorbitant pricing. This $75 bundle is another attempt to prove that true, and they have brought out the big guns to make sure of it. And literally ever sold before. So, the new housing bundle has a giant stack of new
decor, but it also has something they have not sold before, which is new exteriors. Quick thing first, have you ever wondered how spam callers get your number, or how just eerie things seem to happen in the internet where people
shouldn't? It happens a lot, and a big reason is data brokers. They buy your personal info, your name, email, phone, address. They aggregate that stuff, and they sell it on. That means that you don't actually have to be hacked for
through your data being sold or a breach, anytime you're signed up for a thing, that data can end up over in the internet. Now, this video was sponsored by Incogni because what they do is they send removal requests to these brokers
automatically, and they do it continuously. That's because brokers recollect your data even after it's been taken down. So, doing yourself is not a one-time fix. Incogni keeps scanning and keeps sending take downs. Now, I've had
mine running since 2023, and right now I can see 257 requests have been made across 48 brokers, 250 are completed, and it's actively monitoring 21 to make sure my data actually stays down. And honestly, with a lot of that talk from
Anthropic and the Open AI stuff about domestic mass surveillance enabled by AI, especially when enabled through commercially available data sets, well, um yeah, I think the likes of this just got so much more important. And the best
news is that at incogni.com/belly of the war war craft, code belly of the war craft, you'll get 60% off the annual plan, which is the plan that I use. So, go ahead up the link below. There are now a grand total of six exteriors in
the game, and two of them are for sale. Tauren, forsaken, dwarves, most races have got nothing. And the really rough bit here is you can't even buy these things individually. You've got to get both of them for another $40 bundle,
which of course will be without any of the accompanying decor. Now, all of the accompanying decor matches the color and aesthetic directly, making it almost a necessity to get at least some of these decor items if you actually want the
outside of your house to look like something, and you know, to to match the big house exterior that you just bought. They're basically selling theme starter packs for more than a full-price AAA game. It's actually five
bucks more than one of the more premium Diablo IV edition, and the base Diablo IV is $39.99, which is way less than this. And that comparison will be very important later. Now, look, I could rag on this all day, especially given the
alongside a totally busted patch, but that wouldn't be all that useful. People better job of that anyway. I'd much rather talk about why this is so expensive. Not to defend it, absolutely
not, but to put it in context so you know what's actually going on. And maybe watching, well, I know a bunch of you are. Um why this is a really, really, really bad idea. Okay, so here's the deal. This is
textbook whaling, obviously. Housing is a new feature and their numbers department are going to be drooling over all the kinds of data that they can get. They poked the low-end sales with the little plushies they put in at the
start. Those were inoffensive little sales that nobody would really need, even if they arguably did break Blizzard's own rule of having no faction fantasy within the paid offerings for housing. The spreadsheet enjoyers were
of course watching the sales numbers go up and using years of stored data that figured out a baseline. There's whole departments that do this kind of thing working out things like how many bundles were bought versus just individual items
for little tiny amounts of hearth steel here and there. Or perhaps who was needed. And if they're really good, they'll even track how much of it was Battle.net from wild tokens. Now, shortly after the plushies, we got
the decor bundles and even they seemed pretty expensive. We actually did quite the spicy video on it. It was 35 bucks for a large pack of decor which got you steel. So, they obviously know people will buy these things. They know what
price and with what we're talking about today, they are testing another upper It's almost like a negotiation, you see, between the player base and Blizzard. How high are we willing to go to buy some decor? They probably have a good
idea by now, just like how they know what mounts or transmog sets will sell >> [music] >> But the next question is how high we will go for a different class of item. That's where a lot of their future
dollars could be, so they're fishing. Will we bite for $40 exteriors or will we buy the $75 bundles? Will those sell more? We can't know ahead of time, of course, but we'll definitely get the answer.
The next bundle will tell us. If it's cheaper, then maybe this was too direction. If it's even more expensive, then their whaling will have been successful. But of course, none of this happens in a
vacuum. Well, at least for you and me. The problem with large corporations, big company like Blizzard is things actually by different people, different sets of responsibilities, different departments,
which means it's possible and indeed likely that a corporation will act more stupid than the sum of its parts. And that's what's happened here. There's likely a bit of a hitch in their whaling strategy. This kind of thing only works
right now there's a lot of people who aren't. I don't think I really need to tell you why. Can summarize it though. The parts of 12.0.5 that didn't work genuinely great so far, but we've got no reason to believe it will launch
think most of the 12.0.5 stuff is pretty damn good now that it's a bit tidied up and working, well, for many people the damage has been done. The trust is gone. And Blizzard's response has not been ideal to say the least. We just released
a video covering a damage control interview they set up. And really, all the ways that it betrayed the way they think about the game from story to bugs to patch schedule. It was concerning. Now to be clear, I still think Midnight
has a hell of a lot going for it. I really do. But all the same, there is a noticeable dip in Blizzard's public opinion over handling the post-launch period of this expansion. And that has put a little bit of doubt into the
immediate future. You see, it's easy to say that whoever's running the store at Blizzard clearly doesn't care about any of this And it's not really their job to care. That's not their bag. The content train must reach the next
station. That's the core development team's thing. The shop experiments, well, those always seem to run on time no matter what. There's no process within Blizzard that says, "Are we willing to sacrifice a little bit of
revenue and delay an experiment we want to make in order to, well, have our public perception be just a tad better? No, there is none of that. These things operate on separate tracks. And in a company as lumbering as Blizz, clearly
no one has the speed, authority, or guts to say, "Hey, this is not the best time to run a high-end pricing experiment." I'm sure many employees of the company do think that. In fact, based on what I know, I'd say very many people working
at Blizzard think this is an awfully timed thing. Now, not just because of unhappy players that may spend less money, but also because releasing a $75 housing bundle before the other racial exteriors is going to make players feel
like it's incessant greed. And what we feel in the long term. And here's the deal. Blizzard follows a lot of numbers, their analytics, etc. But before that,
you get anecdote. And by the time things manifest in the form of numbers that aren't where you want them to be, the damage is already been done. If you just follow the numbers, you will be led astray. But it's not just money. If it
was only money, then you could make the argument of delay this, launch it right, launch it better, and your long-term numbers will be more healthy. But within the cogs and incentive structures of a company such as Blizzard, well, money
company such as Blizzard, well, money now is more important than money later. pushing them for profit so that the 70-odd billion dollars they spent on the big acquisition makes sense for them. That's the world we're living in and the
deal we make playing a game like WoW. As players, we're mostly happy to buy the odd epic edition to stay subscribed and maybe pick up the odd cosmetic we like from the store. And the funny thing is, Diablo 4's recent WoW-inspired cosmetics
are a really good example of that. We've seen Wow release a housing exterior or back of them on Spark Fury, but then Diablo adds some Wow gear and actually have it spark excitement. Why is that? Well, it's all because of the vibes you
see. Lord of hatred is making people happy. I personally I'm almost I don't want to say shocked, but I am surprised by just how well Lord of hatred is [music] landing with me. And as much as it's
insane to me to look at the D4 store and see these Wow things being $28 each or see these Wow things being $28 each or like $54 for all of them, 74% discount, I roll my eyes at that, but I also do remember, well, I buy the Diablo
expansion once and that's it. There's no monthly fee. I can just play every different business model to World of Warcraft, so it's harder to do this type of thing right in Wow, but to double down on that being tough, 1205 is a
busted patch. So people already don't feel fantastic about the sub fee that they're putting into the game. That means it just doesn't feel worth it at actually be one of the worst times imaginable for Blizzard to be pushing
their luck. And that's because the honeymoon phase of housing appears to have ended. I wasn't keeping track of this. Tell you what, I certainly raised this. Tell you what, I certainly raised my eyebrows when I saw the headlines.
players have grown increasingly dissatisfied or at least, you know, some of them. But within the housing space, it's so much so that Wowhead has posted an article asking if Blizzard should consider tying it into player power.
There's a very easy answer and that is no, never. As someone who survived the Shadowlands, please don't do that. That would send us back years to the horrible time where every single activity in in game had
some form of unique player power that you felt you needed. And to this day, I believe Torghast has been done dirty purely by its reward design. And well, Torghast that Blizzard game jammed
about in public, they had some really damn cool ideas. But you saw they weren't able to fit them into the game in a way that made sense. Anyway, possible rage bait headline from Wowhead aside, the article
does highlight a bunch of problems that people have got. And basically, it's death by a thousand cuts once you start reading into the ongoing issues. Now, I'll be clear for a MMO going from zero to one with housing, I think they've
broadly done a fantastic job. The tools are really really nice to use. There's a bunch with it that shows real care and real craft. But there's also reasons that's not hitting as hard as it should. One of them is bugs. Housing has been
getting worse rather than better since launch, rather surprisingly. You see, until recently, floors didn't work. Yeah, your floor type would reset randomly, which would rather obviously break the entire aesthetic of every
are reporting that walls are doing the same. And then, there's a rotation bug where rugs and stools and other ground items won't save their rotation correctly. And there's a placement bug with only advanced mode being able to
save certain item positions correctly. But think about it this way, putting items down can suck. But even when you've put them down, you can't trust that the items won't well, move themselves about after you've placed
Which for a feature like this is really quite bad [music] indeed. But building and decorating where there are issues. Cracks are showing elsewhere. Housing levels have proven to be a bit more busy work than excitement, I would
say. And that's especially once you run out of easy sources of decor. I mean, at times you quite literally have to collect decor items that you don't want in order to increase the housing limit stuff to place the decor that you do
bit weird. Then there's endeavors. They seem like a nice touch, but they started repeating which kind of broke the spell of there being lots to do. Really, when endless. And in a way it's not Blizzard's fault, but they accidentally
set up some big expectations which ended up collapsing into for some people some disappointment. Getting decor itself does seem to be mostly fine, but not everyone agrees with that. Some say they're struggling with playing enough
want. And of course, lots of time collecting leads to less time for building. But building time is another concern. And I've got to say personally, it's the number one reason why I have not engaged with this feature as much as
camp of people holding out for improvements cuz I'm pretty sure those improvements will come. And that's mostly because we don't yet have import and export codes. And that means that decorating your house is a bit like
making a sand mandala. It's designed to be temporary. If you want to try a new build, you might have to remake the old one from scratch later. Now, if we were never getting loadouts, perhaps that would be kind of freeing. But because we
know loadouts are in the works, well, I guess people like me will be waiting. In fact, that's maybe housing's biggest problem in a way. We know it isn't The decor limits keep going up. That's baked into the progression system
itself. Now, you might think that sounds and perhaps is a nice on-ramp. That's true enough, I guess. But there is another side to it. It means that people can never finish a build. You're not finished within the game's limits
because the limits aren't fixed. Same goes for the rest of the features. We works, but it's been a while since we've heard anything about it. So right now, heard anything about it. So right now, housing almost exists in limbo. Players
increased decor limits, new housing levels, or new exteriors. They don't know if loadouts will be next month or next year. There's certainly a lot of edit mode tweaks that I would like to see be added in just so that it kind of
power-usery piece of software. But what that all boils down to is uncertainty. be one of the most dangerous things in a game like this. Now, that's because to many people, their time and their effort are investments. Of course, so is their
money. And that's likely why Blizzard will see, well, I would imagine lower than expected sales of this new bundle. Because in a way, Blizzard are asking for increased investment, but they're doing that without laying out a future
that people are happy to invest in. And of course, they have set up obvious perverse incentives. If they start selling big housing exteriors like this, essentially as prefabs, well, what does that imply for exterior decor limits?
Because that new fancy house can just be like one one item, right? Not some big complex hodgepodge that you've put together. And that means that players who purchase these cool new houses and therefore don't have to customize their
houses much with regular exterior decor items, well, they're going to be able to put way more items into their gardens, their landscapes, which, given how limited the exterior decor limits are, will make a huge difference between the
haves and the have-nots with this feature. And that will make people feel dangled earlier actually becomes relevant. Housing has got a long way to go to live up to its full potential. Now, that's a measure of there being
improvements to make, but it's also, in my view, a measure of just how grand Now, here's the problem. The ideal way for this to run is fairly obvious. Do the roadmap, execute a bunch of the roadmap, and then start to increase the
monetization once players feel like you've actually earned it. And once you've actually seen players engage with the system over months upon months upon their pain points and what sort of things they would like or perhaps even
resonate with. And with a system like player housing, there's obviously some pressure to show to the bean counters that it's actually leading to the numbers going up. Evidently, even if that means hurting the reputation of
its long-term potential. And the fundamental cock-up is simple. It feels like Blizzard are asking for more money while we deal with more bugs while a road map that they said would be coming has not materialized.
This is a PR issue and to be honest, Blizzard, I think are the undisputed kings of stepping on this specific rake time and [music] time again. I do like to think of what a specific
solution could look like and I guess it's probably something along these lines. It would probably involve perhaps Holly, perhaps Ian, someone formalizing some sort of protocol, maybe with Blizzard's president, Johanna Faries,
is to make stuff work with Microsoft and run the big ship. I think there needs to be a protocol where leadership of Wow can say, "Hey, look, this right now would make life harder for my team and
probably hurt our long-term revenue." I think they need some sort of protocol, something that is established within the system of Blizzard that can escalate
PR-related issues so they can be tackled in a way that feels direct. That's essentially the problem here. There's too many layers of separation. There are too many arms of Blizzard all working not really
with a great idea of what the other arms are doing. That leads to a customer experience that does not feel cohesive. And that's bad because the customer's And that's bad because the customer's relationship is not with you, the game
director, you, the executive producer, you, the individual game developer at Blizzard. No, it's with the company. And if the company acts more stupid than the sum of its parts, well, tough It's going to be your
They need to do something about this. But for any of that to happen, they need >> [music] >> If you were to pull something like this from the store, refund people, and maybe put them into the game in some other
way, whatever it may be, that would be of extremely high signaling value. You see, it would be Blizzard saying, "Okay, actually, we're we're not going to do this thing to make the money go up, because we actually
care about how much you trust us and the value of our relationship. And we're short-term money in order to make sure that relationship is good." That's the type of thing that actually buys trust, because talk is cheap.
Action is what actually matters, and a specific, costly action is of high signaling value, and in this case would be highly emotionally resonant. That is the type of PR Blizzard has thus far never been able to do. We've seen many
other companies actually be able to do it fairly successfully. I hope they find a way, cuz man, I am tired of Blizzard that, because of its structure and its that, because of its structure and its decision-making, is just consistently
able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this story isn't the only recent example. The other recent example is what we cover in this next video, which is about to pop up on your screen. I'll see you over there.