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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9438314" data-attributes="member: 18">WoW Classic was definitely not high risk for two reasons:1) It was something other MMORPGs had been doing for literally decades. Dark Age of Camelot put out what was essentially "Classic" rules-set for servers after a very divisive expansion, all the way back in 2005/6, for example, and many other MMORPGs have similar, and did long before WoW.2) There was clear demand, both from fans saying there was, but perhaps more importantly, as demonstrated by countless unofficial Classic servers being run on code that accidentally got released many years ago.Further, as [USER=7034611]@mamba[/USER] says, Blizzard had retained the actual code, and didn't even suggest they might do that until they'd checked that they had that code.On top of all this, WoW Classic:A) Did not require a separate purchase.B) Required you to have a subscription to Retail WoW.So what was the big risk? I can't see any at all. It wasn't a new concept - it was an old one - and the risk of failure was low. Worst case scenario they lost some development hours and had to shut down a bunch of Classic servers in a few years, but Blizzard long-ago made clear that those costs are relatively low for them, and if they got a rise in subscriptions at all from this, that'd be highly profitable - and it seemed near certain they would (and of course they did).So you're off-the-mark there, I'm afraid.The actual risks WoW has taken whilst under Hight are:A) Developing Dragonflight, which was a very different WoW expansion to all previous ones, with a significantly lighter tone, an heavy emphasis on an new flying mechanic, that had it sucked, could have sunk the entire expansion, and a significantly more generous approach to itemisation, catch-ups, and so on, as compared to previous version of the game (which was considered risky because a lot of people thought it would lead to players getting bored quickly - that didn't happen).B) Developing the WoW Classic Season of Discovery, which was a set of WoW Classic servers with a time-gated approach to levelling - i.e. until X date, you can only get to level Y (and re-levelled raids dungeons etc. to compliment that), and more importantly, a ton of new abilities, which didn't exist in Classic and don't exist in Retail WoW, allowing things like letting Warlocks tank, Mages heal, and so on.C) Developing Plunderstorm and Pandaria Remix, both experimental, time-limited ways to play Retail WoW. Plunderstorm was a full on battle royale which was barely WoW at all beyond using the models/controls/interface, and which ran for a couple of months. It was fairly popular. Pandaria Remix was a much more elaborate thing, where they completely changed WoW's loot mechanics, and had players level up and play solely in a sort of turbo-charged (re: gain of XP, rep, etc.) version of Pandaria, acting as a way to rapidly level and gear up characters, but also producing some interesting/semi-challenging WoW content with mostly just mechanics tweaks (which are insanely cheaper than new art/animations/sound etc.). It also locked those characters into this special version of Pandaria until like, tomorrow. It ran for three months.</blockquote>

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