It seems like things are not going well for Blizzard in the past few weeks, and it keeps going from bad to worse. Blizzard has reportedly withdrawn 500,000$ from the WoW prize pool, and the players are not too happy about it.

In a recent blog post, Blizzard has mentioned that the prize pool for the two events will be 660,000$. This implies that the crowdfunding, in the form of toy sales, got around $2.4m in revenue (since 25% of it was supposed to go to prize pool). While Blizzard explicitly mentions “because of your direct support” in the blog, we have got other sources confirming the same as well. First of all, we have Cloud 9 player Chan calling out the entire mishap. Here is the tweet :-

Blizzard did not contribute a single cent to the AWC & MDI prize pools this year. They pulled their own ‘base’ contribution of 500k when they realised how well the crowd funding did ($2.64m USD). I wonder how many who bought the toys would have if they had known this. https://t.co/c4hCAIlgQL — Chan (@C9_Chan) October 29, 2019

While this doesn’t confirm anything, the next series of tweets does confirm that the whole amount generated was crowdfunded only. Replying to a tweet C9 Player Snutz reveals that the claimed fact is indeed true. He states the source as the player meeting. Here is the picture of the thread :-

This is pretty bad from Blizzard’s perspective. The outrage can be seen from not only fans but players also. Given that there is still time for the event, Blizzard can still fix things.