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Slow growth-WoW now reaches 12 million
henryhoover
Member Posts: 1
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?101007
It is now official that World of Warcraft has surpassed 12 million players. With all expansions there was a surge of players other re-activating old accounts or recruiting "friends". Given that Wrath of the Lich King has just launched in China, which has the highest population on the planet with well over 1.3 billion people this hardly comes a surprise. Especially when recent banning figures are taken into account.
The last press release detailing population figures was Nov 21, 2008 which was 687 days and informed us all that the population then was 11.5 million. The one before that was Oct 28, 2008 which was 24 days since the previous one informing everyone that the 11 million milestone was reached. Lich King being released between these 2 dates.
It would appear that each expansion seems to add half a million players to the player base, but maybe this is just the Lich King effect on China and it is just that which has contributed to the rise.
Since Cataclysm isn't out for another 8.5 weeks can it be inferred that if there no further press release stating the population has risen beyond 12 million (possibly 13) that WoW has genuinely plateaued in terms of population figures and that the only way to expand a player base is to release a game in different territories.
what's everyone thoughts on this?
Comments
I agree, expanding the player base makes good sense. While WoW gets attacked for it's large player base (and getting dumbed down because of it) I have played a game with no player base, it was called Tabula Rasa, and I really enjoyed it. Thanks to a lack of a player base it died. given the choice I would rather play a game that increases it's player base than one that doesn't and dies.
12 or 13 million could be the plateau. However, a lot of people used to think that 10 million was a plateau. 16 or 17 million could be the plateau in 3 years.
The one thing we know is happening - it is still growing. And once Cata hits, it will likely grow some more.
I seriously think this game will hit 20mil+, (if they keep fraudulently counting chinese subscribers as they do)
China just got WotKL which i think has covered up a decline in sub numbers in the west as heaps of people wait for cata to release. Which means that that their subs increase from this expansion will be bigger than we expect
Their retentionr rate currently is about 10% because the starting areas were so dated compared to the newer content
I see some serious advertising going to happen in NA and beyond, designed to get the old WoW players back, since there are a total of 35 million accounts created and that advertising is gonna pick up alot of people prepared to try the game (atleast 1 or 2 mil), and i think their retention rate is gonna increase substantially now that theyve had a second chance to reshape the learning curve etc.
Only adding 5 extra levels could be a really smart move, to minimize the road to max level for all the new starting players, but the pay off will only be if they diverted those extra resources to a more broader ranging end game.
Personally, i hate this game with a passion, after seeing the treadmill this game really became when they released TBC, but you cant flaw their polish, and the understanding they have with their core player base, their slow slide into microtransactions is genius, and while they have tripped up a bit with privacy and all that, i dont think any game bar club penguin has as many parental control options as Blizzard has provided. They've got a miriad of expansions and a graphics upgrade left in them, i see this game going strong for another 6 or 7 at the very least, before they release their new mmo, with this cash cow behind them they aren't in any hurry and i predict it will be the most content rich, polished mmo we'll see so far.
Blizzard isn't going anywere.
Hopefully they dont keep butchering their IPs though.
So all the hundreds of thousands, if not more of inactive Chinese accounts, that reactivated ( take NOTICE that China does not have a monthly subscription plan) just to see what the WoTLK is all about means what? If I lived in China and didn't have to pay a monthly sub to sample the new expansion, I would.. That however doesn't mean I'm going to stay either.. Players in China pay a "pay as you go" system.. So if they have an active account (even playing 1 hour a week which is less then a $1USD) Blizzard counts that.. Since Blizzard has the full set of numbers.. I would love to know how many reactivated accounts in China, and how many hours are they actually playing.. lol
Same will happen with Cataclysm.. US players will reactivate their accounts for $15 a month.. How many will stay after 4 months is a new subject, and I'm sure one that Blizzard will not inform people on.. It was suspect that WoW had dropped to 10 million active subs, and ONLY jumped to 12 million because of China and Cataclysm.. I wonder if Blizzard will have a press release when subs drop again like they did last year? Oh wait.. companies NEVER tell the public when business is falling off.. lol
Well, yes and no. It is growing in China but it been stable in Europe and north America for a long time now.
Cata might change that by getting old players back or not but the way to expand the game now is releasing it in new countries and languages.
Wow is pretty old now and I think most potential customers have played it already. Getting old ones to come back is possible but getting that many people who never played it just isn't going to happen.
Releasing the game in India or Malaysia makes sense to get more players, that could add another 5 or 10 millions.
That would lower the stock prices and would be pretty stupid.
It works fine for a small private owned company but those rarely afford to make MMOs.
I don't think it is so unlikely that WoW is picking up new players in North America, I personally know 3 people who have just started playing for the first time. So I would think it is hardly unlikely that I am the only person who knows people picking up the game for the first time, Also sales of the original game continue, so someone must be buying them and they can't all be gold sellers.
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Yes, and some other 3 players quit. What I mean is that the game have gotten about the same amount of new players as have quit the last 2 years, it still happens that new players start but is a lot less frequent than before and it is not enough to raise the numbers of subs that much.
Interesting idea, and I've wondered why online gaming hasn't taken off more in India. Not sure if they have network deficiencies or its more cultural. When I speak about the subject of gaming with my Indian IT co-workers they really express no interest in the subject. Most of them spent 80 hours a week in school trying to rise to the top and the idea of casual gaming doesn't seem to carry any weight. Not sure if these folks represent the "typical" person in India though.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
qft
I know several that have started since Wrath, and myself (and my friends) quit around the same time. Looking at MMOdata.net and you can clearly see that WoW is currently steady state (other than the China hiccup in mid-2009) since the release of Wrath in late 2008. Wrath reduced the difficulty of the game all the way through to raids that weren't added until spring 2009. It was an attempt to increase player base, but resulted in steady state with experienced players leaving at the same rate new players came in. I find it rather interesting that Ghostcrawler wasn't moved out as a result...if you look at the graph, it was a pretty steady growth rate until the release of Wrath which would indicate that the Wrath design philosophy was almost certainly a mistake (many people complained about BC, but there was no reduction in growth as a result of that expansion). Since Ghostcrawler is still at the helm, I would expect another brief surge for the remainder of this year into January/February 2011...but don't be surprised if the subscription numbers continue to hold pretty steady.
Unfortunately about 10,000 or more of these players are gold farming bots. On the server I play on I can find between 15 and 20 bots running every day and every night without looking very hard. The sad thing is that when I report them I get a thank you message but a week or two later the bots are still doing the same things that they were doing before with very little changed.
I found one bot that has killed over 100,000 mobs but has only ever kill 209 that gave them experience and they are in an instance nearly constantly. Its been reported but nothing has changed a month later other than it has killed more mobs and ground out more gold to be dumped into the game. You ever wonder why AH gold prices have gotten just stupid? In any game inflation is always going to be a problem since quests and other tasks generate income pretty easily but if you have numbers of bots just grinding away for gold and materials 24x7 this just accelerates the trend. A player starting the game for the first time and wandering into the AH looking to purchase an upgrade must wonder what they are doing wrong not be able to afford anything.
I don't think Blizzard is ignoring or allowing these bots to exist as a conspiracy or to keep the revenue generated by them but I do suspect that with the new expansion coming out they just don't consider it a priority any more. Unfortunately these bots do impact the game and allowing them to exist for a day let alone for months is negatively impacting the game and Blizzard really needs to stop and take a look at how these gold merchants are farming not only the game and the players but Blizzard.
I love the jealousy on these forums. WOW hits 12M so of course it is all because of 11.5M of them being from China, and 11.25 of those being bot farmers.
The amount of new players in this game is huge on my server. I'm leveling up a pally tank and have been running a lot of pug instances. At the beginning, I usually say something like ' ok, this isn't a heroic that we overgear, please pay attention to your aggro'. And I am surprised how many people say something like ' this is my main, i don't have another character doing heroics' .
I am sure WoTLK launching in china had a big part of breaking another milestone, but remember that most chinesse players had already switched to the Taiwan servers long ago, so the amount of people 'waiting' for the Gov't in China was probably small.
People can say all they want about China, but the fact is that even if Blizzard did not tell us 12M subscribers, we could still see it on their profit reports. Go look at their financial statements. You really think that 11.5M of those subscribers are from china and are only paying $1/month?
Go look at Funcom's financials. When they were bragging and making up subscription numbers, they were also forced to show that they had lost $25M on AOC. Blizzard is making more than a billion a year on WOW, the vast majority of that is people paying $15/month.
Top 5 MMOs
1. Maple Story - 92 Million
2. Scions of Fate - 50 Million
3. Ragnarok - 25 Million
4. Lineage 2 19-20 Million
5. WoW - 12-14 Million
While not a MMO, its crazy that farmville has 63 million regular players.
link:
http://gamersyndrome.com/2009/pc/top-5-most-popular-mmorpgs/
ok, those numbers are highly suspect.
Removing the free games, cause... they usually count TOTAL account made, not active accounts, let's speak of Lineage 2.
I went and checked the lastest NCSoft Quarterly financial information HERE: http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/quarterly.aspx
You can go and check for yourself but here is a summary:
There is no mention of how many active subscriber they have in any game ,but there IS profit divided by game and there we can see that AION currently brings to NCSoft about as much as Lineage 1 and 2 COMBINED. Lineage 2 is quite low, about half of Lineage 1 in sales. So how come in that list there is lineage 2 but no mention of Lineage or Aion that seems to be quite bigger? You may argue that the sales of AION might include a lot of boxes, so they are higher, but then again, Lineage 1 has been released ages ago, so their sales should all come from subscriptions and micro transactions (if they have any).
So Lineage 1 should have about double the amount of subs as Lineage 2 still, no mention of THAT in that list.
Then let's look at the money. The exchange rate for the Korean Won is at the moment:
1 South Korean won = 0.000896 U.S. dollars
the amount in the pdf are in millions so... Lineage 2 sales are.. 15,886 millions KRW equivalent to.... 14 millions Dollars, give or take.
And you would want me to believe that Lineage 2 has 20 millions active subscribers that seemingly give NCsoft 14 million dollars in a QUARTER? How much it costs to play lineage eh? less than a dollar per 3 months??
Well, this is South Korea, not China but I have not a clear picture how much do games cost there.
Now let's check Activision Blizzard quarterly report:
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ACTI/1034803504x0x393942/a728701a-e87b-4477-90d6-775413f6e556/PressReleaseTablesQ2CY1Final.pdf
This is a bit more messy, since Activision and Blizzard are together, luckly there is a "MMORPG" voice here that constitute a single product, WoW. And you see that in one quarter WoW brought to Activsion Blizzard 289 Millions dollars. That is 20 times what Lineage 2 did.
With this evidence presented, I say goodbye
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
I'm indifferent to the topic - I find the thread discussion itself rather boring as a subject - but this I'l correct.
There have been several long and indepth discussions about this subject on these forums here in the past months, and one of the main conclusions was that the revenues Blizzard makes can be gained with less than half of the subs paying a full monthly sub. That is even without the additional gain of legacy sales, authenticator and other paid-for services (as AH) and items.
It's a simple math calculation, I believe there have also been 1 or 2 analysis reports on Gamasutra that described in detail what could be accounted for as western-style subs and Chinese subs, it was a figure of 5-6 million Chinese subs half a year or so ago. Also it shouldn't be a surprise that the achievement of 12 mil subs is reached shortly after WotLK went live in China.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Well, hello sunshine!
Nice of you to make your own criteria, and decide who can and can't be counted. Last I checked LOTRO, DDO, and a whole slew of other games are FTP, if they could count things like you said, they would be boasting huge numbers, but they aren't.
You may be right about Aion, this could of been done before they released some solid numbers on it, and it too should be above WoW, thank you for bringing that to my attention.
Whats the exchange rate in Cameroon?
1) Wrath of the lich king released in China
2) Cataclysm was announced to release in a month and a half.
3) FF14 is turning out to be just another overhyped dud.
Those three things are going to get a lot of people to resubscribe.
One more thing, 6 million+ players are in ASIA, not CHINA.
If i understand : 99% of developpers, producer are stupid because they make difficult WoW/Lineage2 clone when they can easily make a Maple Story, Scion of Fate clone...
Yeah, only 5 million Chinese players in mid-2009...no reason to believe there are over 6 million Chinese players now...
I have no doubt that there will be a surge in people resubbing. How much really remains a question. The subscription increases for WoW for Wrath were rather lackluster (1 million possible increase in the immediate months prior and few months after release...followed by about 1/2 million drops and fairly steady state - about 1/2 million growth over the past 20 months).
While Cata may do much better than Wrath, it is just as likely that the game really won't grow much more unless they find a new market...which is just fine when you are talking cash cows. Keep that money rolling in...
March on! - Lets Invade Pekopon
I think what is really happening is the base is just moving. The western player base has been with this game since it's launch. Expansions bring many of the older players back, but after a month or two many end up leaving because the 'new' wears off and its back to business as usual.
So as the western base is starting to thin down (slowly, but it is happening), the eastern base is picking up due to many regions just getting the game and areas like China finally getting new expansions. There are also quite a few untapped areas in the east that could maybe add a few more million players, making the western drop in players almost unnoticed.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
If you believe this thing at all, it looks to suggest their western plateau right now has been just over 5 million for a while. They aren't really losing subs in the west, they are just kind of holding steady.
http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/WoW.png
I'm betting they'll grab a pretty good chunk more than 5 million once Cata is actually released.
I would'nt be suprised Blizzard has very successfully identified their target markets those being very young gamers , casual softcore gamers and offered a blend of half decent pve and pvp .The game also is specced as such that it will play on most PCs what many hard core gamers fail to realise is that the majority of people dont have a high powered gaming rig . Most of its competitors offer games that are either mostly pvp or pve orientated . When you look at the competition its plain to see so far not one of the games released since WoW has offered any real sort of mass appeal its not that they are bad they just arn't exceptional and it needs something exceptional to come along to challenge WoW and attract subscribers away from it . I'm holding hope out for next years crop of releases but I've been here before and no long expect anything from a new game because I've seen all the hype before only to be disapointed again and again over the last 5 years . Warcrafts number one by default . Still if they get a hugely popular franchise like Star Wars right all bets will be off .
LOL, I really love this post.
Having played WOW, it does not surprise me that its hit this target.the shame of it is that 7 million of these are korean gold spammers which wow does nothing about apart from trying to sell u more crap to keep your account secure.most games released these days including aion have now implemented software to stop this.but blizzard have done nothing to stop this..real shame cos it ruins a pretty addictive game..