While still a massive number, what is happening is what a few people predicted which is simply as more iterations of the core EQ/Wow model of MMO come out, people find the one that closest fits to the niche they were looking for.
Prediction, wow will bump up a bit from pandaria but generally continue to decline slowly over the following 2 years.
Simply put its NOT just the sub fee / Cash shop transactions games are competing for these days, its also time, and that is something people value far more.
my own case in point, I have no problem subbing to multiple MMO's the cash is not the big problem dropping 3 or 4 subs a month wouldnt make a huge impact on my spare cash.
But would I have time to play them, wow as the nursery yard of MMO's in the sense that for many people its their first MMO is the one that also stands to lose the most from the movement forward with games.
But 9.1 Million subs is still an INSANE number... look at how hard every game since has tried... and the best they have done is 1.7 million... should put a lot of things into context.
No one will break 10 million subs again in the current model thats for sure... Take wow out of the picture and anyone with anything around 1 million is big news...
Or in other words, WoW still has 8 million more subs than any other game. The expansion will come along and bump them back up again. Even if the new/returning subs don't last a long time and *gasp* WoW does slip back to 8 million it's still phenomenal for an EIGHT YEAR OLD GAME! That can't be emphasized enough....the game is 8 freaking years old!
Everyone talks about EQ as the gold standard of MMOs and even it only stayed on top for 5 years and of course never had anywhere near the playerbase of WoW.
WoW is definitly on the decline, but the numbers they are still generating off a game that is 8 years old is nothing short of remarkable.
[mod edit]
I enjoyed my time in WoW. I played it for years, had fun and am now ready for something new. I am unsubbed at the moment and am not planning to buy the new Expansion. I've already pre-ordered GW2 and am eagerly anticipating it.
I'm not sure what me being a fanboy has to do with the truth of my comments. Yes, WoW is declining and will likely keep declining, but even in decline it's still going to be the top game, monetarily or subscription numbers wise.
No one is disputing that WoW is going to be the top dog for a few years still. What you are saying is that WoW is losing subs cause it is old and I agree that is the main reason it is losing subs. What I am saying personally is that we should be excited because this only allows the industry to grow and speculating on what the losses will be like over the next couple of years is fun times!
Or in other words, WoW still has 8 million more subs than any other game. The expansion will come along and bump them back up again. Even if the new/returning subs don't last a long time and *gasp* WoW does slip back to 8 million it's still phenomenal for an EIGHT YEAR OLD GAME! That can't be emphasized enough....the game is 8 freaking years old!
Everyone talks about EQ as the gold standard of MMOs and even it only stayed on top for 5 years and of course never had anywhere near the playerbase of WoW.
WoW is definitly on the decline, but the numbers they are still generating off a game that is 8 years old is nothing short of remarkable.
[mod edit]
I enjoyed my time in WoW. I played it for years, had fun and am now ready for something new. I am unsubbed at the moment and am not planning to buy the new Expansion. I've already pre-ordered GW2 and am eagerly anticipating it.
I'm not sure what me being a fanboy has to do with the truth of my comments. Yes, WoW is declining and will likely keep declining, but even in decline it's still going to be the top game, monetarily or subscription numbers wise.
No one is disputing that WoW is going to be the top dog for a few years still. What you are saying is that WoW is losing subs cause it is old and I agree that is the main reason it is losing subs. What I am saying personally is that we should be excited because this only allows the industry to grow and speculating on what the losses will be like over the next couple of years is fun times!
But see, if we both agree that the main reason WoW is losing subs is the simple fact that it's getting old and people are getting tired of it, I don't see the correlation to this helping the industry grow?
To me the real news is the failure of ToR because it still relatively new and it crashed and burned really fast. This to me is the signal to the industry to not make another WoW clone and expect people to flock to it. Heck, I bet my bottom dollar that Titan will not be a wow clone. LOL!
I hope the current trend of WoW is leading to a great TITAN. They will weave battle.net into Titan as well as other incentives to stay in the Blizzard community of games. Imagine Titan subscribers getting their WoW subscription for free, like calling it "Blizzard MMO pass".
I yelled for 2 years on mmo-c and official forums. Stop making the game so damn easy. The easier the game the faster people get bored.
11,000 people per day for the last 3 months said nah I don't want to play. Bad management imo.
Absolutely, I hope they learn to balance and incorporate things like LFR in the future. Let casuals play in the sand too, but keep normal and heroic raiding hard and rewarding.
From all mmo's i had played this is the last i would be back to played it again , even if blizzard would payed me some bucks i will never come back to WoW.
I yelled for 2 years on mmo-c and official forums. Stop making the game so damn easy. The easier the game the faster people get bored.
11,000 people per day for the last 3 months said nah I don't want to play. Bad management imo.
It couldn't be that in the last 3 months Diablo 3 came out, TSW came out and WoW hasn't had a new content patch in 5 months?
Closer to 10 months. Man if they lost over a million subs in 5 months without a content patch they would not be doing so hot. Thats the problem with Blizzard. They think that people are willing to accept paying 15$ a month for a conent patch that comes out every 5-6 months that people blow through in a month. Sure, heroic mode, yadayda, most people don't care about that. They kinda screwed the pooch with LFR because that makes it so people burn through content faster in the same way dungeon finder did. Sure, you can get better gear and cooler color schemes on the harder modes, but is it really worth it? That is the question most people ask themselves after they do LFR. Sure, its slightly different, but the raid is the same in essence. When you beat a game on normal difficulty because you decided to do hard after you beat it the first time, how often do you really come back and do the higher difficulty? This can be applied to raiding as well. When people are running LFR, normal mode, and heroic mode of the same 5-7 boss raid they get bored of that raid FAST.
This would not be a problem if the content patches came out on a quarterly basis and I feel like they could skate by with that and maybe even get back some subs. The problem is that people are sick of doing the same content over and over even faster now with the raid finder. The raid finder sounds great on paper, but what happens when you are a casual player and have done LFR/the dungeons? What happens when you reach this point when you don't have time to commit to a real raiding schedule? You quit. Atleast before people would be able to organize pugs because alot more people were willing to do that. That gave people something to shoot for and would last much longer then LFR.
I would actually say most people are not REALLY willing to spend 15$ a month with a quarterly content patch, but the brand loyalty Blizzard has developed supersedes that. I know I won't and neither will most people once they play other games that do or don't charge you for content patches at the same/faster pace.
I yelled for 2 years on mmo-c and official forums. Stop making the game so damn easy. The easier the game the faster people get bored.
11,000 people per day for the last 3 months said nah I don't want to play. Bad management imo.
Absolutely, I hope they learn to balance and incorporate things like LFR in the future. Let casuals play in the sand too, but keep normal and heroic raiding hard and rewarding.
double post and replying to wrong person haha sorry
My favorite thing about these kind of posts? people who say things like "SEE!? WOW IZ FAILZOR! WOW SUX AND CAN'T RECOVER!" when the amount they lost is TWICE as much as most 'successful" games playerbase, and they only lost about a tenth of subs.
WoW is still the giant, no game will EVER have as many subs as WoW did, while WoW may shrink, it'll keep a healthy playerbase for years to come, and players will go to a number of MMOs, or none at all, so no single game will see a large jump in subs because of it.
That said, even if wow loses a majority of its playerbase, it'll still be a healthy, profitable MMO. Although they may need to close/merge a few servers if that happens.
Playing Nothing waiting for The secret world Played WoW, DCU online, star wars: the old republic, city of heroes, city of villains, everquest, plenty more I'm probably forgetting or aren't worth noting.
It's so depressing that a game that is 8 years old still completely dominates the market with no decent opposition. The same company will dominate the market till we all die from crazy robot dudes 30 years from now.
Originally posted by Enigmatus Sooooooooo...Anyone wanna start off a list of why WoW is losing subs throughout Cataclysm's tenure, or should I do that?Of course I could just do that in my WoW review, but eh...
Diablo 3 - which sold 10 million copies including Annual Pass but because of Annual Pass Blizzard gave away a game for people to quit WoW to play
End of Expansion Blues - the lull between the final update of the current expansion and the release of the next expansion will always be a low point
Uh-oh, that's only about $130 million per month in subscription revenue. Whatsoever shall they do?! Quick, throw more sparkle ponies into the cash shop!
Joking aside, 9.1 million is still a number most CEOs would trade their left testicle for. That's probably more subs than every current subscription-based MMO would have if combined.
But they don't get 130 mil. You can't just multiply sub number X $15. For starters in the west, some people are paying less than that due to multi-month discounts. Then you got your pre-paid cards, the retailer has to take a cut so they don't get full amount of that either. And then in the East, people are NOT paying $15 per month to play WoW.
Having said that they still probably get quite a nice revenue from paid services such as server transfters and the cash shop.
Originally posted by QuicklyScott It's so depressing that a game that is 8 years old still completely dominates the market with no decent opposition. The same company will dominate the market till we all die from crazy robot dudes 30 years from now.
The most depressing thing is that no other dev wants to make games good enough to take anything away from WoW, they're all just generic clones of the same formula that WoW is following, which makes it hard to justify a purchase. Why spend 50 dollars+sub when I already have a game that plays exactly the same AND I know people in it, AND I have a bunch of characters with cool stuff?
If a dev would grow the balls to make a GOOD game that doesn't follow the formula, I think they'll make a bundle.
inb4 gw2..
Playing Nothing waiting for The secret world Played WoW, DCU online, star wars: the old republic, city of heroes, city of villains, everquest, plenty more I'm probably forgetting or aren't worth noting.
ya and probably 5 million in that 9.1 are from china and in china they dont have (SUBS)
WoW China only requires you to pay for the time you spend logged in. A one-time use card which gives you 4000 minutes of playing time costs 30 RMB (4.66 USD), or about 0.45 RMB (7 cents US) per hour.
~The only opinion that matters is your own.Everything else is just advice,~
We knew WoW was declining already at the start of the year.
The fact they managed, through great promotional deals, to stop the bleeding for a quarter does not change the fact the decline is still there.
The speed of the decline, however, is the concern here. It will be interesting to see where it stops.
Now it is absolutely true that we are finally seeing quality titles coming out (TSW and GW2 above all) that shakes the formula.
TSW is Funcom's best game so far and while it has bugs, problems and stuff like that, it is quite new! new setting, skill based advancement and so on. It also has good enough quality values that it appeal to many.
However, I do not see TSW lasting very long. It has very little replayability value, very punishing dungeons even at low level and an end game seemingly focused on the same stuff WoW did. I think it will get a fan base of loyal followers, but won't threaten WoW for dominance in some time (if ever). TSW also does not offer the whole package as strongly as WoW does, for example. Crafting is quite limited in TSW, PvP offerings are also limited and the world is way smaller than WoW's.
GW2, however, is a completely different story. the 3 BWE showed a game with less bugs and much more server stability than TSW had at launch. More importantly, GW2 hits all the buttons WoW does, but with enough innovation in all parts to call it the next step in Mainstream Theme park Fantasy MMORPGs.
Finally, all reports always carry that tag "most subsctions lost came from the East". Why do you think the eastern market is getting over WoW? It is much fresher there, especially in China, as it was released later and each expansion also got released much later than here. Is there some new super popular Chinese MMO we do not know anything about?
Whatever the reason, I wonder what MoP's impact will be. On paper, it seems the best expansion WoW ever had, adding more of the same while also giving new ways to level up and new things to do at end game, it also re-introduce some of the fan favorites from older expansions like world bosses and no flying until level cap. It also sports the most gorgeous graphics WoW ever had and a new NON-HEROIC class. Oh yes also one of the most wanted and popular Warcraft race, the Pandaren.
So WoW might still come out on top, for now, for some time. Time will tell. My money is on GW2.
"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"
most of wows subs i think are leaving is because they havent released a content patch since march with hour of twilight. On top of that it wasnt like when cata released where you had three raids to work on for months , they added in firelands and then dragon soul way later on so even the most casual raider has probably hit 400 by now gearscore. I know it took me all of two weeks to do dragon soul and hour of twilight and bring a naked DK to 389 GS in both frost sets and blood.
People will go back to wow for MOP, the norm for the last few years has been release ridiculous clones of wow over and over again . Rift SWTOR Allods , the many many asian clones of it , wow players go and try these games out and just return to wow because why leave something your the big dog in when you just join a game that is exactly more of the same thing as wow? I dispise the direction wow is going in as its a dumbed down cartoon crap game now but people do not change willingly unless they are truely disgusted by the game. Plus the secret world is the only game to release lately that is actually different then wow. Guild wars 2 soon but for now its just TSW...
I hope and prey the days of the wow clones are long gone but what do people seriously expect if you are signing your dev studio away with the devil aka the publisher. People do not lend large amounts of money on radical idiology , so you cant really get mad at the poor slobs not playing games and only reading known sales figures for wanting on wow clones more worried about their 401ks invested in a publisher etc.
World of Warcraft will climb back up but I think with guild wars 2 having different pvp options to appeal to the old schoolers and new schoolers a like, i really think those two games will put some dents in wows numbers in the longer term. When MOP releases though, do not count many people leaving it until they finish up the content in it.
Its funny when people claim that WoW lost subs just because of the content gap, but what explains the 900k million sub drop the year before this quarter? =P Oh and the 900k more the two quarters before that one...
As people have stated previously, the game is not necessarily losing subs soley due to the competition or content gaps, it's just old and dated. At the rate they are losing subs I would be shocked if we don't see a bigger drop starting in Q1 2013. The annual pass also held on to 1.2 million subs in the huge loss they had in the year period I mentioned (2 million in a year from Q2 2011 to Q2 2012)
If you look at each of these quarters, they lost 600K subs the quarter right after an expansion hit, another 300k in the quarter of 2 content patches (Rift could have impacted this), another 800k inbetween those content patches and dragon soul, another 100k during dragon soul (SWTOR + gained some back for dragon soul), they did not lose any the following quarter (gained subs back from swtor outweighed losses), and then they lost 1.1 million.
So RIGHT AFTER an expansion they lost 600k subs, shook off some of the pain due to annual pass + fighting deathwing appeal, and now here we are. I would not be totally suprised to see a bigger loss in Q1 2013 then we did in Q12011 especially since it will have been longer since the expansion came out + heavy competition coming out during the expansion quarter.
Comments
While still a massive number, what is happening is what a few people predicted which is simply as more iterations of the core EQ/Wow model of MMO come out, people find the one that closest fits to the niche they were looking for.
Prediction, wow will bump up a bit from pandaria but generally continue to decline slowly over the following 2 years.
Simply put its NOT just the sub fee / Cash shop transactions games are competing for these days, its also time, and that is something people value far more.
my own case in point, I have no problem subbing to multiple MMO's the cash is not the big problem dropping 3 or 4 subs a month wouldnt make a huge impact on my spare cash.
But would I have time to play them, wow as the nursery yard of MMO's in the sense that for many people its their first MMO is the one that also stands to lose the most from the movement forward with games.
But 9.1 Million subs is still an INSANE number... look at how hard every game since has tried... and the best they have done is 1.7 million... should put a lot of things into context.
No one will break 10 million subs again in the current model thats for sure... Take wow out of the picture and anyone with anything around 1 million is big news...
No one is disputing that WoW is going to be the top dog for a few years still. What you are saying is that WoW is losing subs cause it is old and I agree that is the main reason it is losing subs. What I am saying personally is that we should be excited because this only allows the industry to grow and speculating on what the losses will be like over the next couple of years is fun times!
This may be intriguing:
I don't think they have ever been complacent, ever....
They have always valued quality over release dates
they have learned alot over the years from all their projects, which can put them a step above brand new releases.
Replayability/community involvement has been one of their greatest lessons.
But see, if we both agree that the main reason WoW is losing subs is the simple fact that it's getting old and people are getting tired of it, I don't see the correlation to this helping the industry grow?
To me the real news is the failure of ToR because it still relatively new and it crashed and burned really fast. This to me is the signal to the industry to not make another WoW clone and expect people to flock to it. Heck, I bet my bottom dollar that Titan will not be a wow clone. LOL!
I hope the current trend of WoW is leading to a great TITAN. They will weave battle.net into Titan as well as other incentives to stay in the Blizzard community of games. Imagine Titan subscribers getting their WoW subscription for free, like calling it "Blizzard MMO pass".
I yelled for 2 years on mmo-c and official forums. Stop making the game so damn easy. The easier the game the faster people get bored.
11,000 people per day for the last 3 months said nah I don't want to play. Bad management imo.
It couldn't be that in the last 3 months Diablo 3 came out, TSW came out and WoW hasn't had a new content patch in 5 months?
Absolutely, I hope they learn to balance and incorporate things like LFR in the future. Let casuals play in the sand too, but keep normal and heroic raiding hard and rewarding.
From all mmo's i had played this is the last i would be back to played it again , even if blizzard would payed me some bucks i will never come back to WoW.
Closer to 10 months. Man if they lost over a million subs in 5 months without a content patch they would not be doing so hot. Thats the problem with Blizzard. They think that people are willing to accept paying 15$ a month for a conent patch that comes out every 5-6 months that people blow through in a month. Sure, heroic mode, yadayda, most people don't care about that. They kinda screwed the pooch with LFR because that makes it so people burn through content faster in the same way dungeon finder did. Sure, you can get better gear and cooler color schemes on the harder modes, but is it really worth it? That is the question most people ask themselves after they do LFR. Sure, its slightly different, but the raid is the same in essence. When you beat a game on normal difficulty because you decided to do hard after you beat it the first time, how often do you really come back and do the higher difficulty? This can be applied to raiding as well. When people are running LFR, normal mode, and heroic mode of the same 5-7 boss raid they get bored of that raid FAST.
This would not be a problem if the content patches came out on a quarterly basis and I feel like they could skate by with that and maybe even get back some subs. The problem is that people are sick of doing the same content over and over even faster now with the raid finder. The raid finder sounds great on paper, but what happens when you are a casual player and have done LFR/the dungeons? What happens when you reach this point when you don't have time to commit to a real raiding schedule? You quit. Atleast before people would be able to organize pugs because alot more people were willing to do that. That gave people something to shoot for and would last much longer then LFR.
I would actually say most people are not REALLY willing to spend 15$ a month with a quarterly content patch, but the brand loyalty Blizzard has developed supersedes that. I know I won't and neither will most people once they play other games that do or don't charge you for content patches at the same/faster pace.
double post and replying to wrong person haha sorry
My favorite thing about these kind of posts? people who say things like "SEE!? WOW IZ FAILZOR! WOW SUX AND CAN'T RECOVER!" when the amount they lost is TWICE as much as most 'successful" games playerbase, and they only lost about a tenth of subs.
WoW is still the giant, no game will EVER have as many subs as WoW did, while WoW may shrink, it'll keep a healthy playerbase for years to come, and players will go to a number of MMOs, or none at all, so no single game will see a large jump in subs because of it.
That said, even if wow loses a majority of its playerbase, it'll still be a healthy, profitable MMO. Although they may need to close/merge a few servers if that happens.
Playing
Nothing
waiting for
The secret world
Played
WoW, DCU online, star wars: the old republic, city of heroes, city of villains, everquest, plenty more I'm probably forgetting or aren't worth noting.
End of Expansion Blues - the lull between the final update of the current expansion and the release of the next expansion will always be a low point
But they don't get 130 mil. You can't just multiply sub number X $15. For starters in the west, some people are paying less than that due to multi-month discounts. Then you got your pre-paid cards, the retailer has to take a cut so they don't get full amount of that either. And then in the East, people are NOT paying $15 per month to play WoW.
Having said that they still probably get quite a nice revenue from paid services such as server transfters and the cash shop.
The most depressing thing is that no other dev wants to make games good enough to take anything away from WoW, they're all just generic clones of the same formula that WoW is following, which makes it hard to justify a purchase. Why spend 50 dollars+sub when I already have a game that plays exactly the same AND I know people in it, AND I have a bunch of characters with cool stuff?
If a dev would grow the balls to make a GOOD game that doesn't follow the formula, I think they'll make a bundle.
inb4 gw2..
Playing
Nothing
waiting for
The secret world
Played
WoW, DCU online, star wars: the old republic, city of heroes, city of villains, everquest, plenty more I'm probably forgetting or aren't worth noting.
Partially on topic, but there is one thing that always bugs me:
At the end of Wrath, there was a massive drought of content, yet the subscriptions there barely dropped at all. What makes Cataclysm so different?
So simplified and streamlined. Almost bad player proof.
ya and probably 5 million in that 9.1 are from china and in china they dont have (SUBS)
WoW China only requires you to pay for the time you spend logged in. A one-time use card which gives you 4000 minutes of playing time costs 30 RMB (4.66 USD), or about 0.45 RMB (7 cents US) per hour.
~The only opinion that matters is your own.Everything else is just advice,~
If you look at the financial numbers there was a drop actually.
However, Acti-Blizz's Asia side picked up the fall on the Western side so the subscription numbers seemed relatively 'stable'.
The revenue showed the real story rather than just the '10M subs!'.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
We knew WoW was declining already at the start of the year.
The fact they managed, through great promotional deals, to stop the bleeding for a quarter does not change the fact the decline is still there.
The speed of the decline, however, is the concern here. It will be interesting to see where it stops.
Now it is absolutely true that we are finally seeing quality titles coming out (TSW and GW2 above all) that shakes the formula.
TSW is Funcom's best game so far and while it has bugs, problems and stuff like that, it is quite new! new setting, skill based advancement and so on. It also has good enough quality values that it appeal to many.
However, I do not see TSW lasting very long. It has very little replayability value, very punishing dungeons even at low level and an end game seemingly focused on the same stuff WoW did. I think it will get a fan base of loyal followers, but won't threaten WoW for dominance in some time (if ever). TSW also does not offer the whole package as strongly as WoW does, for example. Crafting is quite limited in TSW, PvP offerings are also limited and the world is way smaller than WoW's.
GW2, however, is a completely different story. the 3 BWE showed a game with less bugs and much more server stability than TSW had at launch. More importantly, GW2 hits all the buttons WoW does, but with enough innovation in all parts to call it the next step in Mainstream Theme park Fantasy MMORPGs.
Finally, all reports always carry that tag "most subsctions lost came from the East". Why do you think the eastern market is getting over WoW? It is much fresher there, especially in China, as it was released later and each expansion also got released much later than here. Is there some new super popular Chinese MMO we do not know anything about?
Whatever the reason, I wonder what MoP's impact will be. On paper, it seems the best expansion WoW ever had, adding more of the same while also giving new ways to level up and new things to do at end game, it also re-introduce some of the fan favorites from older expansions like world bosses and no flying until level cap. It also sports the most gorgeous graphics WoW ever had and a new NON-HEROIC class. Oh yes also one of the most wanted and popular Warcraft race, the Pandaren.
So WoW might still come out on top, for now, for some time. Time will tell. My money is on GW2.
"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"
most of wows subs i think are leaving is because they havent released a content patch since march with hour of twilight. On top of that it wasnt like when cata released where you had three raids to work on for months , they added in firelands and then dragon soul way later on so even the most casual raider has probably hit 400 by now gearscore. I know it took me all of two weeks to do dragon soul and hour of twilight and bring a naked DK to 389 GS in both frost sets and blood.
People will go back to wow for MOP, the norm for the last few years has been release ridiculous clones of wow over and over again . Rift SWTOR Allods , the many many asian clones of it , wow players go and try these games out and just return to wow because why leave something your the big dog in when you just join a game that is exactly more of the same thing as wow? I dispise the direction wow is going in as its a dumbed down cartoon crap game now but people do not change willingly unless they are truely disgusted by the game. Plus the secret world is the only game to release lately that is actually different then wow. Guild wars 2 soon but for now its just TSW...
I hope and prey the days of the wow clones are long gone but what do people seriously expect if you are signing your dev studio away with the devil aka the publisher. People do not lend large amounts of money on radical idiology , so you cant really get mad at the poor slobs not playing games and only reading known sales figures for wanting on wow clones more worried about their 401ks invested in a publisher etc.
World of Warcraft will climb back up but I think with guild wars 2 having different pvp options to appeal to the old schoolers and new schoolers a like, i really think those two games will put some dents in wows numbers in the longer term. When MOP releases though, do not count many people leaving it until they finish up the content in it.
want to know how many subs wow has look at how many boxes of MOP they sell in the first 2-3 weeks and thats probably a 90% of the subscription base
very few people dont play in the very latest expansion
The sub numbers aren't worth alot when there are 8mil Chinese paying 15 cents an hour.
Its funny when people claim that WoW lost subs just because of the content gap, but what explains the 900k million sub drop the year before this quarter? =P Oh and the 900k more the two quarters before that one...
As people have stated previously, the game is not necessarily losing subs soley due to the competition or content gaps, it's just old and dated. At the rate they are losing subs I would be shocked if we don't see a bigger drop starting in Q1 2013. The annual pass also held on to 1.2 million subs in the huge loss they had in the year period I mentioned (2 million in a year from Q2 2011 to Q2 2012)
If you look at each of these quarters, they lost 600K subs the quarter right after an expansion hit, another 300k in the quarter of 2 content patches (Rift could have impacted this), another 800k inbetween those content patches and dragon soul, another 100k during dragon soul (SWTOR + gained some back for dragon soul), they did not lose any the following quarter (gained subs back from swtor outweighed losses), and then they lost 1.1 million.
So RIGHT AFTER an expansion they lost 600k subs, shook off some of the pain due to annual pass + fighting deathwing appeal, and now here we are. I would not be totally suprised to see a bigger loss in Q1 2013 then we did in Q12011 especially since it will have been longer since the expansion came out + heavy competition coming out during the expansion quarter.
Previous Subscription Losses