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Statistics, how I hate them. Addressing people who claim WoW subscriptions are climbing
tylerthedrui
Member Posts: 304
But for the sake of being a douchebag and inciting a very difficult to fully-grap discussion, here is stock information for vivendi universal games taken from their investor relations sight.
http://finance.vivendiuniversal.com/finance/home/share_fr.cfm
Of course, internet games make up 1/2 of their sales, and we know which game has the greatest bearing on their revenue. You'll notice the increase around the time that TBC was released, and the general decline afterwards. This goes in line with the increase in the ammount of people who publicly state they are quitting.
Food for thought - Don't take it at face value. And don't reply with some catch-all 1-line response that makes you sound like a complete idiot.
ON A SIDE NOTE: I just ran accross a pretty cute little browser game in an advertisement on this site. http://www.wowisland.com/. I fully support new game makers of all types and give them a thumbs up for their boldness in making a game about a title like WoW. I probably won't be playing it since browser based games aren't my thing. I wonder how they got past the copyright stuff?
EDIT: "Spelling it out for you". This post was intended to mock the people who claim Vivendi is making a killing off of WoW. If you note the Title of the post, as well as about 5 clue-ins and a sarcastic remark I made during the post, you will realize that I am forcing you to draw conclusions based on my post without actually agreeing to me. Of course, most people will miss this point and will probably continue to argue with me even after posting this and subsequent replies because that is their capacity for drawing conclusions.
Comments
Nuh-uh you're a liar, freakin wowbois. j/k just wanted to beat everyone to the punch.
I will be one on the decline also as TBC brought really nothing new to the table. I jumped the Vanguard wagon and sadly as my RL friends I play with ran there also then recently left. We ran back to WoW because for the moment the new territories we're still not completely explored. I can no longer play Vanguard either.
Currently upgraded my beta 2 LOTRO account with the pre-order disk for the hig-res graphics and went from hating the game to loving it. The game has a very nice story line with very crisp graphics and for the moment I am enjoying it immensely.
Fact of the matter since I got off topic is the market tells no lies and I already payed a 3 month sub as I know my RL friends did so those numbers I am sure will decline when many more subscriptions die out. 8 million can't lie of a games success nor can its market value on perhaps a slow decline. I will admit though that the decline will probably take years and in the life of an mmorpg it was a huge success.
WoW will peek in 2007 after the expansion is released in china then it will be a very slow declain over many years, dont expect millions to drop off in a matter of months. WoW will be a majotr player for a few years to come.
Doesn't suprise me too much, TBC was abit dissapointing to me was hoping for a new class, opening all those closed areas on the old world map and revamp the crafting to be actually worthwhile. Plus WoW has been out for 2 years and I think for some (like me) its just time to move on and find a new game. It was fun until end game and you raided the same dungeon for the 5th time and with TBC introducing the whole Rep grind I just had enough. I think we can continue to see a slow decline as time goes on not a big overnight drop or anything, I still think WoW will probably remain on top for the rest of the year but probably by next year it will probably reach the status of a average MMO as we crown a new game with the title of "crack" (I say this jokingly as it seems that "crack" is the unoffical title we hand to the big MMOs. When EverQuest was huge and the king of MMOs it was nicknamed EverCrack and when WoW took its place we dubbed it World of WarCrack).
Seriously with all these new and interesting MMOs coming out this year (LoTR, PotBS, AoC, WAR, Vanguard once it gets patched up enough) and some potential heavy hitters coming out some time in the future (SGW just to name one) WoW will start to decline in subs, which is good WoW has had its time in the spotlight like EQ it has made its mark in the MMO genre and now is the time for companies to look at WoW and come up with innovated ideas to surpass WoW to make their game the one we will all be talking about and playing.
And thats my 2 cents
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
wow is getting more and more accounts open ever day this is true... but.. not all of them are active
u see, many people quit the game on a daily basis.. about as many that start the game and they dont delete accounts unless there actually breaking rules, so out of that "8 million" people or wateva playing now... about 6.5 million accounts are probebly active..
my 2c
"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
It's true that amount of WoW subcribers will probably start declining. Maybe it's starting now, maybe it'll start in a few years, we don't really know. But no matter how good a game is, people will still get eventually bored, and as new games wich offer serious competition to WoW come out, the outflux of bored people will exceed the influx of new players.
However, using Vivendi stock price as proof about WoW subcription numbers is ridiculous, because Vivendi is not the same as Blizzard. Sales of VU Games division were 804 million euros last year, while sales of whole Vivendi Group were 20 044 million euros, so whole gaming business is less than 4% of Vivendi's business.
Source for information: www.vivendi.com/corp/en/home/index.php
E: Fixed typos + mistake in my calculation. And edited the message using IE7, because the enached editor didn't work correctly on Opera.
But in all hopes some of the "purge" will be the less desirables. sadly i dont think thats the case
Look forward to another D2
77% of all statistic are made up on the spot
Statistics are numbers. These numbers can be used, finessed, and cited in order to pwn someone in a debate, or to make yourself look more intelligent than you actually are. (The best part of using statistics in debate is that no one can tell if you lie.)
Most people who use statistics in everyday life are lusers who are too busy crunching numbers to leave their basement dwelling.
Leeroy Jenkin's raid group had a 32.33(repeating, of course)% chance of survival. .
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6167808.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=newstop&tag=newstop;title;2
Yep. best selling AND second best selling PC game for february.
Their subscription must have really plummeted....
"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"
It has already started. Guilds on my server are merging nonstop and my friends list has an unfamiliar grey color. 3 of my 4 RL friends have stopped playing and I have just begun to get rid of my account.
As for the stock, I thought Vivendi's game division sold seperate stock, and may have accidently linked the entire company. Once again, using it as a debating point is useless since stock != sales. However, it's still fun to look at. If by chance I have linked the whole of vivendi, then the graph is utterly useless!
hmm does PC sales charts show much, especially when the next best sellers are the Sims?
So in the US, Burning Crusade sold 141,000 units in February. Just ahead of the original WoW which lets say is 120k at a guess. So, in the US lets take these figures and suggest WoW has made 120k new customers over February. Now the question now is how many people have left WoW in February? Less than 120k and subscriptions in the US are still climbing, more than 120k and it's declining. There are maybe 2m subscribers in the US. So 120k/2,000,000 is 6%. Realistic 6% of people may have left in February? Who knows.
It has already started. Guilds on my server are merging nonstop and my friends list has an unfamiliar grey color. 3 of my 4 RL friends have stopped playing and I have just begun to get rid of my account.
As for the stock, I thought Vivendi's game division sold seperate stock, and may have accidently linked the entire company. Once again, using it as a debating point is useless since stock != sales. However, it's still fun to look at. If by chance I have linked the whole of vivendi, then the graph is utterly useless!
And yet all of the new recommended servers are receving new players every day. Your assertion that people leaving particular servers is a reflect of mass cancelation is falacious. They could very well be moving to other servers. Its not as though such an action is remote or impossible.
What is your point in attempting to make it look as those WoW is collapsing? I really don't see that happening and I have no reason to think your statistics reflect this. Even if the player base halved they'd still be the most popular and profitable MMO in operation. If you don't play the game why do you care? Do you think that WoW's falling subscriptions will bulster your pet MMO? Why do you have so much invested interest in doom speaking?
several days in a row apparently.
Just FYI for the noobs out there.....and STFU in advance i play WOW just getting facts straight
One could claim that all people who are even bothered to post to this ridiculous topic are loosers.
But I think those who argue against using the numers are the real loosers. They are the ones who believe what they want to, and are only intrested in getting others to believe what they believe, not intrested in finding out the truth.
And those who claim that WoW subcription numbers are decreasing because people are leaving the game, please go to troll Vanguard forums. There must be larger proportion of playerbase leaving that game every month than there is in WoW, and thus by your logic the game must be dying.
Edit: Unless ofc you have some proof that there are more players leaving WoW than those who start to play WoW, but none has given any clear proof about it so far. And no, proof of 1 server out of hunders of servers isn't enough, you'd have to prove that the amount of players is decreasing on most of servers.
There are two big problems I have with your theory. First, how could you be so stupid as to think that the stock price of Vivendi would be positively correlated with the number of WoW subscribers? There are many factors that go into the price of the stock and so many reasons for its price of the last few months. Secondly, however, one major reason could have been that a majority of stocks have taken a major hit during the last few months.
http://finance.google.com/finance?cid=626307
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX%3A.DJI
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=INDEXNASDAQ%3A.IXIC
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=EPA%3AVIV
Compare these indexes and the stock price for Vivendi during the same period. See the correlation???? Now STFU and go take a finance class!
Asian trolls, who seem to mash the period button as a function of OCD, constantly refer to asian game sales which largely reflect internet cafe/arcade/corporate purchases and not public purchases. Do you really believe that Lineage 2 has 10 million subscribers?
The term account is also variable... Account that are open and currently being played or the total number of keys that have been activated. I'm pretty sure the last time I checked Blizzard only considered an account an account if it was open and being played/paid.
America (300 million) Vs. World (6+ billion people)
If 7-8 million people in the states play just think how many could globally be playing if they marketed it correctly...
As far as TBC is concerned it was a very lazy expansion pack... So what they made two new models and an outland map. They could have done a TON more and probably will knowing blizzard. First release is awesome, second sucks, third is almost if not better than the original. Warcraft one... was great, Warcraft II was OK, Warcraft III Frozen Thrown was sweet. Why screw up a good pattern
They dont count those accounts that are not active. Taken from Blizzard:
World of Warcraft®'s Subscriber Definition
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
Don't forget that the subscription numbers are inflated due to the increase in gold farmers. They are getting bolder advertising in chat channels and ingame mail, they knew with new expansion would create more demand for gold, items, etc.
So of these 8+ million subs I'm pretty sure 1/4 of those aren't players but Gold Farmer dot Com. With games that have "only" 100-300k subs, the secondary market is hardly noticeable. With WoW's vastly larger sub numbers it is much easier to see these people doing their "black market" work.
To be honest, i liked the second one the best, third was OK and had some deffinite new ideas, but was nothing spetacular aside from graphics.
Anyways... yeah, the expansion was lazy as hell. It really was. I feel ripped off paying whatever it was for that, 50USD? i think that sounds right. Hell we got the same stuff from free expansions and updates. The only new thing that was truly added was 2 new models, different armor that looks the EXACT same as the previous shit, and new maps. Woo... what happened to player housing and EPIC classes?? It would have been worth it to pay for epic classes. Then at least they could justify the 10 new levels.
Also, for those of you who have whined about the lack of diversity with the horde and alliance since the shami/pali interchange... well in an article with blizzard (and i'll try and find it) they basically said that they were getting lazy and it was "too hard to balance the two classes while making indpendent content for each".
Your money at work, ladies and gentlemen.
Also, getting to the actual topic at hand (sorry for the post-jacking), until ANYONE can bring proff of quarterly profit vs the number of subscriptions ya'll can shut up. For you finance people out there, you should know that quarterly numbers dont lie... much... or unless your enron.
"And after blizzard takes over the world, they are gonna gather a bunch of lemmings, sit on their fat asses near a cliff, and watch the little fuzzy bastards suicide dive into the ground below. . . . . all just for their own entertainment."
Yes, sales do not tell you subs are rising because more people could be quitting, but sure as hell is more DIRECTLY linked to it than stock price.. that can fluctuate a lot and it is not linked to Blizzard nor to WoW.
Fact is they got .5 millions more subs since launch of the BC. that is BEFORE the expansion is released in China and other asian territories, so those .5 mils come straight from the US/EU territory (ok, they don't have to, but I would bet most do). pretty impressive I dare say.
As for the expansion, 7 huge areas, several new instances, new world pvp options, bombing runs, etc. Name one free patch that gave even 25% of all this stuff.
Yes, no new classes, can we stop on this already? we knew the "no new classes" part since 6 months before the release of BC, no need to repeat it all the time like a broken record, now is there?
Fact is BC is much much bigger than many other expansions of other games (all EQ2 expansions for example).
Fact is you didn't like WoW before, you won't like it now, but if you DID like it, then now you will like it even more.
Personally I'm enjoying the new content and, as it always was, if you are gonna burn trough it, you will not have as much fun as you could. But then you will realize you actually have seen less than 50% of the stuff, exactly because you burned trough it.
To each its own, i say.
"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"