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World of Warcraft: Subscriptions Tumble from 10M to 7.1M
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Gamasutra is reporting that World of Warcraft lost nearly three million subscribers by the end of March 2015. After the launch of Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard reported over ten million subscribers which makes the 7.1M a precipitous decline in only a few months.
What about you? Are you still subscribed to World of Warcraft? Why or why not? Leave us your thoughts in the comments.
Comments
So, basically, they lost what they gained and ended up back at the 6-7 million they were originally holding strong at pre-WoD?
Doesn't seem very grim at all, as that is still 6.0-6.5 mil higher than the majority of MMORPGs. Blizzard reigns supreme as usual, nobody is going to dethrone the juggernaut.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
It has been almost seven months.....
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
WoD is the best expansion since the BC/WoTLK days. That said it still has the age old WoW problem of lack of endgame content. Most people don't play WoW for pet battles or achievements. They play for PvE dungeons/raids and PvP.
There's just not enough to do in WoD at 100 and that's more apparent in this expansion then most. WoD as a whole felt very unfinished. Tanaan Jungle is in the middle of the map and it's just now being developed.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Yeah WoD is a great expansion, but Blizz is just so set on the raiding is the game ideal that they kinda lost the plot. I was raiding early on, but by the time the second tier came out I was just done dealing with my guild - I just don't care for heavily structured raiding where it begins to feel like a job. And since blizz gutted LFR, it just left PvP, so I geared out in arena gear and had some fun with that, but I really want to do group content without the nonsense.
Dungeons are just not that fun anymore, even challenge mode is speed running. I want dungeon crawling, not running. I don't want to grind the LFD queue, I want to get lost in a dungeon and spend the day in there. I miss stuff like the old BRD where you just find a group and stumble through for 4 hours. It's about playing the game, not about acquiring new pixels. I dunno, a lot has been lost in the transition to modern MMO gaming.
So many renewed with WoD hoping some of the magic of original WoW had come back. It hasn't.
The game will always have a strong core of dedicated players from now until sunset ... in 2030 or whenever it happens... but WoW will never again see 10 million. It's just going to be a long, slow curve downward from here with exception to a spike every new expansion as people take a peek in, play for a month or two, then leave.
It's still a credit to WoW that the only true WoW Killer is going to be time itself.
the resources allocated to garrisons + ashran development would have been better used for more dungeons + new battlegrounds imo
pve is great as always, pvp still a disaster and ashran is a huge joke too
I'm a successful business owner, so I'm well aware of the implications of a large revenue drop within a single quarter.
However, It isn't as concerning as you seem to believe. If you honestly think they didn't plan for this in advance, then you are sorely mistaken.
What are they going to do about it? They already have the next expansion under development, and have for quite some time. They'll ride out the rest of the fiscal, and then reveal what they've been working on, which will pump up the playerbase again until we repeat this same scenario in another year or so.
They've been going strong for over a decade, they know exactly what to expect and how to proceed accordingly.
Losing 30% of your player base since the last report is a telling tale.
Though they have the Movie to bring back interest, and are milking everyone as much as they are able through the cash shop, paying for 90s and buying game time coins at a 30% increase in profit.
At this point, people are only paying for the privilege of playing on their servers (I believe they've even shut down a popular vanilla server recently -- which is their right to do, it's just rare in the past that they would even care, with a statement from them being they just didn't want the creators to say it was a better experience). $180 for no real patched content prior to 6.2 -- and even then it all seems like the minimum they can get away with with the Shipyard "Mini, Mini Facebook game" and the new area that (according to the current build) is just an apexis gathering timeless isle (where are the other areas promised by now? The other content at Blizzcon?).
Fourteen months of no patched content in MoP leading into six months of no real patched content in WoD (With Blackrock being successfully tested in beta, and thus being a part of the expansion); their commitment to release expansions faster (and likely use most of their time for such... with there being rumors that it was almost complete months ago) because it's a chance to make more money beyond the sub that so many will continue to pay no matter what.
They definitely know what they're doing in terms of making money.
That's not exactly true. The last shareholder meeting that confirmed 10 million subscribers played in December. This shareholder's meeting only reports on active subscriber numbers until the end of March.
What we saw was a 10 million to 7.1 million drop over the course of only 3 months.
It's safe to say that nothing's stopped subscribers from pummeting in the month of April and May respectively. If the current number of subscribers, today, is anything over 6.5 million, I'd be surprised.
Everyone expect it.
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John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
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It's a cyclical thing. Player retention loss happens the most after the first month of a vanilla, new patch or expansion launch. That three million didn't happen over night for sure, but you can guarantee the folks with more time on their hands than others bailed within the first month, while people with less time were able to milk some more time out of it before growing bored with it.
This happens in other games and is nothing new. It just sounds like an astronomical number because the amount of subscribers they lose is probably still more than the sum of active subscribers of every other Western MMORPG.
No need to worry according to Activision Blizzard the drop to 7M is typical pre-expansion type drop .... whoops the expansion has been and gone.
The hope, inside Activision Blizzard, will be that WoW has "simply" those who returned and that subs are indeed "relatively stable" - the words AB used in its results. (It won't be that simple of course as there will be churn etc.)
The concern will be that the downward trend seen pre-WoD has resumed and that people who "put off" calling it a day waiting for the expansion will now leave.
They will, of course, know whether WoW had 7.1M, or 6.5M or 7.5M today; sometimes they say but I haven't seen anything this time around.
More like Minimum 5.
I'd be suprised if WoW has more than 2mil players in the West.
50 active friends from my list, went down to 5, which are logging in once a week.
It's also worth noting this report is from March (just when the new raid and patch launched), WoW is probably below 6mil (1.5mil in the West) right now.
nah, this happens all the time with these games. Release game, large spike and then it evens out over a few months. They release an expansion, spike then goes down.
Rinse and repeat.
If you go through these forums you will see that this same conversation has been had over WoW's numbers and expansions for years.
What it "tells" is that certain people buy the expansion because they are fans or curious, they either burn through it or realize that the expansion wasn't enough to keep them and then after they come to their respective conclusions they leave.
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Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo