WoW stabilizes over 10M subscribers, down 100k in Q4 2011

Originally Posted by slimj091

not to knock GW2.. but if most of the "I quit WoW", and "I quit ToR" posts state lack of end game options. how exactly will a game who's only end game is either a pvp grind, or sitting around town hub's chatting be able to fill that void for the average MMO gamer?

You may have seen the server wide PvE event chains that whole server can work towards ... then there are dungs, pvp tournaments, server vs server vs server pvp, bazilion achievs to farm. And honestly the pvp grind in WoW for example is grind only because the PvP is boring ... I play LoL daily, just for the fun of playing ... it's not grind if it is fun.

Originally Posted by Harmzuay

I think all the Annual Pass did was give free crap to people who were going to continue paying the monthly fee anyway. If you signed up for the annual pass just for a free Diablo 3, you're an idiot. By this time you could have been putting that 14.99 a month in a cookie jar and have enough to buy Diablo 3 when it was released AND not be locked into a game you only paid for to get another game for free. That logic doesn't make sense to me.

If you know you are going to play WoW for a year you will be saving $60 I don't understand how that is not logical.

Originally Posted by slimj091

you need to seek professional help if you get this worked up about a game.

Nice straw man, bro. Might want to get over that compulsive replying issue if you can't think of anything valid to reply with.

Originally Posted by Intrepid1

"Blizzard is happy with how the subscription numbers held up during the most competitive quarter ever.

When asked about churn since the competitor's launch, "December was a good month for us."

When losing subs is considered a good month, management is completely lost.

The concept of a 'month' (December) versus '3 months' (4th quarter) seems to escape you.

IMO not many people pay month to month, SWTOR is still new and a lot of the people that quit for it still have an active sub.

Originally Posted by Monara

SWTOR had nearly 1 million digital preorders in North America alone, according to their subscription numbers, that was nearly 58% of their total players thus far. Not counting physical preorders and outside of NA, posted on 6th December 2011.

Q3 ended 1 month after SWTOR already obtained 58%+ of it's total subscribers, and those consumers were only paying retail price, and weren't even obligated to paying for a month yet. It's completely valid.



You TOR fanboys use the same arguments everywhere.

It's just a beta guys, they'll fix it
It's just released guys, they'll fix it
It's just patch 1.1 guys, they'll fix it

Now you get your "WoW Killer" slaughtered it's attempt to steal WoW subs and it's heading to

It's just Q3 guys, you'll see Q1 is important.

Can't wait to hear "It's just Q1 guys, you'll see Q2 is important".

i really wish you would read more than one of my posts. it would help a lot in your case.

ive already claimed im neither a swtor fan boy or a wow doomsayer, im just looking at the bigger picture and predicting my own opinion

I cancelled mid-December. My sub ended Jan 3rd. Anyone who cancelled around the same time, or shortly after playing 'the competitor' would have similar Q1 cancel dates. Mine along with the rest of regular raiding guild of about 40. I can't speak for others, but there will be more cancellations showing later.

Originally Posted by Dawon

Want more statistic bullshit? Here is mine:

14/16 in my wowguild quit wow for TOR (2 remained), 3 of the "deserters" have also quit TOR now, none of them returned to WoW tho.... awesome interesting info, ya?

Seriously, the reason it's "stable" over 10m are all the peeps that (no offence) stupidly locked themselves with the annual ripoff-diablo-package, it's scary that despite this "deal", wow still manage to lose 100k peeps... In one year, we'll be down to 5m (when the annual expire), but it doesnt matter as the world also ends in dec 2012! All is good, you can play until you die wow-peeps, gz!

Do you understand that nobody locks themselves to the annual pass? You can stop paying at any time and the only consequence is you don't get your free D3 and your MoP beta guarantee.

10 MILLION! WHELP, I better pack my bags. I'm gonna go find an MMO that isn't dying. Now lets see, which MMO has more than 10million subs......

Originally Posted by sosleapy

i personally know only a handful of ppl that did the annual pass to get into beta for MoP to just see if they wanna stick around wow longer. i have it too and that is my plan. so idk what i am doing at that time. i am currently subbed to Rift and i love it. IMO i love the way it looks and it feels IMO different than wow. i really hope blizz does something good in MoP for their sake or i have a feeling they will loose alot more subs. this seems to be the general consensus of ppl on my server in wow.

I bought into the annual pass and honestly I'm regretting it. Dragon Soul is...not worth clearing for a year, and while the beta and Diablo 3 are definitely decent perks, in retrospect I would have rather taken my chance with the beta and just bought Diablo 3.

The annual pass was a way to pad their subscription base for the lull period that's happened with every expansion, and it seems to have worked.

The only thing I will say, is that the server populations don't seem to fit the subscriber numbers. Many servers have kind of died out, LFR queues are getting kind of long, and more and more raiding guilds are on hiatus.

So while yeah, the 10 million number is certainly nothing to shake a stick at, it's difficulty for me to recommend people return to the game in its current state, considering the status of so many servers

it wouldn't be surprising to see it go back up with the release of Mists of Pandaria this year.

The winter is coming...

Originally Posted by backupoffmeson

Do you understand that nobody locks themselves to the annual pass? You can stop paying at any time and the only consequence is you don't get your free D3 and your MoP beta guarantee.

Umm no then blizzard will send your info to a collection agency to get the rest of there money that you said you would pay in the contract.

I actually found this graph from an old thread on MMO, which shows that subs have declined as an expansion winds down for the last two expansions (Cata and Wotlk). It seems to have incomplete data, though, so I'm exactly sure how accurate the numbers themselves are on there. http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/WoW.png

Subs actually did go up through part of Wotlk before they started a decline according to the graph, which differentiates it from Cata where the sub decline started happening early on (though Blizzard, at least, believes a large part of that was the difficulty of Cata at the beginning being higher than the difficulty of Wotlk, which is why we'll go back to a more casual-friendly launch on MoP it seems).

Good news all around.

Originally Posted by Asatru

Fabricated information.

Tin foil hat much?

Originally Posted by davep

lol how was it a trick? You make it sound like people forced themselves to play wow to just get D3 for free which for some might be the case but others I doubt it. Also with them delaying D3 they screw themselves because by the time it comes out I'll have half a year into the annual sub. They were probably hoping doing the annual sub and then releasing D3 a month or 2 after would lessen the load on servers and would save them money, which now won't be as much of a case since people will only have about 6 months of paying instead of 8-10.

Blizzard enticed players with a "Tyraels Charger" WoW mount, FREE Diablo 3 (Which is bullshit, you've already paid for it in full 2x with the Annual Pass) and Guaranteed MoP Beta Invite, 2 of which cost Blizzard absolutely NOTHING to give players (In-Game Mount and an Email) only as a ploy to bloat the Subs for the Q4 data. Now, in order to keep the Mount, Invite, (Free?) Diablo 3 you need to keep yourself locked into the Annual-Fees which only proves to feed the Subs #. If you were to cancel it at any time before a payment installment is made, you lose everything.

Admiral Akbar, where were you in the Players Time of Need?!

Can I cancel my World of Warcraft subscription at any point during the 12-month term?
By taking advantage of this special promotion, you are committing to a 12-month World of Warcraft subscription, and you cannot cancel your subscription until the 12-month term of the agreement has ended.
For additional questions, please review the legal document.

But yeah, the annual pass is great value for money. It just may not be for you if you're planning to quit WoW. Duh.

People who aren't educated Economists or other seasoned folk should really just please keep their mouths shut about passing off as irrefutable fact that their explanations are why WoW is "dying". The only reason I'm not playing WoW is because as far as my enjoyment of the game goes, Blizzard has neutered Warriors. They're not fun to play for me, so I will be returning for MoP like day one.

But for now, I'd just gotten into PvP and watching Warriors there is just a huge downer. For -me-, I don't care about why you think I'm wrong yadda yadda. I'll be taking this time to try out other MMOs like Aion, now that it's gone FTP. Always wanted to give it a shot but never had a rig that could play it well. And Rift where I'm just about ready to start raiding.

Zomg! WoW must be dead since 600k+800k+300k+100k subs are gone! . . . . . Oh, wait... . . . . . There is still 10M subs ongoing!....Seems WoW AIN'T dead! /loop

10M but a majority is in asia. How many subs do they have left in the west ?

Originally Posted by Hobb

Normally Christmas is the time they have an increase in subs, but it looks like the increase during the holidays wasn't enough to offset the lost from the previous months. Now that the holidays are over Q1 will more than likely have an increase in lost subs.

How could you possibly think that Q1 will have an increase in subs? Q1 will be 3 months of absolutely no new content. I wouldn't be surprised if sub losses broke the 7 digit mark in Q1.