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

Originally Posted by Duridi

I have yet to see someone not complain about a gaming company.

You would not even have had those games if it were not for Blizzard. Just had to throw it in there.

That's why I said the good with the bad ^^. Does not mean that bad is not bad.

Originally Posted by hiragana

Happy to hear 10million is still an amazing achievement and one that wont be surpassed for a long long time.

Well that number would be 9 million but they managed to dupe over a million people to pay for a year long sub to game that half of them are no longer playing.

Would be if that were true, but it's not. Only the NA/EU subs pay $15 per month. Asian subs pay in 4000 minute blocks for $4.66 USD, which comes to ~7 cents per hour.

It is still a cash cow so I figure that they're happy.

so Diablo lll isn't going to be out till second quater? what months is that...

Originally Posted by Fortuitous

Pendulum swings both ways, 7/8 people I know who went to play ToR with have cancelled. Of my friends guild that I did not play with (not included in the 8 people) have ALL quit ToR as well.

Anecdotal evidence is just that.

People talk like 2 or more MMO's cant co-exist, there is plenty of room out there in the market for multiple MMO's just because wow is the biggest doesnt mean that "OMG if your going to play an mmo it has to be World of warcraft or your the suck". i mean hell Ultima Online is still around, maybe not as big as it was before the wow bananza EQ is still around. Sure wow is the biggest, i love wow, just hate the direction its gone, im still subbed, but i also play ToR, and im loving it!!!! Someone may like mudkipz, just cuz i dont, does that make me wrong? or a baddie?

If you believe that they only lost 100k subscribers in this last quarter, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell to you for cheap!

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

It`s really funny to see comments from people who have internet access and too stupid or lazy to make a little deeper check.,With 10 million subscribers the WoW is not even in the top 10 mmo..the number 1 have more than 100 million..The WoW is really good place in the pay-per mmo but nowhere in all mmo..For example:"RuneScape is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in January 2001 by Andrew and Paul Gower, and developed and published by Jagex Games Studio. It is a graphical browser game implemented on the client-side in Java, and incorporates 3D rendering. The game has approximately 10 million active accounts per month, over 156 million registered accounts,[2] and is recognised by the Guinness World Records as the world's most popular free MMORPG."Plus..losing almost 2 million subscribers from the 12 milllion in a year..that`s an epic failure..no matter how great fan you are, that`s roughly 16%...huuuge from every aspect (especially financially...) This shows, the direction where the WoW moved was wrooooong:P

Originally Posted by BishopXQ

If you believe that they only lost 100k subscribers in this last quarter, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell to you for cheap!

I don't get into the numbers game, but because the last quarter went until December 31. Those who switched to another popular MMO that came out, would have cancelled their account at the end of December, meaning that they will still be shown as subscribed until first quarter numbers. Now, I'm sure in the next 3 months Blizzard will recoup many of those, especially through MoP beta and news in March.

I don't understand why people are comparing SWTOR's initial sales to WOW Q4 statements. It's ridiculously funny, in my opionion. You take a game that released in December and ASSUME that it's initial sales, mixed in with at the very least 60% of it's entire population still leveling, and say that they are being more successful than WoW because they lost 100,000 subs? With all the money it took Bioware/EA to produce this game, their profits are no where near that of Blizzards.That being said, I do believe both of these games can co exist because to be quite honest, they are very very different. SwTor right now is living off of people leveling. If you go to THEIR forums and see how many problems/glitches/and other variables plague the end game content, you can basically assume they are going to start losing subs, because mmo = longevity...if it weren't for end game content, there'd be little to separate it from a regular one player rpg. (besides the obvious world with multiple people in it) I'm not trying to hate either, I had a SwTor account, and liked the game a little bit, but still dropped my sub until a lot of the bugs are fixed. Maybe it's that I'm too used to WoW? You can call me a fanboy, flame all you want, I'm not trying to troll. I just believe that some aspects of MMOs should be a given, and ToR disappointed me in this department (most notably the auction house). It's like... if Ford released a 2012 model, but didn't bother to include a cd player, especially when the same thing released 6 years ago had one. Hopefully that's not too far over your heads.Cheers.

Originally Posted by mundak

Well that number would be 9 million but they managed to dupe over a million people to pay for a year long sub to game that half of them are no longer playing.

Even if this were true, who's fault is that? Definitely not Blizzards. People should've known by know if they're not playing at this point that they probably had pretty strong feelings of quitting the game when the service was announced. So why the hell would they go on to pay for the annual pass if they already knew they likely weren't going to be playing for very much longer? Don't see how this could possibly be any sort of "duping" on Blizzard's part.

---------- Post added 2012-02-11 at 02:13 AM ----------

Additional note, remember when everyone was saying Quarter 3 numbers didn't matter, Quarter 4 is what we should be worrying about? Now, all of a sudden, Quarter 4 isn't what we should worry about, but Quarter 1 is!

I say stop worrying at all. World of Warcraft will still be as playable as it is now, with the same average players on servers, and the same queue times for dungeons and LFR, etc... for a long time to come. If you still like it 5 years from now, you'll still be playing it. If not, you'll have moved on to a different game, or you won't be playing MMO's at all anymore. Why does it matter what someone else is doing? Why does it matter that someone else still likes a game that you don't anymore?

Originally Posted by Veyne

Even if this were true, who's fault is that? Definitely not Blizzards. People should've known by know if they're not playing at this point that they probably had pretty strong feelings of quitting the game when the service was announced. So why the hell would they go on to pay for the annual pass if they already knew they likely weren't going to be playing for very much longer? Don't see how this could possibly be any sort of "duping" on Blizzard's part.[COLOR="red"]?

Yea, I agree. The word 'duping' is kinda of crazy to use, as if Blizzard used a sleight of hand tactic to make sure people kept playing, knowing full well there wasn't going to be any kind of 'mass exodus' these doomsayer's keep believing. Hell, I've been paying for this game every month for the last three years, and when I did the annual pass it was pretty much "well I might as well get a free copy of Diablo since I know I'm already going to pay another year anyway".

TBH, if you signed up for a year sub just to get a mount, then well, that's your own problem.

It's so annoying to see what kind of person the gamer of today has become. During the first 3 years of WoW only very few people cared about class balance, new content, the number of people playing wow or bug abuses. They played the game because they enjoyed it and that was it. Today it suddenly matters how many fucking people are playing wow/swtor or whatever, lots of people cry every day about class balance and how broken their class is and every bug gets abused. The way people are playing MMO's today is in my opinion the reason the games feel less rewarding and challenging (and obviously the fact that most people have played this game for several years). In the beginning of WoW there wasn't much content offered but the people had fun doing random stuff like fighting each other in Hilsbrad etc. Another thing that bothers me with the player base today is the mindset of most people. Many of them think that they have paid Blizzard their money and now they owe them the fucking game they want. But Blizzard owes them nothing the only thing they are trying to do right now is hold as many players as possible(Which are the casuals just look at the raid stats posted on MMO) to make money. They wont put in any brand new additions to WOW nowadays because of titan. ( why would they fucking hinder their next mmo anyways) So just get over it and play another game or keep bashing a game just to boost your high and mighty ego for absolutely nor reason. In the end I hope that WOW will lose more subs so only the people that want to enjoy the game play it and have fun doing so and everyone else is gone doing something else so I can enjoy the game I like. In short in my opinion it's not Blizzard destroying the game the people playing it are destroying it. (Obviously i don't agree with every decision made by Blizzard)

Out of that 10M, around 5M+ are in china, Less than 1M in Brazil and coupla hundred thousands subs are in other regions that are not EU and US. These are the markets that no other big MMO has entered yet, so if you are going to compare subs subtract those numbers from 10M and then tell me how WoW is doing.

Real WoW subs number is probably somewhere between 3M and 4M.

Originally Posted by Deleo

Out of that 10M, around 5M+ are in china, Less than 1M in Brazil and coupla hundred thousands subs are in other regions that are not EU and US. These are the markets that no other big MMO has entered yet, so if you are going to compare subs subtract those numbers from 10M and then tell me how WoW is doing.

Real WoW subs number is probably somewhere between 3M and 4M.

I wasn't aware people playing in Asian markets don't count as people. Good to know.

Originally Posted by xanzul

I wasn't aware people playing in Asian markets don't count as people. Good to know.

Well, in the Asian markets they don't use subscriptions...they use game time. Those numbers are a lie. NA above all has been hit big time, and the only way they stabilized the WoW subscriptions in NA was from the annual pass which was clever. But, people are now getting pissed because the WoW expansion and D3 might cross paths for game time, rather then what was expected, a first quarter release when Deathwing was old news and is a good time filler until the expansion hits.

I did laugh about the DOTA drama. Blizzard has no right to DOTA when they made empty promises to Custom Map mods about making money on custom maps in Starcraft 2. People tend to forget that exciting feature which they were bringing to the Starcraft World....but quietly swept it under the rug. Something like the IRL auction house though, god forbid they can't release the game without that complete....need those micro transactions. Looks good on them, I hope they lose and have to rename their Blizzard DOTA.

---------- Post added 2012-02-11 at 06:55 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Razirm

My god, I have never heard such utter shit in all my life.
It is not in "Activi$ion or Bli$$ards" to fake this shit, the consequences are too big to even think about it. Do you understand the world of shit they would be in if they were "fudging" numbers?
I don't understand why people call out that this is fake info (I know you're not the 1st to say this sort of thing). Just be told that this IS the figures, that's it, end of story.

Because it is, they guess on subscription numbers in asian markets. They don't do subscriptions, they pay for TIME.

Originally Posted by xanzul

I wasn't aware people playing in Asian markets don't count as people. Good to know.

It's a matter of comparing apples to oranges ... Blizz amassed such playerbase, because they promote WoW on bazilion markets. If you compared WoW subscription with subscription of other MMOs based on regions, the difference wouldn't be so big.

Originally Posted by Scarzi

Well, in the Asian markets they don't use subscriptions...they use game time. Those numbers are a lie. NA above all has been hit big time, and the only way they stabilized the WoW subscriptions in NA was from the annual pass which was clever. But, people are now getting pissed because the WoW expansion and D3 might cross paths for game time, rather then what was expected, a first quarter release when Deathwing was old news and is a good time filler until the expansion hits.

I did laugh about the DOTA drama. Blizzard has no right to DOTA when they made empty promises to Custom Map mods about making money on custom maps in Starcraft 2. People tend to forget that exciting feature which they were bringing to the Starcraft World....but quietly swept it under the rug. Something like the IRL auction house though, god forbid they can't release the game without that complete....need those micro transactions. Looks good on them, I hope they lose and have to rename their Blizzard DOTA.

---------- Post added 2012-02-11 at 06:55 AM ----------



Because it is, they guess on subscription numbers in asian markets. They don't do subscriptions, they pay for TIME.

I suppose simple math is too difficult to use for everyone who keeps repeating this? They pay for time, and not per month so lets use our heads a bit. Tally up the entire amount of profits gained each month from "time sold" and divide it by subscription cost (15 USD). The resulting number is roughly how many "subs" you have in the Asian market. What is so difficult to understand about that?

am i the only one wondering how freaking busy the beta will be... with so many anual passes.

Originally Posted by Repefe

It's a matter of comparing apples to oranges ... Blizz amassed such playerbase, because they promote WoW on bazilion markets. If you compared WoW subscription with subscription of other MMOs based on regions, the difference wouldn't be so big.

Jeah, those competitors cant offer their product like blizzard does ... oh wait!

Oh and while we're at it ... could you please provide the source you backup that claim on? Very interested to read it .