WoW Down to 7.7 Million Subscribers, Activision Blizzard Purchases Vivendi's Shares

For all of us who's played for years and years, we've always wondered if WoW would ever end. It's such a great game. We all wondered how. To me it's clear. A slow, slow drawn out end.

This doesn't effect me at all. I'll keep playing and I'll keep taking my periodic breaks. I just hope Blizz doesn't do anything rash after this.

I just hope they will not try to balance their loss by selling more and more vanity items on the shop. I want them to try more on their new expansion and add more features and make more progressions paths. I really like in the 5.4 patch they go away from dailies and they give players control over their progression with the new currency (timeless coins if i remember correctly). If anyone can make a successful MMO, this is Blizzard and I want them to put their creativity to make more excited thinks and rethink many of their changes instead of throw more things to their store.

Originally Posted by OneSent

Oh, the investors will not be happy about this. They will start to panic and if Blizzard has even the slightest inclination to go to a free-to-play model, subscription losses like this and the ones from last quarter will only make it seem more profitable to those greedy shareholders than sticking with the sub model. Especially when you've got companies like EA boasting about their artificially inflated number of players who flooded back to SWTOR after it went F2P.

I love World of Warcraft and do not wish to see it go F2P. But, once that happens, the passion (what little left there is) will be completely gone and the death of the tried and true original MMO model will be sealed for good.

There are F2P/B2P options that can be used that are not be. For example, F2P for normal play, $5 p/m for HC dungeons and lfr and $10 per month for the full experience. Selling XP boosts, Trasmog items, mounts, etc on a real money store. The hard core people might not like that option but even they would be silly to not understand that Blizzard needs to do something. The problem that Blizzard has is that the process will accelerate. People will leave because their friends leave because it's a social game. No one wants to run around the world if there is no one there. They already made a big mistake not consolidating servers.

My daughters would probably play. They have no interest in raiding or dungeons but they would be running around in the world exploring. I will not pay $30 per month for them to play a couple of times a week. It's a waste. I can buy other games rather than do that. Getting them on board with F2P will make the world busier and can only be a good thing.

Originally Posted by bany

I am having A BLAST with 1:1 private servers.
classic and tbc.
i would pay for them too.

I could never do it. I'd worry the people behind the servers would just close down at any moment.

So after 10 months from MoP release WoW lost more subscribers then during 2 years of Cataclysm. For those who say it's becouse of summer...yeah the point is those numbers are from second quarter - April to June so it's not even summer break.

They better get their act together with the next expansion then, the amount of subscribers loss over the recent years is nothing to scoff at.

Originally Posted by Rsharr

Everyone that whines about it should learn some basic marketing. Go search about Product Life Cycle. Every product goes trough those fases. Things like coca-cola are exceptions.

If that's the case then blizzard failed at making WoW into Coca-Cola-ish product.

Originally Posted by Djouga

LOL @ people who think a 600k drop is relevant.

LIKE ALWAYS, this is mainly asians loss NO ONE gives a FUCK about. Let them play their shitty korean F2P games or Starcraft.

I love the people who feel it's their duty to protect "their" game and thus the company that make it at any point.

As somebody who's realm has slowly died over the last 2 years, I can tell you they're not all Asian.

Originally Posted by The Illusive Man

I think that the whole engine of WoW is simply outdated and no one wants to play with graphics and models from 2004. A fresh start in terms of engine would be a great idea to be able to compete with the recent MMO´s.

I can still remember when I still played WoW and AION got released and I first played it. I was shocked at how much better the whole textures, models and graphics looked compared to WoW and that was in 2008 !! Now we have 2013 and there is still this shitty old engine in WoW.

Graphics were proven again and again to be the least of game's problem. Just look at IOS or whatever its called and tell me with a straight face that IOS market is doomed to fail. The problem with WoW is that it tries to make everyone happy while at the same time refuses to make everyones happy by giving them excuses like "not enough resources"... well gee wiz blue sign.

wow is in a decline and will continue if they screw up next expac.
Doesn't mean it is dead...yet.

People who still enjoy the game will keep playing it, this is (not) the players having different desires, it is blizzard not having an active and effective input.

If my memory doesn't cheat on me...
Isn't it that Blizzards connection timeline to larger corporation is rather this:
It was Vivendi to put money into Blizzard at first, to fund their ability to increase their production teams? Activision came in later..
Now if my memory is correct, this development is then rather negative, since it seems to put Blizzard even more entangled with ATVI. I wish one had more insight into the business structure behind the scenes, and the possibility of whether Blizzard had the financial ability of breaking entirely free without having to answer to any partners.

Without hard data, the speculation over why the subs are lost really became a moot point.

Small changes may help though to stop this somehow...
The 50% valor buff... For Christs sake make this truly account wide, not just affecting toons on the same realm. It may actually help with reanimation of dead realms where still tons of currently abandoned toons exist. Finalize the system to make players able to send account wide mails cross realm. If I could send stuff to that old TBC toon I haven't played in ages anymore, I may actually play it again.. (that's an example, not a subjective demand. I have no TBC toon I haven't played in a while lol)

In fact, stop the nonsense of paid character transfer. It is nowadays a nonsense. It used to be justified to pay for it, because it involved a lot more work.
Nowadays it's a perfected system that ends in toons being moved in less than 15 minutes. Make realm transfers free for toons, and at the same time close high pop realms down, so they can no longer be overpopulated because everyone and their grandma wants to move there, since it's trendy to be on that realm.

If there is anything on the technical part of the game I see as the most negative impact then it's this:
The game is getting close to 10 years anniversary. With that said, stop the ongoing nonsense of class balancing. Stop listening to the QQ and demands of nerfing and buffing.
I am a professional IRL. I do my job, and I know my craft. I have a skill set. If after almost 10 years I still do not know my skills, I am not a professional...
Coming from there, after almost 10 years a constant class/spec balancing, with countless changes almost daily, is a very bad thing. That's unprofessional, that's a very bad performance. This aspect should long be a non-issue.
There will never be any true balance. And there shouldn't be one. Classes and specs should be unique from one another. Not everyone needs the same tools. Not everyone needs the same abilities. So instead of tinkering with the classes and specs, tinker with the content we mastering. We have 11 classes, now if - for example - a raid has 11 bosses, and each encounter gives an edge to one of the classes, at the end of the day, all classes are treated equally, and no one can bitch about how they are treated like an unwanted step child.
Why am I pointing this out? Because the majority of the players aren't geeks and nerds. They play the game for fun and leisure. They don't want to relearn their toons every few month. Playing WOW effectively requires a lot of work outside the actual game. This was always true, but it's a lot more work and study today as it was in older days.
And that is a bad thing.

Originally Posted by docterfreeze

Honestly never heard of that, I hear people blaming activision more than anything, and I would too. Activision is probably right up there with EA for most greedy gaming company.

I think Activision is worse than EA. EA don't publish all kinds of rubbish just for a chance of a few bucks (Activision's Deadpool as recent example).

Hmm yet another big sub drop. I dont wanner yell out WOW IS DIEING as i know ofc it is not. but i am wondering if this have made any alarm bells ring with the amout of subs they lost since the start of the Xpac. and also as far as i remeber there have not realy been any big MMO's in the time this xpac been out so wonder how it will be when stuff like Elder scrolls and wildstart get out there. Also wondering a little when will the numbers start to be steddy agien as we all know they wont drop 600k subs all the time untill there is nothing left :P

One more think i took note to is a small thing that i might just have missed. But always when the Quarter numbers come out and blizzard lose subs they always seem to say the same words that is something along the lines of ''This is normal subs will come and subs will go'' they dont seem to have said it this time.

Originally Posted by El Plastico

If they keep loosing 600k per quarter soon nobody will be left. They better get their shit together and stop shitting on us players.

There's always a decline of players at the end of each tier. Then people will comeback to run lfr normals for a few months and unsub again until the new expansion comes. Thats just standard procedure.

As long as they don't start dropping the quality of the game (due to less numbers, this could also mean an increase in quality instead) then sub numbers don't really effect me. Sure, i feel it occasionally as 1-2 players from my guild over the past like, 2 months have quit the game. But in general i've never really felt the sub drop. People say 25 mans are dying. Statistics show that, but i've never felt it. I've always had players to run 25 mans with, my LFR queues have always been the same, etc. The only place you can 'feel' it is on already dead servers. When you have like 4 Horde to every 100 Alliance, when one of those horde quits, you feel it.

All in all though, i don't see why the numbers are dropping? Burn out i guess? 5.4 looks like an amazing patch and 5.2 and 5.3 were pretty good pve wise. I can say though that the PVP in the game currently is pretty horrendous, but those PVP folks have always been pretty resilient in their ability to wait stuff out.

At the end of the day, if this post hadn't been made, i probably wouldn't of thought they were down to 7.7M. Probably due to the size of that 'small' number in itself. Regardless, its still almost a 50% sub drop from a few years back, even if 7.7M is 10 times the next MMO's playerbase.

*enter wow is dying comment here*

Originally Posted by Catharsius

There's always a decline of players at the end of each tier. Then people will comeback to run lfr normals for a few months and unsub again until the new expansion comes. Thats just standard procedure.

Look we don't need to over analyse the sub drop, but let's not make silly excuses either. WoW is in sharp decline due to a number of reason stated many times before, and this has little to do with a mid tier drop off.

As one of the subs that left the game (again), I can offer only my personal perspective on the reasons for doing so this time.

The main one by far that made me leave WoW this time is that there are many acceptable options for F2P or B2P. Not better or worse, just acceptable and much cheaper options. And these options are growing every month and become better every month.

The second problem by far (for me) in the general character development systems that are simplified/streamlined too much in WoW while the competition is going the other way. I understand this is a personal taste and I accept it as such, but between the "talent trees" of current WoW and the soul-system of Rift or the ability-wheel of TSW (again, among others) there is a massive gap that WoW can't cover with the current settings while others can (in Rift/TSW/etc you can still pick a build that does the job and stay with it forever or keep changing as little or much as you like). I mean, it just does not feel like an RPG anymore for me while other MMOS do, for better or worse

Finally, the social aspects of the game that brought me back before are becoming corroded. I am not saying that it's the game's fault, but 9 out of 10 of the people on my friends list are gone and I find some of them in those other MMOs. So when I left I was mostly playing with 1 or 2 friends and a bunch of strangers.

I will probably be back for 5.4 just to raid against Garrosh, but that will be it. The amount of changes Blizzard needs to implement for my taste in order to justify paying for a sub over the numerous F2P/B2P competitors would be enough to make a new game entirely. As such, WoW is pretty much done for me with 5.4, nostalgia of all the good times be damned. I hope the game stays around for the people that still enjoy it, but I will probably be having fun elsewhere.

Originally Posted by Renegade

No it won't, Blizz is only making two more expansion's, one for 90-95 and the last for 95-100.

Citation Needed.

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Originally Posted by Bichoverde

XXD

They killed the game long enough, you would expect.

They killed the goose that lays the golden eggs

And sure the figure is closer to 5 or 4 million

Err..if this is an official financial report Blizzard CAN'T lie about sub. numbers in it without people going to jail for fraud...and unless the executive/financial people at Blizzard have been drinking copious amounts of lead-based paint I really doubt they're that stupid.

No shit they lose subscribers when they treat their custumors badly, and ban people in banweaves, who has done nothing wrong. Furthermore telling them that they will never get their accounts back... GG blizzard.