Originally Posted by
brok3nh3lix
This, blizzard has stated to their investors (who lying to could cause a whole mess of legal issues), that they are not seeing significant increases in the rate of player loss, but rather they are seeing less new players as time goes on. They have always had a constant churn of players, just there is less new players coming in. Among other reasons mentioned above an a few others, people fail to realize that wow is well past its peak in market awareness saturation or brand awareness saturation, Its peak in the area happened back some where around BC, maby wrath. This brand/market awareness is the % of people who are aware of the product. Most every one in the US/Europe and wows main markets will at least know that wow is a video game, probably know its online in some way, and that it involves a lot of time. These people have generally made the decision to play or not, and the amount of available people they could possibly attract new to the game will diminish over time as it is inverse to the amount of people who are brand aware. No amount of marketing will have a significant effect at this point in that regard. Marketing at this point is aimed at reminding people who have left that the game is here, in hopes they might want to come back. To expect them to keep the same number of new incoming players the same as BC or Wrath is ridiculous and unfounded. Player retention rates havn't changed dramatically, and its also ridiculous to think that after nearly 10 years that there would not be players who simply move on, no matter how good the game is. If they didn't make many of the changes they had, and stayed stagnant in the BC era design philosophy, they likely would have far fewer subs than they do now (though we cant accurately measure this because it is not the case, just as we can not accurately say that they would have more subs now if they had for the same reason).
add this to every thing else above, such as aging player base with new priorities, market shifts such as the influx of high quality, F2P mmos. Regional changes such as Asian markets where the profit model isn't even the same, and they have games that are not available here that are also popular competing with wow. Its death by 1000 cuts, not a few big ones, and its inevitable. I find it amazing that they have the player base they still do while still using a sub based model in their primary markets, after this long of time. People point to LoL and its huge numbers, but there they count every one who logs in once in a month or what ever, and there's no cost to that player to only log in once a month, for wow, the cost is the same as if they logged in every day, not to mention its unclear how they count people with multiple smurf accounts, which again, costs them nothing.