Why did MoP sell so little compared to previous expansions?

[Coils]

Theme, not because Cata ended on a down note.

WoD undoubtedly ended at the lowest point in WoW's history in terms of active players - Legion outsold MoP.

[Snackpack]

Was burnt out on WoW and assumed MoP would be worse than Cata, as each expansion was getting worse. Didn't like the theme either.

Kinda regret not playing MoP because it looked great, aesthetically at least.

[Khime]

No reason.
Blizzard just had wrong number.

3.3 million is really not a good number.
Even FF14 sold 6 million copies.

This thread is about sales on the first day or in the first week. The original release of FFXIV took two months to sell 603 thousand copies, and the re-release as FFXIV:ARR had first-week sales of 184,000 copies.

So yes, 3.3 million is really a good number, especially compared to the not-quite 0.2 million FFXIV:ARR managed in the same amount of time.

[Pony Soldier]

Because it was an obvious rip off of Kung Fu Panda.
/sarcasm

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People disliked Cataclysm and gave up on WoW, and then found out about Pandas and hated it even more without even playing it and therefore didn't buy it.

Still can't wrap my head around people hating Pandaren SO much that they can't/ won't play but yet are totally fine with fireball throwing space goats, werewolves, shape shifting trolls, line dancing cows, mad scientist gnomes/ goblins, magic vampires (Blood Elves) and 10,000+ year old purple elves...

Because that stuff is cool. Asian pandas are dumb and like I said it was a rip off of Kung Fu Panda and MoP was made for little kids. Also Asian themes are dumb and not meant for WoW. Only European cultures.
/more sarcasm

[AbalDarkwind]

I'll parrot everyone and say it was a combination of the very disappointing Cataclysm, and 4.3 especially, combined with a very divisive theme.

I'm a fan of the Pandaren, and play one as my main. As much as I loved MoP, though, it was a bit shortsighted of Blizzard to make an entire expansion about them. The Pandaren as a playable race were divisive way back when people were speculating about the Alliance race in TBC. I find it hard to believe that Blizzard didn't notice that.

To everyone who says Pandaria and the Pandaren don't 'fit' WoW, though, I can't imagine any of you playing Warcraft before Warcraft III. Gnomes and Goblins were totally absurd in Warcraft II, and no one complained. Night Elves were totally different than anything that came before them, including their Asian architecture. The idea of a Far Eastern themed continent and race, isolated for 10000 years, being different from the rest of the races wasn't a new idea when MoP came along, so I really have no idea where that sentiment comes from.

[Katchii]

Because it was an obvious rip off of Kung Fu Panda.
/sarcasm

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Because that stuff is cool. Asian pandas are dumb and like I said it was a rip off of Kung Fu Panda and MoP was made for little kids. Also Asian themes are dumb and not meant for WoW. Only European cultures.
/more sarcasm

That's kind of my point. The cartoonish art style of all of WoW is pretty childish/ Saturday morning cartoony on the whole. The themes, moral dilemmas, situations the game tries to tackle are often not childish though (albeit very cliche' and/ or contrived). So some people are totally OK with all of this other cartoony, childish stuff...but not OK with this new. cartoony. childish...stuff?

It just doesn't compute with me that people would be so childish over something like that. MoP was IMO a great expansion, with a pretty decent story. Yeah the Pandaren theme, and many of the characters were a little whimsical, but I thought that made it fun. It's a fuckin game for crying out loud, stop taking it so seriously that you simply cannot enjoy it because of PANDAS.

[Pony Soldier]

That's kind of my point. The cartoonish art style of all of WoW is pretty childish/ Saturday morning cartoony on the whole. The themes, moral dilemmas, situations the game tries to tackle are often not childish though (albeit very cliche' and/ or contrived). So some people are totally OK with all of this other cartoony, childish stuff...but not OK with this new. cartoony. childish...stuff?

It just doesn't compute with me that people would be so childish over something like that. MoP was IMO a great expansion, with a pretty decent story. Yeah the Pandaren theme, and many of the characters were a little whimsical, but I thought that made it fun. It's a fuckin game for crying out loud, stop taking it so seriously that you simply cannot enjoy it because of PANDAS.

Yup I know I'm with ya man, I was being sarcastic there but yeah I agree with everything you said here. I also thought it was a great expansion and it was actually my favorite for a while until Legion came out. I LOVED the Pandarens and the monk classes and I LOVED the whole theme too with music, environments and everything. I'm really into that stuff so it's no wonder I loved it so much.

I don't want to sound like an SJW but to me the whole anti-Asian theme shit going on back then seemed kind of racist to me. I mean I don't take offense to that stuff but just an observation I made since literally every other culture is fine except for Asian because that somehow doesn't fit in WoW. Literally the main source of hate for that game was because it was Asian stuff basically. They're just idiots is all I can say about them.

[Anakso]

Pandas.
Coming out after the worst expac in the history of WOW(yes, worse than WOD).

The other stuff might be more your personal complaints but I think these two are the big reasons the expansion sold less. MoP is the only expansion I didn't buy the day of launch too and those are the two big reasons.

I quit at the end of Catta because it was just such an awful expansion, and I had pretty much nothing to do in the game after stopping raiding, and I think a lot of people would have been pretty disheartened after Catta.

and the Pandas thing basically to elaborate, the expansion had absolutely zero hype factor compared to any other expansion. We get to play a race I don't care about, a class that doesn't sound exciting, in a land I've never heard of that has no real big villain to the point that all they could do with the trailer was have a pandaren embarrass an orc and a human. There was just really nothing about the lead up to MoP that gave me any reason to be interested again, where as both WoD (Although it wasn't great either) and Legion did.

[Osmeric]

I guess I could understand why people would call Cata the worst expansion Pre-WoD...but I don't see how people can Post-WoD.

Back to the OP, what is so bad about MoP sales? It's better than BC and only slightly behind WotLK. I'd say it's middle of the road.

I had more to do in WoD than in Cata. Cata was so disappointing I was unsubbed for most of 2011.

[Softbottom]

Pandas were a joke made into an expansion /thread

[Lashiec]

Most people have hit on the two major factors: coming off the heels of a poor Cataclysm expansion, and the panda theme. But, the people who are lashing out at 'panda haters' are off base. Well, sure there are people in the world who hated the pandas, but that wasn't the real problem.

The real problem was this: imagine yourself as somebody who doesn't automatically buy every expansion. You see the marketing for Pandaria. Some panda that is spin-kicking random dudes. Is this going to inspire you to buy in for an expansion + monthly fee?

It wasn't 'I'm passing on this because I hate pandas', it was 'Is that all you got? What compels me to buy this?' Where's the lore? Where's the major characters? What's the 'hook'? Where's the big conflict?

Maybe goblins are just as silly as pandas, but there wasn't a whole expansion centered around goblins.

[Eazy]

I didn't buy it because of Pandas.

[Lime]

The largest factors were probably a combinations of Cata driving people away from WoW and the silly theme MoP was looking to provide. Even MMO-Champion had to tell people in one of their news announcements that MoP wasn't a joke by the devs.

[Deleted]

It may have had a weak launch, but Mists of Pandaria has done a pretty impressive job in keeping subscribers playing compared to Warlords of Draenor and Cataclysm. I'd say retention is far more important than launch numbers.

As to why is anyone's guess, it's all speculation. I think Dragon Soul was probably the weakest raid in World of Warcraft's history and dragged far too long, along with the patch having very little to do in general. On top of that, a lot of people disliked Mists of Pandaria's theme.

In the end, good word of mouth over the quality and content-rich nature of the expansion probably spread, which led to the stable subscriber count (aside from a drop-off near the end of the SoO drought, which is to be expected)

[Luckx]

Pandaria had only 7millions subs, Cata had 9millions, WOTLK/TBC had 12millions and During TBC and Vanilla sub numbers wasnt falling they was growing.

Pandaria was full of bots and pandaria had horrible Garrosh storyline.

Some pandaria gameplay improvments and toys was great but Garrosh storyline was bad.

[Halicia]

I had more to do in WoD than in Cata. Cata was so disappointing I was unsubbed for most of 2011.

Setting aside the fact that "there's more to do in WoD", I also had *more fun* doing the same stuff in WoD that was in Cata.

Cata had a couple great novelty missions. (Joust, Katamari Damacy), but they were generally unrepeatable. The Uldum questline was pretty great for one or two bouts....

But just *questing* in WoD was much more fun. Oho, that useless green reward you got is a great epic upgrade! Having that possibility around every corner helps alleviate the grindy unrewarding feeling of *having* to finish useless quests for zone completion.

[Teaklog]

The people who mention Pandas, along with the culture specific to the expansion, are either biased or ignorant to the fact that the Warcraft lore had anthropomorphic races since the dawn of times. It's actually disheartening, seeing all the hate against the pandas. If WoW launched now, I bet the community would be in an uproar about worgen/tauren and be all like f*cking furries or who knows what other ridiculous argument.

No, the pandas aren't the reason MoP didn't sell in big numbers. It's because it came out after the wrong expansion, at the wrong time. A lot of people quit after the failure of a patch that the Dragonsoul one was, so it's only natural skeptics chose not to jump in the hype bandwagon. If Legion didn't continue the story that WoD started and chose to tackle a different antagonist and a different story, it would have tanked big time as well, regardless of the features/promises it brings. As it stands, Blizzard played it smart and decided to have Legion pick up the scraps of WoD, which made a lot of people want to see how this whole demonic invasion thing pans out.

Its funny, because you mention a fairly large group of ignorant people who did not buy the expansion because of pandas, then say the reason for the low numbers is because it came out at the wrong time. Its both. Poor marketing was a turnoff for many people (and you mention that group) and it came out after cataclysm. All through mists of pandaria, when people who didn't play WoW saw me playing, they'd ask me "is that the game with the pandas?" I enjoyed mists too, and I thought the theme was alright. You can't deny the fact that although YOU were not turned off by pandas, many others were. Those didn't buy the expansion the first week, hence the low opening numbers. In addition to those, a lot of those who were on the border of buying it were turned of by dragon soul (or vice versa).

[xenogear3]

This thread is about sales on the first day or in the first week. The original release of FFXIV took two months to sell 603 thousand copies, and the re-release as FFXIV:ARR had first-week sales of 184,000 copies.

So yes, 3.3 million is really a good number, especially compared to the not-quite 0.2 million FFXIV:ARR managed in the same amount of time.

WoW is different.
If you don't play the first month, you fell behind on gear.

Especially WoD and Legion, there is no catch up on the artifact weapon and legendary ring.

[Spotnick]

Only because CAT added flying to the entire world. Content/class wise, WOD is the worst expansion/MMO ever created.

Actually, everybody was praising WOD when it was released and how fun it was, the problem was that everything became completely obsolete too soon with it, plus if WOD had lasted only one year as expected, probably people wouldn't have had so much issues with it.

But let's be honest, when one of the main architect of an expansion leaves before it's even released, you know there will be problems, they probably had to recover from that and it hit them hard.. and it's exactly what happened, the launch content was fine, the content patches after that were very bad probably because the teams were restructuring and they had very little time to adjust... and who knows, maybe there were problems internally which lead to Ghostcrawler's departure, it's speculation and we'll probably never know.

Legion is the first real xpac with the new team, the launch is once again good, now the real test is the content patches and hope the last patch won't be a year.

As for the OP, if I had to say, it's because there was no main villain in MOP... every other xpac you knew who the bad guy was from the start and what you had to achieve... I won't say WOD because I'm starting to believe WOD was done exclusively because of the WOW movie and to reintroduce characters from the movie, and Legion was the plan all along.

[KayRule]

I personally didn't purchase the expac because it had flying on launch = no meaningful world content.

And I was right.