What do you think WoWs minimum viable population is?

[Deleted]

A minimum viable population in nature is the lower boundary in which a species can survive in the wild. Any lower and it suffers from an extreme risk of extinction.

Given the recent earnings call it's made me question exactly what population WoW needs to be sustainable. There must surely be some point in which the plug would be pulled if current trends continue.

This is not a thread consisting of the following:

• WoW is dying
• WoW is not dying
• WoW will go F2P some point in the near future
• A discussion in itself concerning the earnings call

All I'm interested in is what people think the minimum viable population of WoW is before it reaches a considerably high chance of being ended.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Financially? I'd say 1 million is probably the event horizon.

Below that servers are going to start getting shut down for cost savings, and Blizz may just release a "last" expansion with custom content tools.

But truth be told I think we're going to start seeing big changes as early as 3 million.

[Feali]

Trade Chat is already dead on many servers. We need to put more servers together if the numbers don't start growing again. Soon.

[Deleted]

With full realm-merging it can easily continue the zombie walk below the 1M, as other games do.
What a disgusting twitching corpse will it be!

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Trade Chat is already dead on many servers. We need to put more servers together if the numbers don't start growing again. Soon.

I would never judge server health by Trade Chat.

I'd never look at Trade Chat honestly.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

2.5-3million

[Feali]

I would never judge server health by Trade Chat.

I'd never look at Trade Chat honestly.

There is literally nothing but gold spammers there. NOTHING.

[ro9ue]

EQ1 is still chugging along with ~250k.

I imagine WoW is a little more expensive to run for various reasons but I think they can make it work at ~500k. That's still like what 90m a year.... if there's 500 people required to run WoW and they get paid an average of 80k a year... that's only 40m.

At 250k they are breaking even basically.

[clevin]

Viable in business terms? Probably around 1m though it depends on revenue per subscriber (Asian players are less lucrative than NA and EU from what I understand). But at 1m I don't think you'd get the expansions and patches we see now... I can't see them spending the resources on a game that is only pulling in, at most, $15m/month not because that's not decent money ($180m per year gross plus box sales and services is a lot of money) but because they may well reach a tipping point in two directions:

First, they might decide that those resources are better applied to another IP with more future growth. After all, the underlying premise here is the subs are declining. That might mean they reallocate the devs and do minimal new content and just let the game go.

Second, the good devs and artists etc will want to work on hot products that bring them prestige and are more fun. Everyone likes working on the new, shiny product that's the current darling. No one really wants to be working on the shambling corpse of a once great game. That will hurt content quality and quantity.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

There is literally nothing but gold spammers there. NOTHING.

This is true.

Also Thunderfury.

Which is why I never have it on anymore. At least LFG has actual discussion now.

[Deleted]

Hell..Blizzard could make WoW a pet project?

Aren't you the dude that comes to every vanilla servers topic with "Why would they do something if it doesn't make bagillions of moneys?"

[DarkAmbient]

From the player's point of view, as long as there are enough players for one US server and one EU server, it's viable. From a business point of view, I have no idea.

[Gurbz]

Considering EverQuest ran on a subscription model for 12 years before going free to play, releasing regular expansions the whole time, without ever having much over 1 million subs at any time...I think WoW is going to be fine for quite some time.

[WarpKnight]

Rift is well below 1 million and it's on it's second expansion now, so such a business model does seem to be viable.

I don't think Blizz has the same expectations with regards to product success as Trion or other such companies, though, I would expect them to become righteously indignant and make massive cuts before then.

[Echo419]

At 500k subscribers WoW would still make 7.5 million / month.

That's 90 million $ /year from WoW subs alone, excluding services and box costs and physical store sales. That's a lot of money.

[Deleted]

500k-1000k