Im enjoying the game and 10.3 Million others are and i could careless if anyone leaves, i have seen worst days for this game and im not to shit worried
Im enjoying the game and 10.3 Million others are and i could careless if anyone leaves, i have seen worst days for this game and im not to shit worried
I know, I added these remarks to my post before you guys finished your messages.Mynsc: those numbers went up primarily because of box sales for Cata. Looking at non-GAAP numbers for Q3, actual recurring income is in decline from the previous year's quarter. Say that again: quarterly revenue without deferred Cata sales is lower than the lowest point of Wrath.
Not saying it's not true, but I haven't seen any source supporting this.Most of this quarter loss come from China, but most of the 900k that left before this quarter were from NA/EU.
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"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
NA/EU had been growing until WotLK, China/Asia grew until WotLK hit. See a patern? :>
Geez, everyone, dead horse is dead. And beaten!
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Not really/significantly. The numbers went up a little shortly after the release, which you´d expect when something brand-new and (at first) exciting hits. But it soon plateaued afterwards. And you have to remeber that they played TBC for nearly 4 years in China and yet the market still grew. It just seems very strongly that there is a correlation.
OMG only 10.3 million subscribers left!?!?!?!?? Holy crap! Next...
1 - WoW is certainly not dead, but is surely declining at fast pace, 1.7m less subs in 9 months is alot, people need to understand this is a huge loss in revenue for any company
2 - 800k less subs in the quarter that Cataclysm also got released in China, and according to Activision/Blizzard most of losses were in China, means that the game was really badly accepted in China.
3 - Activision/Blizzard announced a 148million in profits, but most of the profit came from value-added services (server transfers and the like) Source
4 - Activision/Blizzard knew about this before Blizzcon, and introduced the 12month plan to retain revenue, and possible try to slow down the decline in subs, cause once you sign u basically saying that for 12months you will pay a sub, and they offered people D3 as eye candy to the noobs that signed for it. No matter how good or bad 4.3 and MoP will be, people that signed still have to pay for it
5 - Depending in how well MW3 and its Elite service performs, the next Q4, will most likely still show profits for Activision/Blizzard, but i think the subs will go down even further, mainly cause BF3, Skyrim, MW3, AC:Revelation and SWTOR, all that are released in Q4. i'm gonna give a wild guess here but after Q4 Subs will be around 8.8million (swtor will hurt, and it will hurt them bad in Q4)
Regardless of most opinons either defending or attacking Blizzard are these figures indicate a 14.1% drop in their playerbase in the last 3 quaters (9 months) since Cataclysm was released. This represents a minimum of a bit under $230 million in lost revenue.
You may say "who cares they still have 10 million subs they won't miss that much money" or you may be on the other side saying "omg so many lost subs wow is gonna die". Well neither is particularly true but $230 million is a LOT of money regardless of who you are and how much you normally make and I guarentee that their shareholders will not be happy with them.
Up until recently it has always been a, relative, minority that weren't happy with WoW but since Cata release that minority is evidently becoming larger and larger. There have been a lot of broken promises and neglect over the last 10 months or so and it shows in the loss in players.
In my OPINION the losses are down to a number of things:
1. Shear neglect of PvP on all fronts.
2. Easy/boring PvE content combined with over-nerfing everything they can touch with the nerfbat.
3. Lack of anything to do outside raiding and PvP.
Starting with PvP. If you disagree with this then fair enough but I'd love a photo of the cave you've been living in for the last 9 months. It must be wonderful in there. It's clearly evident from the 4.3 patch notes and discussions (or lack thereof) that they have given up on PvP until MoP. Arena is in the most broken and unbalanced state it's ever been in and RBG's have been a flop since day 1 of Cata.
PvE... Well... If I remember correctly it was meant to be a MASSIVE step up from WotLK difficulty with leading dungeons that tried to increase the skill of the average playerbase until they were ready for the "hard" raiding content. Well I can't blame them completely for caving after 2 weeks or so because so many people cried at them and afterall Bliz/Activision's moto is "MUST... HAS... MONEYYYYYYYYY $$$$$". Again can't blame them for that. They are a business. Heroic modes were supposed to provide a compromise though. Easier content for the masses so they could experience the content and the story and heroic modes for the smaller, hardcore playerbase to give them a challenge. Challenging = fun, broken/bugged = frustrating, faceroll = boring.
Lastly about nothing to do. Personally it does't bother me. I raid 1 night a week for 4 hours or so and log out and do other things the other 164 hours of the week but apparently a lot of players aren't happy about it. DMF may help or it may not. At the end of the day it's daily quests which are in my opinion the Devil in quest form. Possibly fun once. But everyday? No thanks. Nor do I particularly think that Pokémon in WoW will solve it too much but again that's just me.
TLDR: Significant loss in playerbase/revenue, shareholders won't be happy about it, wrong direction, my opinion which if you skipped to TLDR you won't care about anyway, etc, etc
The subscriptions will increase next year.
That's not an accurate chart.
Even the CEO of Blizzard said (before this quarters numbers) that the numbers were dropping faster than ever in Cata but he tried to justify that by saying that a lot of people came at the beginning of the expansion and thats why they had such a big loss.
Cata launched in China this quarter. 800k loss most of them are from China, the quarter that is launched into...
It's just going to show
"Blizzard doesn't need a WoW killer, they'll just do it by themselves"
not my words.
How come? Its not the first expansion they released. Pet battles and Pandas better be mighty good and fun if its to break the steady fact of WoW declining steadily for some time. We have seen WoWs peak in all but new markets.
Everyone knows that before a new expansion subs drops, once it hit they rise. No biggie there.
But their subs decline alot even with this taken into account.
WoW wont die but saying it will grow (outside new markets) is moronic (no you are not, im speaking in general terms).
WoW is becoming more of a dead horse in the oldest markets. A large portion of players have seen a few expansions by now and realised it will bring nothing new just another package ie. zone, talents, mini-games, achivements.
US/EU will decline, Brazil and new markets will be a nice boost, what happens in Asia will be extremly important.
All this while more and more challengers emerge, challengers who learned the leassons of all previous misstakes the so called 'WoW-Killers' made.
But soon after Mr Xi secured a third term, Apple released a new version of the feature in China, limiting its scope. Now Chinese users of iPhones and other Apple devices are restricted to a 10-minute window when receiving files from people who are not listed as a contact. After 10 minutes, users can only receive files from contacts.
Apple did not explain why the update was first introduced in China, but over the years, the tech giant has been criticised for appeasing Beijing.
In 2011 they lost 1.7mil with only Rift to compete with.
In 2012 WoW goes up against TOR, GW2 and The Secret World.
My guess is that no, they won't see 11mil again, let alone 12mil.
The last time WoW was at 10.3mil was in 2008. Again, with 3 juicy MMO's out in the next 6 months I can't see WoW holding 7mil (2mil NA/Eu, 5mil Asia) in 2012. Are Panda's the answer? Maybe, maybe not.
We're all guessing...even Blizzard at this point