Article explaining exactly why WoW subs are going down

[Samin]

The problem is that the peak of the MMORPG genre is passed. People cling to every new announced game as the salvation of the genre but so far they were always disappointed and will be with future games.
MMORPGs will continue to exist for quite some time that is sure, the genre isn't going to just go away but it won't be the big market anymore.
The audience has changed -and maybe someday we will not resort to malicious assumptions like "oh all the new players are ADD and lazy" when we face uncertainty- people don't want to grind out anymore, yes the memores of it are great ones for various reasons but were they faced with it now, they wouldn't accept it. The questing idea that got MMORPGs to the place they are is now one of it's downfalls. It's always the same, kill, gather, protect, deliver. The only thing games can do to fresh this up is by wrapping it in a nice packaging either by story telling (SWTOR) or by loosening up the flow (GW2) - but in the end it's always the same stuff and especially many long term MMORPG players have enough of it.

MMORPGs are now only number games anymore. Collect 10 of these, kill 20 of those, use item on 5 of that...and that's how people see it. They might realize that there is more around it, but in the end it's just the same basic concept. What made it great back in the day was the novelty. You had the illusion of it being a vast world with an immersive story. The games still have huge worlds with a great story, but your perception of it has shifted from seeing the game to seeing the mechanics behind it and this is what contributes to ruining the experience very much. Because games are always limited and in strict boundaries and always have been. What makes those very fond memories is inability or ignorance to see those boundaries, which gave the illusion of always something being there that you don't know yet. Once you know everything it gets boring (and in contrast to real world scenarios, you CAN know everything about a game engine and it's rules & limits)

If you're still new to the genre you're still able to have this immersive feeling for the story and the world, but because the cynicism is so wide spread, both ingame and outside in related forums and such, those new players get disillusioned much faster and become just as cynical and disappointed with what the game actually is in contrast to what was expected to be, was supposed to be and actually was as long as you were looking at it with a more naive and fresh eye.

[chuck123]

Definitely, they would never have needed to offer annual passes and amazing SoR deals back then as the game itself was so good that it marketed itself.

wasn't RaF with that zebra introduced in bc already ?

[candle86]

MMO's are loosing there luster. Gaming as a whole has moved on from the days of hardcore. Look around you, you can find it everywhere, people are no longer investing years to become perfect anymore. Instant gratification are the norms for gaming these days. When wow launched the market was much diffrent. Think about your average PC gamer at the time. Counter Strike 1.6, Quake III, Team Fortress Classic, Everquest, Half Life 2, ect. This was a time when singleplayer was a minimum of 10 hours your first go round, games like FarCry could last up to 20 hours. Multiplayer games required skill, this is the market wow launched into it, something PC gamers expected. Now look at the modern PC gaming crowd today.

Call of Duty, Battlefield BC2 and 3, Indie games are at an all time high, minecraft. The games that are hot and the style of them has been very popular for 4 years now, people like me who still devote time to Counter Strike, at least 10 hours a week are a dying breed. The MMO is falling prey to this

[Deficineiron]

So you'd rather play a game where you never saw the end bosses or raids and was isolated from the main story of the game? Or are you in that small minority that saw the end bosses before "normal raids" and mad that casuals get to see the boss now, too.

Did you even play BC? players understood that anyone could do progression raiding, if they were willing to put in the time and effort. It was that simple. If you didn't, you had heroic 5-mans that would remain challenging for essentially the whole expansion at t4 or lower gear levels, one and later another 10-man raid, and many optional grinds, and the option of actually having to put a decent amount of /played time into a new character (not 2 days or whatever it is, now).

I never saw t5 content in BC because I looked at a progression guild's schedule, and realized I would never put myself into that kind of time committment. It wasn't blizzard's fault, it wasn't the guild's fault, it was my decision because I was not willing to do what was needed to get that reward. The entire 'i paid 15 bucks this month I should see everything NOW' mentality just didn't exist then. Blizzard really opened a pandora box with that one.

[Eliathe]

Hey guys. Bergg here--you may remember me as the author of the Troll Regen Thread. Please check out my article, which attempts to list the specific reasons why WoW has recently lost subs. It's not an extremely serious article--I just hope that it may help some of you more easily identify what aspects of the game you may or may not like.

http://www.gatheryourparty.com/artic...what-happened/

I'd appreciate any and all criticism, as this is my first published article. --And if this is considered spam I am very very very sorry! Edit: Oh god, forgive the signature, it's more than a year old!

I think what you meant to call the article was "Article explaining exactly why WoW subs are going down IN MY OPINION" because to be honest with you that's what it is. You offer not proof whatsoever and use things like canceling Blizzcon completely out of context in order to serve your own purposes. You lay out grains of truth and than run wild with it with assumptions. I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just saying your a terrible blogger/journalist or whatever you want to call yourself.

[RandomGamer]

"I’d link you some evidence, but I’m too lazy."

I stopped reading at that point in the article.

[Deficineiron]

As of Q1 of 2012, their up.. Why must we make more WoW is dying threads?

Is this a fact or a guess?

I think they will be up in the west in q1 (no idea in china), but I make a point of saying that I EXPECT that, not that it is a fact.

[DreamCast]

A 7 year old game competing against a brand new 'Star Wars' mmo made by a developer admired by a lot of gamers. Surly any games company would have reacted or done the same as this to compete?
Sorry If I mistook you for this comment, I guess I am taking it as you being a little unfair to the annual pass deal (which ofc will not be a surprise that I personally think was a good deal/idea)



This I do agree with, maybe even a few less than 9 mill but it will stabalise due to a playerbase that simply wont play other mmo's (and a lot of players that basically use wow as a social hub)

Nah I really meant the game was keeping players subbed for longer periods, Guild wars 1, Age of Conan (which also had a lot of hype behind it) but wow sub numbers still kept climbing even with those releases. With SWTOR, wow sub numbers were decreasing long before swtor was released which meant it was wow itself that was the problem.

Like I said before and I think you mentioned in one of your previous posts, it can't revert back to the past as the playerbase has changed and a lot of the foundation players of large communities have quit as the automated systems of convenience has taken there place.

The new systems don't bread guild management material in new players and with it being increasingly more difficult to get involved in the social aspect of the game it is becoming harder for new players to know enough people to try form there own communities.

[Deficineiron]

This I do agree with, maybe even a few less than 9 mill but it will stabalise due to a playerbase that simply wont play other mmo's (and a lot of players that basically use wow as a social hub)

with multiple mini-games being added, I expect that in fact this is a new favored target market of retain-able subscribers. The entire zenga phenomenon on facebook is something their marketing people would have looked very, very closely at in terms of how it influences log-in behavior, at least what they could model from public info.

[Pua]

This is one of those topics I often get involved in but, on this occasion, I won’t. People pass off their own opinions as fact and simply won’t accept, or listen to, those who hold any that differ.

And typically, logic be damned.

I’d recommend the moderators just close these threads as soon as they start, despite how unfair it is to those who can hold civil discussions about the topic.

[Eon Drache]

Wheres the whole that new players aren't joining in drones because of the ridiculous start up fee? Yeah, they made the older expansions cheaper/free. But WoW still costs more than any other game out there, with graphics and game play that doesn't come close. Not to mention most older players were there for LORE. Not exclusivity LOL

[Shadylol]

Wheres the whole that new players aren't joining in drones because of the ridiculous start up fee? Yeah, they made the older expansions cheaper/free. But WoW still costs more than any other game out there, with graphics and game play that doesn't come close. Not to mention most older players were there for LORE. Not exclusivity LOL

I started in Vanilla, and knew absolutely nothing about Warcraft Lore... what a strange argument

[Deleted]

MMO's are loosing there luster. Gaming as a whole has moved on from the days of hardcore. Look around you, you can find it everywhere, people are no longer investing years to become perfect anymore. Instant gratification are the norms for gaming these days. When wow launched the market was much diffrent. Think about your average PC gamer at the time. Counter Strike 1.6, Quake III, Team Fortress Classic, Everquest, Half Life 2, ect. This was a time when singleplayer was a minimum of 10 hours your first go round, games like FarCry could last up to 20 hours. Multiplayer games required skill, this is the market wow launched into it, something PC gamers expected. Now look at the modern PC gaming crowd today.

Call of Duty, Battlefield BC2 and 3, Indie games are at an all time high, minecraft. The games that are hot and the style of them has been very popular for 4 years now, people like me who still devote time to Counter Strike, at least 10 hours a week are a dying breed. The MMO is falling prey to this

Actually it's a myth that gaming "has moved on" from the days of "hardcore". And the market is not different. That is just perception cause WoW choose to go the route of "guaranteed" success on all levels, be it leveling, 5-mans or raiding and no major MMO publisher has the balls to deviate from that philosophy. WoW and SWTOR are actually perfect examples to highly doubt that the audience is looking only for instant gratification and elimination of true challenges or time consuming stuff.
WoW was perfectly fine at the end of BC and there was no need at all to change the game upside down. It needed some adjustments nothing more.
Here comes new devs, announcing that it's "bad design" to exclude x% of playerbase from some parts of the content and we get aoe grindfest 5mens and Naxx 2.0. There is no foundation to the claim that it is actually "bad design" that some parts of the games content is exlusive, no game theory supports that, at all. To the contrary, every game needs a solid relation between risk and reward and the things you don't see are the underlying motivation to keep playing. The relation of risk vs reward was totally destroyed by WotLK.

[Deleted]

An argumentative article should never start out with saying "I'm too lazy [to provide evidence]" in the first paragraph of the preamble. I am indeed aware that Blizzcon is cancelled, but stuff like that is the best way for people to not take your article seriously or even feel it belongs on a publication of any sorts. I'll continue reading and possibly add some more thoughts on the article, but that was a very early mistake that I just wanted to give my initial impression on while the iron was hot.

--
Edit:

Overall this felt less like an article of any description and more like you transcribing a juvenile spoken rant into written words. Most of the time you jump from one argument to another without explaining the importance of either one of them or how they're connected to each other. Almost every other sentence is a joke, which is too often considering we're here to read your arguments and not your comedy routine, and furthermore the way you write them isn't adapted to text so it's very easy to misunderstand them as serious statements. Most of your statements and claims aren't even backed up by any arguments, and the whole text feels very unprocessed and entirely written on impulse or adlib.

Where was this published, anyway? It just doesn't feel like the kind of article I thought I'd see anyone except for a smaller blog give up space for.

[LonestarHero]

The OP article may as well be, "Dispatches from the Buggy Whip Makers".

Remembering only the good parts of old memories is a common human trait. I'm living your nostalgia right now playing SWTOR.

Guess what? It sucks. I prefer not to waste my time hunting down tanks and healers for an instance group and burning 40 minutes waiting for the inconsiderate bastards to get to the instance entrance. If you want to play the "exclusivity" and "intimidation" cards as some kind of virtue to waste time and not have fun, go play some SWTOR until the next patch (when the dungeonfinder happens).

As far as the correct answer to WoW losing subs, here goes:

It's an eight year-old game! A damn good eight year-old game, but one I've been playing for six of those years. The game can be reinvented another twenty times and I still won't be interested. It's an old game and that is all. I need something different. It can even be another MMO from Blizzard.

[Shadylol]

The OP article may as well be, "Dispatches from the Buggy Whip Makers".

Remembering only the good parts of old memories is a common human trait. I'm living your nostalgia right now playing SWTOR.

Guess what? It sucks. I prefer not to waste my time hunting down tanks and healers for an instance group and burning 40 minutes waiting for the inconsiderate bastards to get to the instance entrance. If you want to play the "exclusivity" and "intimidation" cards as some kind of virtue to waste time and not have fun, go play some SWTOR until the next patch (when the dungeonfinder happens).

As far as the correct answer to WoW losing subs, here goes:

It's an eight year-old game! A damn good eight year-old game, but one I've been playing for six of those years. The game can be reinvented another twenty times and I still won't be interested. It's an old game and that is all. I need something different. It can even be another MMO from Blizzard.

The "nostalgia" argument has never been valid. WoW used to be a lot better than it is now. Blizzard gets away with making lackluster Content for present-day WoW, because they already killed all the competition. WoW is the only successful pay-to-play MMORPG on the market, so the power is in their hands

[Pancaspe]

Will there be an article explaining how WOW reached 15 Million Subs in MOP?

Cause it is going to happen.

[Shadylol]

Will there be an article explaining how WOW reached 15 Million Subs in MOP?

Cause it is going to happen.

Lol, no it won't

[Keosen]

Is there any article explaining why a 7yeard old -old- game it still have a staggering >9ml sub base?

[LonestarHero]

Will there be an article explaining how WOW reached 15 Million Subs in MOP?

Cause it is going to happen.

The Asian market you mean? Maybe. I don't see it though.

Right now I say I'm not excited for MoP, but when it comes to the seven day countdown perhaps I will throw down the $40 and a resub.