WoW Down to 7.7 Million Subscribers, Activision Blizzard Purchases Vivendi's Shares

[Eliandal]

Stinky, but kind of expected for the sub loss (I'm unfortunately one of them - but will be one of the returning ones at a later date)

REALLY good news about their buy-back though. Even though Kotick is still at the helm - I feel he's a far better option than Vivendi (though dang - must be nice to have that kind of pocket change eh ?)

[Hitei]

GG Blizzard and now you have it - focus on casual players, they come and the leve, while hardcore players would stay(and they didnt because of what game become)

And your proof of this is where?
To begin with, your statement assumes that Hardcore players and Casual players are static.. They aren't.
There are people who were hardcore five years ago and are casual now, and people who were casual a few months ago and are hardcore now.

I'll tell you one thing though, casual players vastly outnumber hardcore players, and wow's current success is due to BC being more casual friendly than Vanilla, and Wrath being vastly more casual friendly than BC. If Blizzard had "focused on hardcore players" It's likely subs would have never even grown to 7.7 million in the first place.

[Khadgar]

WoW will likely be around in 10 more years, in one form or another- the game is not going to die anytime soon. With that said, 600k subs is nothing to say "who cares" about, and you can be certain that there will be a few closed door meetings concerning it.

No it won't, Blizz is only making two more expansion's, one for 90-95 and the last for 95-100.

[Mormolyce]

No it won't, Blizz is only making two more expansion's, one for 90-95 and the last for 95-100.

WoW might end at level 95. Or 105. Or 140. The level cap is irrelevant.

[Bawk]

5.4 is bringing us the "timeless isle" another daily zone so we can daily while they open raid wings, i only purchase time cards now too, i cant bring myself to sub up

That's funny because there's no dailies on Timeless Isle. If you visit MMO-Champion enough, you'd see that right on the front page. It is intended to just be an island w/ World Bosses and currency to buy 496 items, pet battle and on pvp servers ... pvp. Nothing more, nothing less. lol

[Kagecamia]

No King rules forever, my son.

[Mormolyce]

The difference between the amount of time it took to actually get good gear is about the same amount of time as it currently takes. You just now do it in a more boring way by repeating the same shit over and over. Instead of doing a long quest chain that provides lore to the raid you are doing so you can even step inside of it, you are just doing the same quests enough times a week for tokens so you can run LFR and possibly a normal/heroic mode too if you are really trying to upgrade your gear and money for enchants and gems.

Attunements? There was no fucking lore attached to attunements, I did them all... and they didn't gear you anyway...

[Sills]

End of a raid tier...not surprising to see more lost subs. Great now I have to hear all of that "WoW is dead" stuff for the next few weeks -_-

[Mormolyce]

No King rules forever, my son.

How many subs does the next-largest sub-based MMO have?

Yeah.

- - - Updated - - -

End of a raid tier...not surprising to see more lost subs. Great now I have to hear all of that "WoW is dead" stuff for the next few weeks -_-

Try like, forever. If only I could filter them out of the "recent posts" section.

[Deleted]

not as big of a loss as i expected.

Same, I thought 5.3 would've hit it harder. For a lot of people it's still 5.2 content wise, I enjoyed the the former mop patches and I hope blizzard has figured out what made them good. Some will come back at 5.4 (Raid, Timeless Isle - better than barrens so it will do). Then it will go down again while the expansion is wrapping up. Expansion pre-patch, and it begins all over again, it works like that - it has a slow decline atm, can't deny that, but imo the game was awesome when they only had 5M subs so.. for me these numbers doesn't bother me at all.

[Deleted]

No it won't, Blizz is only making two more expansion's, one for 90-95 and the last for 95-100.

I hope they end world of warcraft with a big bang. An epic raid into the demon realm to defeat sargeras, or something epic with titans.

[Khadgar]

At this point WoW has become a sinking ship, they can only try to patch the hole's that are flooding it with water for so long before it goes under.

[SturdyGamer]

WoW isn't likely to die in the immediate future, though at the same time it's unlikely to go back to the same level of success that it once enjoyed during the 'golden age'. It's a dated game and the people believing it will last forever are just as irritating as those who say it'll die each week as far as I'm concerned.

[rabbimojo]

Always interesting how many game industry experts come out of the woodwork on posts like this.

It is a bit weird to see the subs so low, but over the years I've noticed that sub numbers go up or down based on whether *I* am playing. Therefore, Blizzard should work hard to earn *my* favor. Silliness aside, I do feel like something of an individual representative of the population Blizzard is trying to court, on both sides of the coin: Hardcore and Casual at the same time.

The fact is that Blizzard's rise to fame came at a time when there just wasn't as much on the market. Now? Any game with a big market share better know its days are numbered, because the truth is many players just aren't invested in anything the same way. Why would we be?

I'm high on my red wine so, to bore you to death (though it's part of my point), here's my current game roster: My big hours and multiplayer time are in Firefall's beta. Some nights I jump into Planetside 2 because I just love the scale of it all. I play Neverwinter (which is awful) for ~10 minutes/day because I like the professions. I occasionally play Towns (mediocre Dwarf Fortress clone on Steam) because I hate myself. When I feel ambitious I work on getting through the various Dragon Age DLC/sequels, or similar Mass Effect. I sometimes play Minecraft, Diablo 3, Monaco, Torchlight 2, Payday, Civ 5, Fallen Enchantress, and a dozen other games.

My point? Why would I play WoW? How much content can Pandaria offer? I played it a bit, thought it was solid, but... why pay $15/month for it? I've been through the raiding song and dance so many times. I've geared up in heroics and PVP so many times. I've leveled so many times. I've done all this with alts so many times. I've spent hour after hour building spreadsheets to figure out some new feature, poking at EJ to see whether my numbers are right. I've done it all a thousand times (probably more like 4-6 times, considering number of xpacs): Why would I do it again?

This is what every post-WoW MMO is failing at. Why do I care about doing 15/20/25/whatever-man raids? The same mechanics, the same character development, the same stories FFS.

Free to play isn't the problem. Catering to casuals isn't the problem. Quality of design isn't the problem, talent changes aren't the problem, lack of change or too much change aren't the problem. It's just that Blizz can't innovate away from WoW while trying to court the population that does still enjoy it. It was always going to happen, now it's happening, BFD.

Source: I am a game dev. I spend more hours reading industry post-mortems each week than most in this thread do playing WoW. I'm probably still wrong; nobody knows anything anymore and we'll never have true experts again. C'est la singularité.

Cheers, and long live WoW. The devs have worked hard, and it's been fun to watch usurpers try and fail, year after year. I hope I get to enjoy it a bit longer.

[Deleted]

You are all missing the important part: The investment group includes Bobby Kotick and Brian Kelly, who put up $100 million together, as well as Tencent. This group will own 24.9% of the company and Vivendi will retain ownership of 83 million shares (12%) of the company.

Tencent i so fucking huge oO

[Khadgar]

I hope they end world of warcraft with a big bang. An epic raid into the demon realm to defeat sargeras, or something epic with titans.

Yeah I have a strong feeling the final expansion with be against Sargeras and the Burning Legion.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Titan's/Pantheon aid us in our battle against him, Sargeras was a titan himself after all.

[lokithor]

End of a raid tier...not surprising to see more lost subs. Great now I have to hear all of that "WoW is dead" stuff for the next few weeks -_-

actually that was taken from the beginning of ToT if I'm not mistaken, so not good. Not the end of the world or anything though.

[Galexander]

1 word......summer

[Shaede]

hi. i still play. don't really give a shit what you think.

[Deleted]

Patch 5.4 10milion subs