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

[Rolly]

as well as Tencent.

Tencent i so fucking huge oO

Is that 50 Cents' little brother.

[Sniperwolfes]

7.7 million is still such a ridiculous high number

[savethetuna]

I saw this coming haha

[Deleted]

[Warrada]

Is the comment section bugged or its just me?

[nekobaka]

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)

The word casual covers a very wide variety of players. Blizzard focused on a different spectrum than the one they focused on in Cata and even that of WotLK. The previous quarters main reason for sub loss was lack of engaging content for casuals which was the kind of casuals that Blizzard was focusing on in Cata. This just all the more shows that when a "casual" claims that their beliefs are of the majority, they are not as the group is varied and not all casuals want the same thing.

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

Did you just say that the BT attunement had no lore?

[Iseeyou]

Would be awesome to see the different sub numbers per region : EU/US/ASIA.

[Baneleaf]

I think a major thing you are all missing is Blizz killing multiboxing in bgs. You have to remember that though it was a smaller population that most think, it was still a decent number. I personally cancelled two accounts when I could no longer box in bgs and I have another that I am going to let sit for a while after the sub runs out in two weeks. that will leave me with one of my four active accounts going. 600k seems about right with normal mid patch decline and the number of boxers that I have heard quit or cut down to only one or two accounts. since the /follow was broken.

[Invictus9001]

People have been screaming the end of WoW, and the end of time for that matter, for years upon years. Either, or both, will happen when they damn well happen. Until then, enjoy the game if you do. If you don't enjoy it at all or are unsubbed with no intent of returning, stop spamming up forums dedicated to the game with your prognostications of doom and rancid BS. If you enjoy the game but think it could be better, as I do, make yourself heard. There are enough means available these days to do so.

Oh.. on topic: Blizz.. take the advice you wrote in for the Pandaren monologues.. "Slow down." (Just my 2 cents.)

[Aerisot]

Omw WoW is dying! no but seriously, 7.7mil is still 7x the amount that Blizzard was expecting in the first place , that is still $115,500,000 a month....A MONTH..and $1,386,000,000 a year, and that is just sub money, that is no including what they make from the store or game purchases.

Yes I know they have server upkeep and wages...which both tie into each other, Now if you include RMAH from Diablo 3, even with WoW at it's lowest since TBC...they are still racking in over a billion a year..Holy shit!

Now with that said...Activision..Stop being greedy assholes and just let Blizzard make their games and stop making them split them up (Looking at you Starcraft 2, Diablo 3)

[jacob1212c]

Well with the Vivendi purchase the activation blizzard company is now an independent company, maybe they will start puting out good content again w/o a tiny french company's dick owning 48% of their company.

[sergel02]

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.

This is a very good post imo.

[Deleted]

Funny how it was 12m "half" a year ago? now it dropped almost by half.

[Rixarius]

Funny how it was 12m "half" a year ago? now it dropped almost by half.

There hasn't been 12m subscribers in WoW since Wrath.

[Yuyn]

Well with the Vivendi purchase the activation blizzard company is now an independent company, maybe they will start puting out good content again

Vivendi was a major stockholder in Blizzard since roughly 1998. All of WoW's development, from the very early alphas to current, have had Vivendi involved in some manner. Usually the Activision merger (~2008) is considered the point where things started to go downhill, largely in terms of more and more obvious money grabs.

[Deleted]

There hasn't been 12m subscribers in WoW since Wrath.

Didn't it peak at 12m when MoP came out? or was it 10?

[stellvia]

Except Vivendi has always been extremely hands-off with Blizzard. Far more-so than Bobby Kotick and Activision getting their grubby hands in the cake mix.

I don't think you can attribute the sudden decline in WoW numbers to anything other than it finally running its natural course. There was a lot of design churn in the first few expansions, but since Cata they've basically settled on a fairly consistent way the systems work. People grow up and start families, people just flat out get bored, they want to do other things, etc.

I don't think we'll see these subscriber numbers run themselves into the ground over the next 2 years, but it probably will continue to plummet down to the 4-5M range. We'll see if Flex raiding manages to prop up the ship.

[panterarules]

Perhaps we should go back to the TBC/Wrath model, when the game was growing exponentially.

TBC and Wrath had completely different models. MOP is a derivation of the Wrath model. AoE, no mana and PvP where you die from RNG burst. A big factor of the game growing in Wrath was that the Chinese WoW affiliate changed hands making it more accessible in China.

[Rixarius]

Didn't it peak at 12m when MoP came out? or was it 10?

http://www.statista.com/statistics/2...d-of-warcraft/

[stellvia]

That's another angle to consider: The rise of indie gaming over the last few years. There are just so many MORE games you can get involved with nowadays -- why tie yourself down to just one thing?