WoW Down to 7.6 Million Subscribers

[Archermit]

As usual with these numbers... it's 7.6m PAYING... that's FREAKING far from the amount PLAYING!

If it's 2m playing, I'd be surprised... most of the subs are just people that still pay for sentimental reasons as it's hard to cut the cord from something you once loved!

Does that matter? If there was 100,000 people paying but 5m paying Blizzard would still release expansion packs and content and claim the game is still in good shape and it would be, WoW is a business and those paying is all the matters in the end

[Azrile]

I think the closest MMO is FF14 with 600k & EvE has 500k, some corrected me in another thread for FF14.

You can play EVE for free using ingame currency.

My guess is there would be a ton of us with alt accounts if we could spend 10,000 gold per month to pay our subscription. So many people in EVE have 5-10 accounts, all paid for by their main account.

[Scram]

Not enough of a loss to cause a fuss.

As a player 100k doesnt sound like much as a business owner, while could be worse, its still troublesome. Bring on the demon hunter!

[WyvernVin]

Increased interest in one will have some impact on the interest of the other.

I'm pretty sure that's the case and most likely Blizzard sees it that way ...they compliment one another and, as an example, in my case it did work ...i took a time off of WoW and while at it, i got a beta key for Hearthstone ...after playing it i felt nostalgic to go play my characters in WoW again and after a couple weeks i re-subbed.

A loss of 100k subscribers is much better than what i expected ...last patch didn't have so much great stuff to make us all come back as some other poster noted as most stuff was targeted at those already at end-game content ...i believe game will go well below 7M before expansion and then back to 8M once WoD hits (hate the name still but should start getting used to it).

[Mormolyce]

So like... that's essentially nothing.

Shrug. Can we all go back to not obsessing about meaningless figures like sub numbers for at least a few months now?

WoW: Still losing more subs than most MMO's gain.

If that were true it'd be kind of a sad statement about the scale of other MMOs. Fortunately it isn't.

[AlereanJr]

Does anyone here actually care that people are quitting, as long as YOU are still having fun? Far out, 100k people quit...boo hoo. I'm enjoying the game more than ever, and a few numbers aren't going to change that. How many subs does WoW actually need to survive/continue? I'm willing to bet its a hell of a lot less than 7+ million.

[Azrile]

You all seem to forget this is WoWs lowest sub number- 7.6 million including Asia - since Classic. TBC at release was 8.5 million and WotLK was 11.5 million at release - BEFORE they opened it to the eastern markets like China. WoW is in a bad spot, make no mistake.

Warhammer online is in a bad spot. AOC is in a bad spot. SWTOR is in a bad spot.

World of Warcraft made a billion dollars this year.

[Mormolyce]

As usual with these numbers... it's 7.6m PAYING... that's FREAKING far from the amount PLAYING!

If it's 2m playing, I'd be surprised... most of the subs are just people that still pay for sentimental reasons as it's hard to cut the cord from something you once loved!

You think 5.6 million people are happy to pay $15 a month for a game they don't play?

Did you ever consider that maybe your personal beef with the game is completely colouring your perception of it?

FYI the game is in a great place right now and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who likes MMOs.

[JoeShmo]

Abandon your foolish quest. All that awaits you is the PR of my master,...... its too late to save the game. Now you shall join him, in Blizzcon.

[Frozen Death Knight]

100k loss of subscribers is actually pretty good news. It is possible that they have slowed down the leak significantly for it to remain a slow decline. Hopefully the next expansion and keeping current pace of content updates will keep the numbers more stable.

[tankbug]

I'm puzzled about people wanting the subs to be shit, so Blizzard will realise the "truth" about the current state of the game.
Reminds me of the Tea Party, where some members want to see america become a third-world country under Obama just to prove a point.

[Mementomori1993]

Way better than I think anyone was expecting. I think it wouldn't be far off to say that WoW is starting to level out. I can see it staying around where it's at now for quite a few years. If you look at all of the previous drops in the past couple years it is usually way more than this, ballpark 800k a quarter.

I think it's safe to say that this is going to be the new norm. New xpack in 8 months or so will bring the numbers up substantially only to level out at a little less than they are now.

All of the "wow is dying" naysayers can go to hell.

[AmerikanRejekt]

Having read a good few posts of people who say "100k is nothing" I think you guys seriously forget that Wow/Blizzard is a business just like Google, Microsoft and Facebook and any other tech company you can think of.

The news that they are losing even more players is of course damaging to Wow and no doubt that they are behind the scenes discussing ways to revitalize Wow and inject new players into the mix.

Wow will eventually decline in players, but it should not be at the current rate that they are losing players.

People like you who speak as though WoW is Blizzard's only game/source of income are hilarious.

You make it sound as if the people who stopped playing WoW didn't simply go to another Blizzard title like Starcraft, Hearthstone or Diablo.

Just because the numbers on one Blizzard game goes down doesn't mean the numbers on another Blizzard game didn't go up.

[Frozen Death Knight]

It's the final major patch wrapping up the expansion, there's a new raid mode that's supposed to get a lot of people trying it out, arena got a whole lot more convenient, the isle was supposed to offer a whole new experience and a great way to catch up, proving grounds was yet another new feature, and connected realms got a lot of people on dead realms interested to see how it would play out. And well, it still didn't go up; I don't know why people are excited about this. Going down a little at a time when it probably should've gone up isn't good. That said, while I do think consistently losing subscriptions is indicative that the game isn't at its best, I'm not one of these people who say the game is dead if it doesn't have ten million players either, so whatever.

The game has way gone past its best-before-date for it to gain subscribers again. There is nothing you can do but slow it down.

[Deleted]

Does that matter? If there was 100,000 people paying but 5m paying Blizzard would still release expansion packs and content and claim the game is still in good shape and it would be, WoW is a business and those paying is all the matters in the end

If your argument is money matters, then you should take a look at how much money those people have paid, not how many have paid money. And then how much they have paid before.

[FishHead]

I'm puzzled about people wanting the subs to be shit, so Blizzard will realise the "truth" about the current state of the game.
Reminds me of the Tea Party, where some members want to see america become a third-world country under Obama just to prove a point.

It's more like foreigners who emigrated out hoping the US will fall apart and cause a revolution for some much-needed change.

I resubbed after a year, cleared the final boss in a day, then unsubbed when I found myself standing around in SW. The spark is long gone and Blizz is too afraid to make any massive revitalizing changes to their precious cash cow.

A shame that Titan fell through.

[Mormolyce]

The game has way gone past its best-before-date for it to gain subscribers again. There is nothing you can do but slow it down.

So? Every game gets old.

WoW is 8 years old and completely dominated its genre for pretty much its entire lifespan. That's an unprecedented accomplishment. In that sense at least, it's probably the most successful game in history.

And for bonus points: I personally find it as fun as it's ever been. In many respects, more.

[hablix]

Who cares about 100k subscribers when you sold 14 million copies of one of your other flagship IPs, not to mention the expansion pack to one of your other IPs being the #1 PC game for almost the entire year of 2013? Blizz has said that the game with the impact on WoW subs was Diablo III anyway, and I actually believe that. After I spent most of Cata on hiatus, when I came back many of my old WoW friends on b.net were in Diablo III most of the time. I mean, I don't want to just be a cheerleader for Blizz, but these results are pretty damn impressive.

[voskopoula]

Well guys , for all of you who say
wow is going well in game i agree, pve wise at least, pvp there will always be whines etc
For all of you who say
7.6 million subscribers but how many logged last 7 days, how many do actually pay etc i will tell you what i did . I went to wowprogress at August! and counted fast and roughly, 25man guilds that are doing ToT and10man guilds that do too. If you consider 25man guilds are from 35-45ppl = 40avg and 10 man is about max 12-15, i calculated, really roughly and found about 2.5million raiders!. I did htat some weeks ago, you are all free to check it. Now wow progress, i don't think it updates automatically, it is updated from guild leaders , so i assume we are like 3.5million raiders atm.
Add about 50% of this population as players who don't raid past flex or are socials, we kinda reach 5million
That's a good amount of active players i think. i wouldnt be surprised if instead of 5 there are 6 or more ...
Future of WoW, i don't think we will see huge decline on subscriptions before next expansion. There are nice interesting things inside wow the last year, i would have to admit that MoP has surpassed TBC from my point of view, the things and the fun stuff you can do are way way many .
Log term future of wow. What saddens me is that blizzard will have to slowly kill and give a dishonorable death to WoW at some point in order to hail the new king (whoever that will be). Players are too accustomed to wow interface and feel like. It is really hard to reboot players in a new game, unless you make the old game decline slowly and deteriorate on content..

[Frozen Death Knight]

So? Every game gets old.

WoW is 8 years old and completely dominated its genre for pretty much its entire lifespan. That's an unprecedented accomplishment. In that sense at least, it's probably the most successful game in history.

And for bonus points: I personally find it as fun as it's ever been. In many respects, more.

The game still is following the typical life cycle of a product, so yes, its age is relevant.

Major difference between WoW and other games is the scale of success. By all accounts WoW was, still is, and will remain a massive success for years to come as long as they keep the sub losses at these levels.

Also, I am not going to dispute the game being fun. While I haven't played anything during MoP, it has had more to do with time and money rather than the quality of the content. Frankly, I have been quite impressed by some of the stuff Blizzard released this expansion, and I hope they keep that up in the next one.