World of Warcraft is down to 6.8M Subs

[yunito]

The fact that they still have 6.8million even with no content for a year shows that if they actually put in some effort they could probably hold massive sub numbers.

i know if there was new stuff to look forward every month like a new scenario with few new quest ect don't have to be a new raid or dungeon all the time . i would had not cancel my account back early spring. Would be back end of September to claim my motorcycle and hopefully new patch.

[Gothicshark]

50% of the subs were in China. Blizzard stated that back in LK. That market went F2P before we even heard of it in the US. Do the math on where the players went.

F2P was a Sub Model in Many Chinese Games back in 2007 and a few US games, WOW was still increasing it's Subscription base at that time. In fact it maintained over 10 million Subs on a monthly (pay by hour in china) model for over 5 years (2007-2012). Free to play has not hurt WOW at all.

[Deleted]

Not surprised due to the content lag and having nothing but Siege to keep us busy.

[Gothicshark]

It's amazing how many inaccuracies are in this post. Games without subs being listed as having subs, games that never actually hit 1 million subs, and claiming that UO had "many times more players than WoW ever did"? That's not even remotely close by any measure.



Um, no it didn't.

Actually they did, however when they investigated accounts they found most of them were duplicate and hacker accounts. So they closed down 90% of their accounts. Since that time they refuse to acknowledge they had that many registered accounts.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

They better start thinking about another big game, its clear that the wow concept simply got old, it will keep declining steadily until it becomes irrelevant. They lost 2.9m during cataclysm, 3.2m during mop, at that rate they will be around 4m at the end of the next expansion.

Can't wait to see another warcraft game purely lore driven, not this mmo crap.

[Spoonman]

I Think its acctualy pretty impressive, there has never been a lower Point than right now in WoW and its only a 800k loss? I was expecting.... actualy hoping it was 2mil+.
then it would be a Wake up call for blizzard, now its just routine stuff. (1year of nothing to be used again)

[Gothicshark]

His point was that not everyone leaves for the same reason. How are you even trying to argue that?

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I wouldn't put any money on that but it would be nice, the content that is; doubting the sub difference.

True people come and go for a lot of reasons, however that is a constant rate of change. Peaks and valleys in something like WOW are caused not by the constants, but by things specifically dealing with the product.


Example: Coca-Cola

As a product it has a constant rate of sales growth, it nearly matches the rate of growth of the human population. However people stop drinking coke often, and for a lot of reasons. That is all accounted for in the long term growth curve. So if for any reason a sharp decline in sales happens around the time you stop selling Coke and Sell "New Coke", is it the economy or is it the change in flavor? (look at sales in 1985)



When new Coke hit, sales dropped to a 5 year low, as soon as they released 'Classic Coke' Sales skyrocketed.

You can use the Coke lesson with WOW and see that the same thing is happening old WOW sold well and had a constant rate (this includes people coming and going for what ever reason), the Cataclysm changed things, the Growth curve became a downward trend, Mop came out and it became a sharp drop.

To someone who cares about the game and the quality of game-play in the game, seeing a sharp drop after 3 years of growth, and 5 years of consistency. That is a concern. Sure Blizzard is still making money, they are offering many online services, and they have other games. As a company Blizzard is a good investment, however I am concerned with the health of WOW, not because it is an old game, but because it is hemorrhaging subscriptions. And the only factor that can explains the current losses relates to in game. Game-play changes, and Content.

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This is factually false. New players do not buy old games at the same rate they do when the games are new. It applies to all media everywhere. Best selling books, CD's, movies or anything else of an entertainment nature tend to tail off in sales over time.

WoW had an excellent growth curve but at some point the game would inevitably stop growing and start to decline. Blizzard may have lit the fuse on that with Cataclysm--I think they did--but it was going to happen eventually.

Lineage 1, which has been out since 1997 still has 1 million Subs. It peaked at 3 million in 2003.
EVE online has had a constant growth curve since it came out in 2003.

MMOs do not follow normal entertainment growth Curves, as it is a constant environment which constantly is updated. MMOs are closer to periodical entertainment such as Magazines or Book Series, as such they can maintain product consistency.

[Cows For Life]

It was up by 247 million dollars for 2014 and they made 801 million dollars total for the first 6 months alone.

With WoD still to launch, they will break every old yearly revenue record they ever had.

And it won't stop as the WoW franchize is being taken to other/newer gaming forms. Hearthstone is just the first.

The iPad market is simply booming while the MMO market shrinks a little further. simple.

It finally makes sense if, as you claim/implied, you own ATVI stock.

Because it's kinda strange for uninvested people to talk about corporations with such superlatives like "absolute record", "unprecedented", "whopping", or "impressive" like you do. (unless you're being paid to)

BTW they have already booked half the revenue they will ever get from WoD sales already with the pre-sell. (that also includes the price increase) Expect a few more sales closer to the release date of the physical box and into the discount bin a couple months after release like MoP.

[icausewipes]

This :37 secs sums up ALL subscribers to wow.




If enough of you stop paying then maybe blizz might change their ways.

[theWocky]

I am happy to see consumers are finally voting with their wallets.

I love Warcraft, but don't enjoy the 12 month lack of content.

Maybe this will spur them on to not do it ever again.

Every time they lose a sub, there is a chance these people don't ever come back.

[Gothicshark]

So they had 20 million+ subs, but no one knew about it and every source in the world is covering it up, so I just have to take your word for it that a game in an era where MMOs hadn't even taken off yet in the west had somehow managed to have 100x more subscriptions than anything else in the west at the time?

Even if I believed all this, it would still mean that they had 2 million accounts left after the "90% purge" which is still far, far higher than all the official numbers and STILL would have been an insane phenomenon that everyone would have paid attention to at that time.

it happened around the end of 2004, been years since I saw anything on it. As for the rest, companies like to clean up their images, so they pay people to keep certain information off of wikis. Although I am sure a search should pull up the great subscription purge. Hell WOW did it in china around 2008. Dropped nearly 3 million subs in one day.

Really hard to find any headlines on that one as well.

[Vober]

It doesn't matter to me if they have 1M or 10M subs, If I'm having fun with the game that's all that matters. I dropped my sub a few months ago because I got bored with the content and I was playing other games more hardcore. But I reordered WoD and will be back to play it.

[Gimlix]

it happened around the end of 2004, been years since I saw anything on it. As for the rest, companies like to clean up their images, so they pay people to keep certain information off of wikis. Although I am sure a search should pull up the great subscription purge. Hell WOW did it in china around 2008. Dropped nearly 3 million subs in one day.

Really hard to find any headlines on that one as well.

What are you on about? they lost 3million in 1 day?
And they once had 20M subs? Like what?

[Gothicshark]

So again - just so I have this straight - I'm simply supposed to take your word for it that at a time where 100,000 subs was considered an amazing, unbelievable success, one game just happened to have 20,000,000 paying subscribers and no one noticed. Then they just decided to cut 90% of their paying subscribers, which still left them at 2,000,000 or so which at that time would have still been the most incredible, unbelievable, shocking story in gaming.

But somehow, all news of this was magically covered up and the game just faded away.

Do I have it all straight, here? Have you written about this story to...you know...basically every source that tracks this stuff and says that UO peaked around 250,000 paying subscriptions?

my bad, trying to remember stuff from years ago while avoiding looking them up, Ultima and RuneScape got mixed up. oh and RuneScape claims 200million subs currently. Which seems really high.

[Thimagryn]

20 million is a far cry from the 250k peak that I'm seeing. Calling shenanigans on that unless there's a source for it.

-edit- Ah, it was Runescape. Makes a little more sense. It's always been F2P, so of course it would tout a higher player base.

[Noomz]

http://files.shareholder.com/downloa...ss_Release.pdf

"As of June 30, 2014, Blizzard Entertaintment's World of Warcraft Remains the #1 Subscription based MMORPG, With approximiately 6.8 Million subscribers."

Because there hasn't been any new content for what, 8 months or more? It's the pre-expansion dip.

Though I think that the huge rise in numbers in Wotlk and the slow drop throughout Cata and MoP is due to people not having any interest in the events that happened in them. Illidan and Arthas were killed, the two major villains that everyone had grown up to love through Warcraft. Together with many other villains through TBC and Wotlk that died with them.
I think people lost connection with the game after that.

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my bad, trying to remember stuff from years ago while avoiding looking them up, Ultima and RuneScape got mixed up. oh and RuneScape claims 200million subs currently. Which seems really high.

Isn't RuneScape F2P played in a browser? As I remember it, it's horrendous.

[Dequanacus]

True people come and go for a lot of reasons, however that is a constant rate of change. Peaks and valleys in something like WOW are caused not by the constants, but by things specifically dealing with the product.


Example: Coca-Cola

As a product it has a constant rate of sales growth, it nearly matches the rate of growth of the human population. However people stop drinking coke often, and for a lot of reasons. That is all accounted for in the long term growth curve. So if for any reason a sharp decline in sales happens around the time you stop selling Coke and Sell "New Coke", is it the economy or is it the change in flavor? (look at sales in 1985)



When new Coke hit, sales dropped to a 5 year low, as soon as they released 'Classic Coke' Sales skyrocketed.

You can use the Coke lesson with WOW and see that the same thing is happening old WOW sold well and had a constant rate (this includes people coming and going for what ever reason), the Cataclysm changed things, the Growth curve became a downward trend, Mop came out and it became a sharp drop.

To someone who cares about the game and the quality of game-play in the game, seeing a sharp drop after 3 years of growth, and 5 years of consistency. That is a concern. Sure Blizzard is still making money, they are offering many online services, and they have other games. As a company Blizzard is a good investment, however I am concerned with the health of WOW, not because it is an old game, but because it is hemorrhaging subscriptions. And the only factor that can explains the current losses relates to in game. Game-play changes, and Content.

Everything that you posted is great and I'm really happy for you, but it has nothing to do with what I posted, nor did I deny of it, nor did I care.

[Mormolyce]

Pretty predictable. Looking at the graph on the front page, the only real outlier from the overall parabola from launch till now is the jump at the start of MoP.

[Gothicshark]

Isn't RuneScape F2P played in a browser? As I remember it, it's horrendous.

Doesn't matter if you like the game, it's a MMO, and it makes money. I think the original point was 6.8 million subscriptions is not all that impressive as several MMOs have had that many or more.

When WOW had 10+ million paid subs that was an impressive feat, it is even more impressive they kept it up for over 5 years. What is sad are all the excuses people are using say 'not an issue' as if the constant loss rate doesn't matter.

It Does Matter, if WOW looses too many subscriptions they will go free to play, once that happens the game as we knew it and loved will truly be dead. This worries me, because I look at the time travel Orcs and no flying expansion and see more of the same.

Do you love WOW? Was it a great game for you? If so do you want to see it die?

[Mormolyce]

Doesn't matter if you like the game, it's a MMO, and it makes money. I think the original point was 6.8 million subscriptions is not all that impressive as several MMOs have had that many or more.

Comparing something that costs $180 a year to something free is beyond idiotic. The next biggest sub based MMO behind WoW is like 2 million or something. And WoW is a decade old. To say WoW's track record is not impressive is to indulge in deliberate stupidity.