WoW Down to 6.8 Million Subscribers

[Beet]

They need to lower the subscription fee. As a university student, if i were to return I wouldn't play nearly enough to warrant spending £9 a month of my already stretched budget on a video game. If the subscription fee was a bit cheaper I wouldn't feel too bad about only playing a couple of hours every few days.

Dude it's already cheap. If anything it should have gone up by now. $15.00 has been standard MMO fee fare since the 90s.. lol

[Deleted]

A well deserved loss. And no, WoD won't save you, scrubs.

[Deleted]

I will keep being subbed for aslong as I still enjoy the game =D

[Deleted]

It is the fault of stupid players, not casual players, that bring down games - and not only WoW. Players that do not try the slightest to understand the game, but expect that even without any effort at all they should be able to beat those games in the first try and receive all items they could possibly wear.

It's not the players, it's the game producers that decides to pander to them!

Blizz decides how the game is. They decide whether it should be for the 'elite' or whether to broaden the appeal to increase their revenue (they have shareholders after all). Blizz could make the game harder and give up on those 'stupid' players.

Don't blame the players - they're only here because Blizz wants their money.

[Trinora]

It's still a good game, maybe better then it ever was. But after playing it for many years it is simply losing it's appeal to me.
I loved the idea of MoP, and that was enough to get me out of the burnout the last time, but this time around I am pretty meh about the coming expansion and I seriously doubt i will get in on it.
Nothing bad, just to much of the same.

[reemi]

Blizzard made a choice!

I'm wondering if Blizzard prefer to make money with subscription or with expansion.

I mean,

WoD xpansion worth, with 7 millions players, ~350$ Millions to 490$ Millions.
Subs worth (12.99x12=155.88$) to (14.99x12=179.88$) for 1 year, so ~1091$ Millions to 1259$ Millions (If everybody pay)

Losing 12$ millions (800 000 player lost for 3 months), or even 24$ millions for 6 months to release an expansion faster is a good or bad idea?

At same time, lot of D3 and heartstone player are from WoW... and if they are too addicted to WoW some won't buy D3 or HS cards you know... (I bought D3 because I was tired of WoW)

I would to participate a Blizzard financial meeting!!

[Crovyn]

Sub decline months before an expansion hits, while there is no new content? UNPOSSIBLE! Kappa

what you forget is that in Wrath, ICC was out for many months with no content update. It's the closest thing to the situation now. Yet subs did not only NOT fall but rise! So while it is not surprising that they lost subs it is also not the WOW norm. WOW is FAR from dead, but we have to accept that the great days are over. Yes WOD will bring many subs back but I doubt wow will ever come even close to the 12 mil. subs again. I wish I was still crazy about it like I was all the years till recently because a movie is coming and it would be so much more enjoyable if I still loved the game it's based on.


but hey who knows, maybe WOD brings back the magic....

[lolipopp]

Honestly wouldn't be surprised considering no one has considered Asia competitive in WoW since the opening of MoP cause of the way they changed Asian raiding.

Me 2 and this time i take my longest break from wow like 10 months +. Probably will play again for the xpack but the chances are i ll get bored in 6 months max again !

[Frothem]

WoW is dying etc etc, The "Glory Days" are over etc etc, Guild Wars 2/TOR/Wildstar is going to kill it etc etc, Did I miss anything?

[Durandro]

There's one idea floating through my head. Its not likely, but...

They say max level because its designed for either 90 or 100, but if you're 90 you get scaled up with that new scaling tech they were talking about implimenting eventually. So everyone is basically level 100, but you don't need to actually be level 100 to join.

If that makes sense.

Unlikely, though.

[Lilscrappy]

The graph is my literal mindset of World of Warcraft.

Vanila just got better and better, it peaked at the end of BC, then was stable in WotLK, then started declining in Cata, and went spiraling downhill in MoP.

My guess for WoD, it will stay stable for a while then continue to decline. The game is old, they havent done anything amazingly new in a while, garrisons suck, we've already seen Outlands,
the lore is going sour, its just....time for something else.

[notorious98]

Well, from these numbers we can say cataclysm was the worse expansion - it all went downhill from there.

MoP lost more subs than Cata, it also decimated Cata in percentage of subscribers lost. So what about these numbers tell us that Cata was the "worse" expansion? Because that's when the decline came? In that case, Classic was by far the best despite it's horrendous bugginess, terrible gear itemization, and horrible class balancing.

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How is that amazing? The older the game is, the less people want to play it. Simple logic, nothing even remotely interesting. Unless simple logic is shocking to you.

He/she was making a point that it's amazing that WoW was able to retain more than 7 million subscribers for as long as it did. Don't get all butthurt because you were incapable of comprehending that.

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what you forget is that in Wrath, ICC was out for many months with no content update. It's the closest thing to the situation now. Yet subs did not only NOT fall but rise! So while it is not surprising that they lost subs it is also not the WOW norm. WOW is FAR from dead, but we have to accept that the great days are over. Yes WOD will bring many subs back but I doubt wow will ever come even close to the 12 mil. subs again. I wish I was still crazy about it like I was all the years till recently because a movie is coming and it would be so much more enjoyable if I still loved the game it's based on.

Blizzard also fixed their issues in China and released Wrath over there when they announced the jump to 12 million subscribers. It all happened within the same quarter. Prior to that, Blizzard didn't release numbers because of the issues they were having with NetEase in China. We don't really know, for certain, how many people came or left during that time.

Also, people seem to completely discount the fact that Wrath saw the death of Arthas. There was an article at the time about how there were a large number of people only sticking around to kill Arthas. When Blizzard killed the Lich King, they killed their most compelling antagonist.

[Madscientist]

Great. More China arguments.. If Chinese players doesn't count, then WoW never had more than 8million subs.

[notorious98]

Great. More China arguments.. If Chinese players doesn't count, then WoW never had more than 8million subs.

It's not "China argument", it's simply an explanation for why things happened at certain points. If you're going to disregard any factual information with regards to China as "Hurr durr China", then why bother responding in the first place? Nobody discounted them as subs. If we did, then WoW would have lost significantly less than 800k subscribers.

[ControlBlue]

Exactly. The writing for garrosh's story was so fucking bad. And WoDs story isnt going to be any better. They should have moved the story on the most obvious direction and went with Queen Azshara and N'zoth as the focus of the Next xpac.

You will probably not see this comment. But still I think your comment is one of the most interesting points among those that have been brought in this thread outside of the Fanboys/Haters eternal debate.

MoP shows the disconnect WoW has with its own lore, and that disconnect is now further confirmed by WoD, it shows that Blizzard can no longer advance that story that started with Warcraft and can only now either bask in the nostalgia or worse twist it like they did with MoP into something it just isn't.

Not too long ago, WoW was associated with innovation, fun, and great design, the whole industry was looking up to it, now it has lost all that innovation for more of the same or worse less of it, lost all the fun to the same old raids, and now they are essentially copying other for skills, ideas, and philosophies (the ability pruning is essentially making WoW feel closer to QWER MOBAs).

LoL is where the innovation, fun, and great design is happening now, the King is still alive but people care about him less and less.

[BullyZJ]

Well deserved drop for being liars. I still remember that "Dragon soul won't happen again".

OK Blizzard, do you know a thing that will never happen again? 10M subs. maybe 9M neither.

[Scottyjscizzle]

Was subscribed from 2006-2014 without ever unsubbing, but even my subscription was paused for a few months this year.

It just blows my mind how they could let that huge gap happen AGAIN (and even longer than before), despite all the talk over the years about how they want to achieve the opposite.

Same here, I was tempted to drop out after Dragon soul but decided to give it a chance. I don't see myself coming back, though for those who still enjoy it have fun.

Honestly think mmo devs need to stop aiming for "WoW' numbers because none of them are gonna reach it without watering down their games for the people who are still in the mmorpg scene.

[notorious98]

OK Blizzard, do you know a thing that will never happen again? 10M subs. maybe 9M neither.

Yeah, but that'll be true for all MMOs.

[Orkwuzhere]

Hard cores didn't complain about Cata, quit fucking lying, maybe bad casuals who think they were "hardcore" because they cleared nerfed content but no one else. We were clearing in blues/greens while people were still crying the game was too hard. I have been running Beta and good healer's are having no problem in raids,especially 5-man's lol. They are losing sub's because of the catering to casuals, they are making the game easier and easier, and the subs keep dropping, real easy to see, good players leave, baddies stay.

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Baddie still crying about the game being too hard, go practice, hell if you practiced as much as you cry/whine on here you might not be bad, well, not as bad.

I bet you're fun to hang out and play video games with.

I sure love these "hurr casuals ruined everything" when even "hardcore" pros hated Cataclysm's heroics (SFK took forever, and wasn't fun, and Deadmines was an even worse shit hole).

[Strikesuit]

What's with all the wotlk love as of late.. wotlk seems to be still fresh in my mind i can remember people complaining that raids were too easy, lfd destroying the community, that the content lul was way too long, that ruby sanctrum was boring, northrend had too much snow, gearscore was alive and well, dalaran lagged, too many rep grinds for enchants, naxxx is reused etc etc

Those complaints came from guys who like to talk tough on the forums. It was more fun playing with mediocre players in Wrath than good ones in Cata. The game was old and tired when ICC dragged on but people kept playing because it was fun and there were ways to advance a toon.

WoD will be Cata 2.0. The curve's drop will get steeper if the new content isn't lightly tuned.