How much of a drop can WoW take?

[xanzul]

I actually believe that there was something said or written that stated the majority of WoW players do not know there is a new expansion because they do not frequent fansites. Instead they see it on the homepage

Most people just play the game. They don't treat it like some sort of religion or way of life like some do here.

[Deleted]

Most people just play the game. They don't treat it like some sort of religion or way of life like some do here.

And? That doesn't prove or disprove anything. The only thing we know for sure is that WoD is the biggest failure to ever be seen in WoW.

[xanzul]

yeah...well...that's just like your opinion man.

either way so long as their subs go down the shitter, you can put whatever blame you want on it. I really don't care either way. I'll just be celebrating quietly on the side.

Why don't you people move the fuck on? This endless desire to see Blizzard fail is borderline psychotic.

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It most certainly can survive even under 1M subs, it's just a matter of how low of a number will the shareholders tolerate before starting to want to cut costs on it.

But if I had to guess, WoW will most likely remain above 5M for a few more years.

You do understand there is more to ATVI than Blizzard Entertainment and Wow right? If Wow is profitable at 500k subs they won't give a fuck about "cutting costs". Profit is profit.

[Osmeric]

The numbers will go back up in the next patch. A good number of players will come back for the new raid and then leave out again after a couple months. It's worked like this for a while now.

WoD does not have good catch-up mechanics. This will make it hard for the expansion to overcome losses.

[Deleted]

Why don't you people move the fuck on? This endless desire to see Blizzard fail is borderline psychotic.

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You do understand there is more to ATVI than Blizzard Entertainment and Wow right? If Wow is profitable at 500k subs they won't give a fuck about "cutting costs". Profit is profit.

They would have to make cuts though, push people around to other projects. Which means less content........AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH......

.......AHAHAHAHWAHAHHAA

[Osmeric]

You do understand there is more to ATVI than Blizzard Entertainment and Wow right? If Wow is profitable at 500k subs they won't give a fuck about "cutting costs". Profit is profit.

A WoW that is profitable at 500K subs would be a pale shadow of even its current state. Costs of an MMO are mostly fixed, so development would have to be slashed radically.

[xanzul]

In this case it's pretty evident. The single sharpest drop in Wow's history which just happens to coincide with the largest thread on this server, and the quickest thread tally on their server to 511 pages (which still get's continued might I add as we speak...) Now...you could put blame of that sub drop on allot of things. Garrison, pvp...bots...fatigue from a 10 year old game. Lack of content (which is debatable...as they (blizzard) are clearly of the opinion that you all have as much to do as you've ever had before...

Me?

I'm VERY comfy putting most of this plummet's blame on the flight issue. You can quote blizzard until you are blue in the face. I really don't care. I'd say part of blizzard's problem is that they are NOT seeing peoples complaint about wanting flight at all. Like you, who is repeating blizzard...blizzard themselves appears to be covering both ears and proclaiming "not listening!" whenever anyone suggest they are quitting because of flight.

And as such...the subs just keep on dropping!



Because watching a train wreck...is very entertaining thing indeed.

Honest to god the sooner you pro flyers get the fuck out the better. It has been nearly 2 years of this bullshit. All the QQ over flying has done nothing but bump down any discussion on any of the other issues in Wod and hasn't contributed a fucking thing to the game. Once all of you are gone maybe we can finally get back to talking about something other than flight sims.

[Deleted]

Another point is.

If Blizzard is so sure that it is a popular decision.........where is the devblog? Where was the announcment during Blizzcon? Where was the announcment on the box?

Your logic is complete garbage Darsithis. They secrecy and silence make it certain that they know it isn't a popular decision.

[Altrec]

Honest to god the sooner you pro flyers get the fuck out the better. It has been nearly 2 years of this bullshit. All the QQ over flying has done nothing but bump down any discussion on any of the other issues in Wod and hasn't contributed a fucking thing to the game. Once all of you are gone maybe we can finally get back to talking about something other than flight sims.

Maybe if all you anti-flyers realized it was a stupid decision and joined with us to prevent it from happening we would all have more time to talk about "real" issues instead? Certainly seems people would be happier at the very least. Pro-flyers because they didn't lose what they wanted, and anti-flyers wouldn't have to hear about it without end.

[Chickat]

A WoW that is profitable at 500K subs would be a pale shadow of even its current state. Costs of an MMO are mostly fixed, so development would have to be slashed radically.

Yeah, I imagine they would make smaller expansions once a year with no content patches.

Imagine WoD with just 6.0 content lasting until November of 2015. Thats what I would guess they could do at 1m or less subs. I wonder why the patches have been so bad tho. They must be working on 7.0.

[Varabently]

So, we've all seen the massive drop for Q1 and if player opinion is anything to go by, the same is going to be announced when the end of Q2 rolls around.

What I'm wondering is how much more they can take.

When is it going to get to the point they start forcing more server merges to recoup losses?

When will Blizz start doing panic moves, rather than continuing to ignore the vocal majority?

I'm curious.

By definition, the majority cannot be vocal. If everyone was "vocal" the forums and such would crash. Imagine 7 million people on the forums every day.

As far as how many subs can drop? Do you mean before the game goes under, before drastic changes are made or when the game no longer becomes profitable? All are very different numbers and no one but Blizzard can tell you for sure. If you believe their PR, the drop was totally expected "churn" and within the expected ebb and flow after a new expansion drops.

I'm not sure a 30% subscriber drop in one quarter is really expected "churn" though. Seems like spin to me. I'm not sure how many subs WoW could lose to hit those three levels: panic, insolvency, and death, but one thing is for sure: No matter how many players WoW has, the development time is not going to change much. Whether 10 million people or 100 million raid, the raid development time probably doesn't change that much. The operating costs like support, servers, etc. will go down as subs go down, so those costs aren't really that big of a deal. They can just combine servers and lay off people as necessary.

The other unknown variable is that if they lose a lot of players, it may make content easier to make. Here's how: if they gutted pets, no longer had new pets drop, etc. then some players would likely quit. Those players who didn't care about pets would stay (or didn't care THAT much), but since now the vast majority of players either don't care about pets or barely do, they don't have to waste time developing and balancing pet battles. They can let that content stream wither and die.

So if blizzard WANTED to get rid of a certain subset of the population and thereby save their development time (if for example, the development cost was higher than the subscription revenue generated by the lovers of that content), they could do that. I think that's why they keep splintering out raids into more and more levels. First, it was all 40 mans, then they started bringing in 20 mans (ZG/AQ20). then in TBC they brought that down to 25 man, with 10 man alternative raids (Kara, ZA). And so on. Now we have 10-30 man flex modes (x2) plus LFR plus mythic.

Anyway, I'm off in the weeds. Just trying to point out that Blizz would have to lose a LOT of subs (probably millions more) to really get into panic mode.

[xanzul]

It's actually not at all a given. In fact, I doubt they have much data on why people unsub other than the forums / fan sites like this one and reddit/r/wow. That little "why you unsubbed" form isn't a lot of data, because most folks simply click through such forms in order to make them go away - we know that from 20+ years of experience, hence the signal is small and absolutely inconclusive. What else is there? Telemetry? They don't have it in any material amounts, we'd know from the packet sniffs. Completion rates are something, but they are too circumstantial to be useful for analyzing why people unsub / are angry, they are good for other things, but not that. Sims and internal formulae / models obviously don't help.

In the end, they don't have much more than the forums, same as we do.

Blizzard has access to a lot more metrics than we realize so no, they aren't as stupid as you and the haters hope.

[rda]

Another point is.

If Blizzard is so sure that it is a popular decision.........where is the devblog? Where was the announcment during Blizzcon? Where was the announcment on the box?

Your logic is complete garbage Darsithis. They secrecy and silence make it certain that they know it isn't a popular decision.

Screw it, where's that vision that they have been talking about all this time, in the game? Where is it? They had more than a year, where exactly are those great things that they couldn't do because flying was getting in the way? And if the things are the same and not having flying simply saves time developing same content, where're those savings and added content that we have because of no flying?

[Varabently]

Yeah, I imagine they would make smaller expansions once a year with no content patches.

Imagine WoD with just 6.0 content lasting until November of 2015. Thats what I would guess they could do at 1m or less subs. I wonder why the patches have been so bad tho. They must be working on 7.0.

They've confirmed they are already well under development of the next expansion.

[xanzul]

It didn't drop very many subs at all. They gained a huge number of extra players buying the expansion at launch who then haven't maintained the subs. You only have to look at other MMOs who still churn out regular content that don't have a tenth of WoW's subs to know they can take real hits (even though they obviously don't want to) and still be worth carrying on with.

We also don't even know which of the 3 million left or why which is far more important than how many left.

[Deleted]

It depends if their profits from WoW take a significant dive when the IP still has the potential to supply demand and make money.

Some people might be perfectly content to milk a dying game.

[xanzul]

And again...that's just like, your opinion...man.

Right back at you.

[rda]

Blizzard has access to a lot more metrics than we realize so no, they aren't as stupid as you and the haters hope.

A lot more than we realize? Not really. Than you realize, possibly, but speak for yourself.

A lot more than we have - yes, and I said that, except it is not much help wrt the question of why people quit.

Didn't say they were stupid. Learn to read.

[Deleted]

Another point is.

If Blizzard is so sure that it is a popular decision.........where is the devblog? Where was the announcment during Blizzcon? Where was the announcment on the box?

Your logic is complete garbage Darsithis. They secrecy and silence make it certain that they know it isn't a popular decision.

The majority of WoD's design and direction changes have been solely about cutting costs and making life easier for themselves. Not for the players. They were arrogant in their ability that they could still deliver a fun gaming experience despite stripping the game to its bare bones. They were wrong.

[xanzul]

It should be mentioned - and I feel like a lot of people forget this tiny little detail - WoW's servers are much more numerous, better and larger than most average MMOs out there. What may be profitable for a game like GW2 or FFXIV may very well not be for WoW. I don't think it could go down to 500k-1mil for example and still be a profitable game purely because of the upkeep it requires.

That being said, I think it's far from that. I'd say 2-3mil is the point of danger and the WoW token ensured that will not happen.

Because Blizzard totally has no use for hardware right? It isn't like they have released 2 new games in the past few years with more to come or anything. I think players need to stop being armchair developers and shareholders and financiers and just playing the fucking game or don't. None of this is our concern.

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5m more lost would force them to go ftp. 2mish is that mark imo where they would make more as ftp than sub based.

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Eh, I dont think they will go up. They just wont go down much. 6.5-7.1m is my guess. Guessing 6.8m.

And yet most subscription mmos barely hit 1 million much less two. But why pay any attention to actual industry norms when we could have a hater circle jerk instead?

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Working hard for that job oppotunity over in Irvine eh? You would fit perfectly over there, same mentality that made WoD flop.


And large companies with a lot of data are always right. Are you for real? Do you what logic is?

And what job are you and the other haters bucking for?

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WoD does not have good catch-up mechanics. This will make it hard for the expansion to overcome losses.

Because 6.2 totally isn't a thing. It's like you people don't even try anymore. You just post ignorant bullshit regardless of actual facts just to get your digs in on Blizzard.

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They would have to make cuts though, push people around to other projects. Which means less content........AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH......

.......AHAHAHAHWAHAHHAA

Remember how people said subscription losses during Cata meant less content? Then we got Mop.

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A WoW that is profitable at 500K subs would be a pale shadow of even its current state. Costs of an MMO are mostly fixed, so development would have to be slashed radically.

Shareholders aren't in the habit of telling the companies they invest in to stop making a profit just because.