World of Warcraft Subscriber Trends Revealed at GDC 2024

https://www.windowscentral.com/gamin...thin-expansion

Looks like Jez Corden has independently verified that the 7.25m subs figure is accurate

"As a result, World of Warcraft has achieved a type of player growth not seen in years, coinciding with an analysis from BellularGaming that the game has roughly over 7.25 million active subscribers — which we can independently verify as accurate according to our sources. "

Originally Posted by AtomR

is that the world that you live in? That things are either all right or all wrong? That you say "I told you so" because other people dares defend stuff you don't like. If people stopped playing wow every time they did poorly thought out storylines, poorly implemented gameplay the game would have died in vanilla. Your "how it was back in the day" is just you misremembering things as perfect or as only good. Every single expansion had to be rationalized to be enjoyed. Enjoying wow for 20 years takes a lot of enjoying what we were given instead of what we wanted. And a lot of realising that what you hated someone else loved. Shadowlands could have been amazing and it wasn't, just in terms of storyline. I had a great time anyway playing the game and the last zone was incredibly fun for me. BUT it wasn't worse than WoD, in my opinion. Or rather, it was worse in terms of impact on the lore and the main characters. WOD is just ignorable.

And don't think for a second that there isn't a similar presentation slide to every expansion after they analysed how it went.

That's a nice looking strawman you've got there. Allow me to lit a match.

1. I never said I believed things were either all right or all wrong. Blizzard themselves had a category called "things that went wrong" and that was what I commented on. Now do I agree with some of their sentiments? Yes and I suspect quite a few people do, as well. If you construe that as me living in a world where things are either "all right or all wrong", frankly I'm not sure what to tell ya. If anything my post was a criticism of black and white thinking.

2. I never said "I told you so".

3. I never said people stopped playing because of poorly thought out storylines. You have now made a sweeping judgement on this matter (stating that it is not the case apparently), but that is your judgement, not mine. In fact, I never even mentioned that some people had stopped playing, let alone speculate on the reason why.

4. I never said it was perfect back in the day or "only good". You have now made a sweeping judgement on me, my memory and motivation, but, again, that is your judgement, not mine. I'm sure I could make similar judgements about you and about why you feel the need to respond to my comment, but honestly I have zero interest in doing so, nor did my original post contain any kind of judgement on the alleged motivations of other people.

5. "Every single expansion had to be rationalized to be enjoyed". Another judgement? Well, maybe that's how you see it. Personally I don't look at things that way. I tend to lean more towards rationalization being the death of enjoyment, but that is, indeed, a matter of preference.

So yeah, maybe you want to re-consider who's really being judgemental here, cause frankly, I don't know who you're arguing with, but it ain't me. But for what it's worth, I don't hate either BFA, Shadowlands or Dragonflight (wouldn't have played them if I did). I just disliked some of the elements from some of those expansions for some of the same reasons that Blizzard are pointing out now. And now that Blizzard themselves have shared similar sentiments I am, as I said, cautiously optimistic.

Originally Posted by panda040

Yea, I suppose you are right, I still thinks its funny and the phrase fits, even if the woke characters isn't neccesarily why it has declined. I really dont get why these players who have constantly been lied to don't just go and play something like paladins.

That is a damn good question. From what I've seen, Paladins is supposed to be a pretty good game, and the artwork for it is nice too, so you'd think there'd be more players. Not sure about the story or the world, though, I haven't looked into it.

I do know that the potential the setting had in Overwatch was what grabbed a lot of people. A near-future Sci-Fi game with cool heroes, fighting robots and bad guys, almost like a Saturday morning cartoon? That was a big hit. And then we never got any serious PVE mode, and they cancelled the rest...

Originally Posted by doledippers

https://www.windowscentral.com/gamin...thin-expansion Looks like Jez Corden has independently verified that the 7.25m subs figure is accurate

Sure he did...Blizzard Entertainment may have over 7.25 million players... Weasel words

Originally Posted by Shadowferal

Sure he did...Blizzard Entertainment may have over 7.25 million players... Weasel words

so i see you didnt read beyond the overview. ill repost what is quoted in the article, and from Jez himself:

"World of Warcraft has achieved a type of player growth not seen in years, coinciding with an analysis from BellularGaming that the game has roughly over 7.25 million active subscribers — which we can independently verify as accurate according to our sources."



whether or not you choose to believe it, i dont think anyone cares, the reality is pretty clear

Originally Posted by doledippers

so i see you didnt read beyond the overview. ill repost what is quoted in the article, and from Jez himself:

... material from a convention...he doesn't have any choice but to be a cheerleader. He can't say anything negative...really, you can't grasp that...even if things went to shit, he still would say differently.

Originally Posted by Shadowferal

... material from a convention...he doesn't have any choice but to be a cheerleader. He can't say anything negative...really, you can't grasp that...even if things went to shit, he still would say differently.

ok so just to be clear, you think Bellular, Jez Corden, and blizzard, are all lying

got it

Originally Posted by doledippers

ok so just to be clear, you think Bellular, Jez Corden, and blizzard, are all lying got it

Just to be clear, you've never said anything negative, and attack those who do...right. Gotcha!

Originally Posted by doledippers

whether or not you choose to believe it, i dont think anyone cares, the reality is pretty clear

True but it is worth pointing out that Jez Corden is basically just a MS fanboy larping as a journo. His sources are lets say questionable at best.

Originally Posted by Shadowferal

Just to be clear, you've never said anything negative, and attack those who do...right. Gotcha!

im just going with the numbers, verified by independent sources what are you going with? your biases? phantom data that doesn't exist? it's alright. If it makes you feel better to think everyone is lying then go for it

Originally Posted by Grof

noooo, bcs you are idiot!!!

Ouch but kinda based xd

Originally Posted by doledippers

ok so just to be clear, you think Bellular, Jez Corden, and blizzard, are all lying

got it

Shadowferal thinks they regularly lie on there investor reports and just no one reports them for it soooo ya.

Originally Posted by Lorgar Aurelian

Shadowferal thinks they regularly lie on there investor reports and just no one reports them for it soooo ya.

memes aside its pretty insane behavior to assume that everybody is in blizzard's pocket and paid to lie about how well the game is doing. Not sure what one gains from living in the delusion that the game is dead

Originally Posted by Shadowferal

Just to be clear, you've never said anything negative, and attack those who do...right. Gotcha!

Someone has to have negative opinions about something for them to be correct? Okay, how about this:

It sure looks like all those numbers about WoW subs seem to be fairly accurate... however, I dislike how smug Bellular always is in his videos!

There, is that negative enough for you?

Originally Posted by The Stormbringer

Someone has to have negative opinions about something for them to be correct? Okay, how about this:

It sure looks like all those numbers about WoW subs seem to be fairly accurate... however, I dislike how smug Bellular always is in his videos!

There, is that negative enough for you?

No no... It has to be like this.

It looks like all those numbers about WoW subs seem to be fairly accurate... however, I REALLY fucking wish they weren't. I hate this game, I hate Blizzard, and every single person who works there, even the fucking janitor. Just the idea that Metzen is back and that the story might, JUST MIGHT become a little bit better makes me wanna PUKE! WHY did they have to say that they're listening to player feedback?! You're not supposed to do that Blizzard! You're supposed to ignore your players and FAIL! FUCK! As for all those 7 million subscribed BASTARDS, I wish them nothing but unhappiness! How DARE you like this game you absolute goddamn NERDS!

/s obviously.

Originally Posted by doledippers

memes aside its pretty insane behavior to assume that everybody is in blizzard's pocket and paid to lie about how well the game is doing. Not sure what one gains from living in the delusion that the game is dead

Realistically, WoW isn't dead, but what's getting lost in most of the responses is that WoW classic is likely the reason for that. With the addition of Classic, the WoW subscriber base instantly doubled... that's insane. Now, does that mean the WoW subscriber base is evenly split between retail and classic to this day? We honestly don't know, because WoW subscriptions do not differentiate between retail and classic. However, I do not doubt for a second Blizz could yield these numbers, but it's likely in their best interest not to. Furthermore, classic has the advantage that it not only takes less time/investment to operate but also has WoW token MTXs, so it likely has a much better (or safer) profit margin than retail WoW has; from Blizz's perspective, that's a pretty solid win.

What's getting lost is that the meta data analysis prior to this news actually gets corroborated by this new analysis. From the analysis done on this new data, if you overlap it with meta data analysis it actually makes sense when you realize that classic WoW has been padding the sub numbers (even if you assume classic is less than one-half or even a quarter of WoW subs). What should be taken away from all of this is that the issues with retail and the discussions around them are still relevant even with these numbers, and even their verbiage within their own presentation corroborates many of the complaints people have had. If you take away classic numbers, regardless of whatever reasonable ratio of the subs that may be, retail WoW still hasn't reached Legion levels of engagement (which did not have classic WoW to help add subs).

At the end of the day, what this data shows is that classic WoW was a huge win for Blizz. That's great, especially since they were adamantly against it for so many years. Doesn't mean that retail was trash, but it's still not the glamorous success that it was in the past (and accounting for classic just shows how bad Shadowlands really was). New expansion could change things, and any reasonable person would hope it does well; however, people are running on hype right now... which is expected, but Blizz needs to deliver. Their actions over the past few years demonstrate that even Blizz thinks retail is in an unstable position and needs a solid win in order to justify the time and money spents on new expansion.

Originally Posted by Luthorite

Funny how the "official" sources for this are a youtuber and a journalist.

if you took the time to read the article they verified with independent sources, but who am i kidding. blizzard could post videos of their revenue and server population and you still wouldnt believe it.

rough week for doomers i guess. they're resorting to calling everyone a liar

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by exochaft

--snip--

i dont think anybody was under the impression that classic wasn't 'padding' the sub numbers, and i also dont really think its padding either. It's a product within the WoW sub, so the consumer can now get more value out of it. If you only pay the sub for classic, or if you only pay the sub for retail, you are still a WoW player. I don't think anybody, including blizzard in the presentation, is ever making the claim that world of warcraft retail is as popular as it was in legion, I don't even think that was ever implied either.

I think with dragonflight and blizzcon they've regained the trust of a lot of their playerbase. This is reflected in the surge in m+ activity in season 3 and overall player retention throughout the expansion. Both versions of the game are in healthy and growing states

If you guys are worried for the subs numbers, let us remember that there is a reason Blizzard stop sharing those numbers. And the main reason was, because those numbers made them look bad infront of investors. Stop trying to change that fact over other excuses. They no longer want people to know how good or bad WoW is doing lately, because those subs numbers used to say a lot. And they removed them during WOD....guess why.

Originally Posted by Altmer

If you guys are worried for the subs numbers, let us remember that there is a reason Blizzard stop sharing those numbers. And the main reason was, because those numbers made them look bad infront of investors. Stop trying to change that fact over other excuses. They no longer want people to know how good or bad WoW is doing lately, because those subs numbers used to say a lot. And they removed them during WOD....guess why.

nobody is trying to change that fact... we're just discussing newly found data regarding the sub number. We're all aware that blizzard doesn't directly report their sub counts anymore. this 7.25 million subs number is the most current and accurate data we have regarding this

Originally Posted by Roanda

Blaming the "Afterlife" setting for the reason why story was bad...Blizzard...come on...thats my favorite setting of all time and is mega epic.
It was not the setting.

I mean I dont blame the afterlife settings. I blame the afterlife world, the whole structure of the afterlife (save for zereth mortis) is AWFUL and makes no damn sense.