WoW Down to 7.7 Million Subscribers, Activision Blizzard Purchases Vivendi's Shares

Originally Posted by docterfreeze

Honestly never heard of that, I hear people blaming activision more than anything, and I would too. Activision is probably right up there with EA for most greedy gaming company.

Me neither and it is Activision promoting the shitty decisions. I remember explicitly that the "Caretaker" of Blizzard from Vivendi didn't know anything about games and therefor let the guys at Blizzard do their thing (Or atleast that's what he said in the 20 year anniversary video) People should be afraid now that Bobby Kottick owns more shares of Vivendi rather than overjoyed.

Originally Posted by Kagecamia

No King rules forever, my son.

Dude you had to go there? LMAO!!!!

Originally Posted by ProfessorTjc

As long as Blizzard has 1mil+ active subs they will continue to make money off WoW.

This will only be true if they scale back everything to a skeleton crew.

WoW grew to 12 million and the developers, servers, support staff, GM's, etc. all swelled to support 12 million.

Remember when Blizz had that massive round of layoffs last year?

WoW can be profitable with 1 million subs, but only if Blizzard is willing to drastically slash the WoW team back.

It's also not as simple as profitable vs. non-profitable. If you spend $10 million dollars and make 10.1 million you are technically profitable, but it's also a giganitc waste of time. Profit MARGIN is very important. If for example you spent $100,000 to make $200,000, you have the same amount of profit but a much greater margin.

Big companies pull the plug on profitable projects all the time, if they think they can get a better ROI in other places.

Originally Posted by g1zm0

Please tell me how something OPTIONAL is killing the game? Don't like it? Then DON'T fucking purchase anything from the store, it's not hard.

You would be surprised how many people would get upset and quit over a matter that is optional. It is the fact that you can only obtain these items off the store instead of earning items through hard work that really bothers people. I see this in every MMO that was said to get these optional stores and there can be a huge fuss about it. Just because something is optional doesn't mean people wont leave over it, this happened when Tera Online introduced their store, this happened when Rift introduced their store, and it happened when SWTOR introduced their store. I even remember seeing posts on MMO champion complaining about the store. I am not saying people are leaving mainly because they store because no one other than the people that left truly know the reason, but like said, even optional features can piss people off causing them to quit.

Originally Posted by Kelilareyn

You would be surprised how many people would get upset and quit over a matter that is optional. It is the fact that you can only obtain these items off the store instead of earning items through hard work that really bothers people. I see this in every MMO that was said to get these optional stores and there can be a huge fuss about it. Just because something is optional doesn't mean people wont leave over it, this happened when Tera Online introduced their store, this happened when Rift introduced their store, and it happened when SWTOR introduced their store. I even remember seeing posts on MMO champion complaining about the store. I am not saying people are leaving mainly because they store because no one other than the people that left truly know the reason, but like said, even optional features can piss people off causing them to quit.

This is true, but not with the amount of sub loss.

People are just seeing big numbers and using it to fuel their anger against the company. Which is confusing. Because you either hate the company and it's politics and still play the game and therefore defeat your own argument to anyone with sense. Or you don't play anymore and should STFU and not butt into something you're not paying for, and no longer have a point to make.

Leaving over stuff you don't have to partake in is particularly why, us as a species, are fucking ungrateful for anything. Everyone thinks they have their own crusade and morals, and those are the same people who ninja shit or kick you from a group because you're considered a scrub/loser/whatever in their eyes. We love to take the moral high-ground in the general public, even though we're shitheads at every opportunity.

Originally Posted by ProfessorTjc

As long as Blizzard has 1mil+ active subs they will continue to make money off WoW.

They will switch to f2p before that, losing 11 million subs and still charging a monthly fee would be a pr disaster.

Originally Posted by Strychnine

This is true, but not with the amount of sub loss.

People are just seeing big numbers and using it to fuel their anger against the company. Which is confusing. Because you either hate the company and it's politics and still play the game and therefore defeat your own argument to anyone with sense. Or you don't play anymore and should STFU and not butt into something you're not paying for, and no longer have a point to make.

Leaving over stuff you don't have to partake in is particularly why, us as a species, are fucking ungrateful for anything. Everyone thinks they have their own crusade and morals, and those are the same people who ninja shit or kick you from a group because you're considered a scrub/loser/whatever in their eyes. We love to take the moral high-ground in the general public, even though we're shitheads at every opportunity.

Well, the games what.... 8 years old now? The fans of the original game are in/approaching their 30's, there's been enough huge screw-ups along the way and corrections etc to try and correct it, none of which helps (if you try to please everyone, you normally end up pleasing no-one). There's a bunch of stuff they DO need to sort like low pop realms and some of the usual whine on the balancing front etc (though it's better than it's been in the past, not the best but still...).

HOWEVER. Those sat pointing at figures as proof the games now gone to sh!t and they need more content and blah, blah, blah... please. They made some huge mistakes with cata (though maybe it was needed to do "cheap" content to get the rest of their stuff sorted) but MoP really HAS been some of the best stuff they've done since TBC, it's at least up with WOTLK standards overall.

The games OLD, there's plenty of alternatives on the market, as expected there's a decent number of reasons for subs to continue to fall.

Originally Posted by Strychnine

This is true, but not with the amount of sub loss.

People are just seeing big numbers and using it to fuel their anger against the company. Which is confusing. Because you either hate the company and it's politics and still play the game and therefore defeat your own argument to anyone with sense. Or you don't play anymore and should STFU and not butt into something you're not paying for, and no longer have a point to make.

Leaving over stuff you don't have to partake in is particularly why, us as a species, are fucking ungrateful for anything. Everyone thinks they have their own crusade and morals, and those are the same people who ninja shit or kick you from a group because you're considered a scrub/loser/whatever in their eyes. We love to take the moral high-ground in the general public, even though we're shitheads at every opportunity.

I agree and like I said before I am not saying I believe this is the main reason for a loss of subs because these people left on their own agendas and we will probably never know what this agenda is or if these subs will return. I think most people who are saying the game is dying are just plain stupid because they seem to forget that 7.7 million subs is still a huge number and it is still the largest MMO out there. No game will survive forever and I am sure people see this, but I don't see WoW going any where for sometime.

INC more stupid cash shop items to keep their pockets full.

Originally Posted by Zaqwert

This will only be true if they scale back everything to a skeleton crew.

WoW grew to 12 million and the developers, servers, support staff, GM's, etc. all swelled to support 12 million.

Remember when Blizz had that massive round of layoffs last year?

WoW can be profitable with 1 million subs, but only if Blizzard is willing to drastically slash the WoW team back.

It's also not as simple as profitable vs. non-profitable. If you spend $10 million dollars and make 10.1 million you are technically profitable, but it's also a giganitc waste of time. Profit MARGIN is very important. If for example you spent $100,000 to make $200,000, you have the same amount of profit but a much greater margin.

Big companies pull the plug on profitable projects all the time, if they think they can get a better ROI in other places.

They would slash the team back regardless and wow would still be profitable if it had 1 million subs by that time they will likely go f2p and most games that go free have made more then they did with subs at that number. Im pretty sure they would be ok with cutting the team, servers, whatever back, like you pointed out they have already done this twice to scale with the player base.
Lets take Swtor for example before they went f2p they were likely losing money but now they have scaled back and have still recently released a new xpac. They cant have that many players yet they are still afloat like every mmo that has gone f2p.

Originally Posted by mercutiouk

Well, the games what.... 8 years old now? The fans of the original game are in/approaching their 30's, there's been enough huge screw-ups along the way and corrections etc to try and correct it, none of which helps (if you try to please everyone, you normally end up pleasing no-one). There's a bunch of stuff they DO need to sort like low pop realms and some of the usual whine on the balancing front etc (though it's better than it's been in the past, not the best but still...).

HOWEVER. Those sat pointing at figures as proof the games now gone to sh!t and they need more content and blah, blah, blah... please. They made some huge mistakes with cata (though maybe it was needed to do "cheap" content to get the rest of their stuff sorted) but MoP really HAS been some of the best stuff they've done since TBC, it's at least up with WOTLK standards overall.

The games OLD, there's plenty of alternatives on the market, as expected there's a decent number of reasons for subs to continue to fall.

This is a good possibility as well, I joined WoW at launch and I am just hit 23. I am losing out on time to play any MMO seriously enough to stay subscribed in the first place and I too have considered dropping subs and I refuse to become a casual player. I have military training coming up and balancing working out and having a job, I am not going to be playing forever. The game is also very old and the fact that it still has 7.7 mil players means the game could be doing much worse than it currently is.

Originally Posted by Tails

Yes but, aren't there actually more stuff that makes people go "I did this I'm a God" in MOP than at any point in the games history? How many rank 10 brawler's are there? How many gold medalists in challenge modes? I'm playing a hunter since vanilla and there hasn't been anything harder officially put in this game for me than the brawler bosses. The exceptions are the solo adventures people invent for themselves, people who are looking for an actual challenge in pve because to them, the game never offered that kind of pressure on personal talent in official raids. I raided TBC, I wiped 600 times on M'uru, but that wasn't hard, only annoying. 25 or 40 man raiding is exactly this = only 1 in every 25 or 40 wipes is on you hence you are basically corpse running due to other people's errors or RNG most of the time (considering the skill of people in the raid is more or less the same).

I don't think the lack of hard content is the problem with the game nowadays. The game to me lost the social aspect a lot when they introduced LFR, random dungeon queuing etc. Nobody is being forced to make friends anymore unless they want to raid normal or heroic content. That to me is the biggest culprit of the game today. But I won't blame the diminishing sub count to that. I don't think anyone can actually figure out why people are quitting the game, but if I had to guess, I'd say that despite how great it still is, it is a 9 year old game and there's the simple fact of people getting bored already.

I don't know about you, but I've yet to meet anyone who cared about brawlers guild or getting gold in challenge modes. You no why? People care about getting meaningful rewards not stupid achievements or gear with no stats.

If people put effort into something they want a reward that means something to them. The Brawlers guild rewards are terrible, i also think half the Challenge mode sets look terrible and people just don't care to get them.

I do agree with the social aspect being gone but that leads up back to Blizzard making the game to easy.

All will be ok

Originally Posted by Kelilareyn

This is a good possibility as well, I joined WoW at launch and I am just hit 23. I am losing out on time to play any MMO seriously enough to stay subscribed in the first place and I too have considered dropping subs and I refuse to become a casual player. I have military training coming up and balancing working out and having a job, I am not going to be playing forever. The game is also very old and the fact that it still has 7.7 mil players means the game could be doing much worse than it currently is.

Exactly people are leaving highschool/university and moving on with their lives. Wow is just a game and it is not worth ruining ones life with it.

Originally Posted by Buck-Shot

Well can you realistically expect the community in a MMO to stay the same? If Blizz had stick to the old way of no LFD (i care not for Raids). WoW decline would have happened faster than now, or it probably wouldn't have gotten that high because you know why?

Rampant speculation. LFD was introduced as part of the design shift, specifically in patch 3.3. Easily-obtained data (I'll let you Google/Bing/whatever yourself) shows the decline began at that time. As has been previously stated in this thread, those subscription numbers are part of their shareholder reports. Falsifying them in any way opens them up to fraud charges, potential prosecution by the SEC, and lawsuits. Therefore, any statement about when the decline began is not subject to opinion. Therefore, it's not hard to see that LFD came out right as decline was beginning, which means we cannot take it as action to fight decline.

To address the rest of your post, there's a MASSIVE difference between convenience and completely changing a game's design philosophy. An example of convenience would be casters no longer carrying reagents (bonus points if you knew they ever did, and even more if you can name any) or hunters no longer losing a bag slot for ammunition. LFD, on the hand, is the complete opposite of how groups were previously formed. You needed to be social or at least polite, or you wouldn't get many groups. LFD completely negates the need to be civil at any point, unless you care to claim you've never seen rudeness or trolling in LFD. Please feel free to do so, if only so that the entire forum can agree for once and have a laugh...

Now can blizzard finally see what they are doing wrong? and they should go back to their hard annyoing farm game and stop this easy content, But instead they add another easy content just to dig another hole

Originally Posted by Rooik

Now can blizzard finally see what they are doing wrong? and they should go back to their hard annyoing farm game and stop this easy content, But instead they add another easy content just to dig another hole

People do not have the incentive for doing anything serious in this game anymore

Originally Posted by lazzy

I don't know about you, but I've yet to meet anyone who cared about brawlers guild or getting gold in challenge modes. You no why? People care about getting meaningful rewards not stupid achievements or gear with no stats.

If people put effort into something they want a reward that means something to them. The Brawlers guild rewards are terrible, i also think half the Challenge mode sets look terrible and people just don't care to get them.

I do agree with the social aspect being gone but that leads up back to Blizzard making the game to easy.

We are saying the same thing. MOP offers a lot of "I did this I'm a God" type things, people not caring about them shows that actually hard content is not really cared for by many people, so the lack of hard content wouldn't be either. Whatever is killing the game slowly isn't about hard content since few people actually care about that kind of things.

Originally Posted by Xjev

People do not have the incentive for doing anything serious in this game anymore

Isn't that a symptom of what you were quoting?

Originally Posted by El Plastico

If they keep loosing 600k per quarter soon nobody will be left. They better get their shit together and stop shitting on us players.

They aren't really shitting on players. They're making a game as well as they can to cater, intelligently, towards as many players as possible. They aren't "indie", nor have they been since well before the masses began to join in BC.

How would you feel getting in front of a room full of board members and explaining to them why they should earn less money? Exactly.

People have this hard time coming to understand that the only "force" that's making you play is your desire to play.

It's a good game that's been around for a long time. It's natural that it will reach the end of its cycle.