WoW Down to 6.8 Million Subscribers

Originally Posted by esach88

Agreed, League is THE casual MOBA of MOBAS lol. it's funny because i had a few friends quit wow saying it was to easy. Meanwhile they only down 5 bosses in normal mode and hit 1700 arena rating... It's not too easy they just got burned out of MMO's. Now they play CoD like crazy, go figure.

Also, with wildstar it's not just who they are targeting for the game. It's the massive amount of bugs and the very poor optimization. When you have a $3k rig playing it on low settings and still only getting 20FPS then something is wrong. It's all over reddit and their forums. They are doing well with content each month but they blow a fixing their broken game.

I haven't played Wildstar, but from what I've read, the optimization is poor. But I've also read a ton of complaints about the lack of content for the "casual" player and the attunement process to get into raiding. Two things that people have cried about with WoW and reasons why, they claim, people have left (increase in casual content and WoW needing attunements again).

Not that surprised considering SoO is nearly a year old. Typical waning period for Blizzard, once WoD comes out subs will rise maybe 1 or 2 mil then drop 3-4 over the expansions life cycle. I predict WoD will end with somewhere between 5.4-6.3 mil subs.

Originally Posted by ProfessorTjc

I honestly think WoD will bring it back up to 8.8 million, maybe 9.2 million. WoW is start long way away from being dead.

Well, if you compare it to cata then it will only go up to aorund 7.5 million. But maybe this wasn't the last quarter before WoD....so maybe it will go down to below 6million prior to release and then Just go up to 6.8million.

Originally Posted by Muneraven

The only thing I have to say about this is that they could significantly slow down the inevitable bleeding away of subs if they didn't have content droughts lasting almost a year. Or more.

WoW isn't going to get back up to 12 million subs, but regularly released content would keep many players from unsubbing, finding other games, and just not bothering to come back to WoW.

I think a bigger problem is that there is no compelling antagonists left in the Warcraft universe. Not like Arthas or Illidan.

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Originally Posted by Pacster

Well, if you compare it to cata then it will only go up to aorund 7.5 million. But maybe this wasn't the last quarter before WoD....so maybe it will go down to below 6million prior to release and then Just go up to 6.8million.

You can't compare it to Cata-MoP because of the insta-90. That can be a game changer. Knowing you can jump immediately into the newest content could be a good selling point. Or enough of a selling point to bring in a couple million people.

Looks like unsub threats aren't just threats. Not saying that accounts for all unsubs, but with a report like this you'd think blizz would start taking player responses a little more seriously. I've been playing since vanilla myself, and I don't plan on unsubbing for any foreseeable reason in the future. However, blizz could take constructive criticism a little better and do more of what their player base wants and less of they they think is cool. Sure, they made the world, but we inhabit it, and I personally would like to see a world closer to what I have known warcraft to be like since I stared playing WC3 with my dad as a child. I think time-traveling nonsense is part of the problem. Warcraft has always (in the past) been about the future. The prophet Medhiv, the burning crusade coming. Reign of Chaos was "Prepare for what is to come." Arthas and WotLK, was a forward driven story. Time has moved forward. Caverns of Time was a nice way to see some of the older stuff, and parts of it fit. Even the Cataclysm was an occurrence of years of planning for the future on Deathwing's part. Traveling back to pre-BC Draenor, with a modern day Garrosh... It's losing appeal methinks. I'd really prefer to see more of the classic forward driven story. I DON'T mean after WoD seeing Garrosh (or anyone for that matter) coming back forward into time. Or even going into the future before it happens. Keep the time-space continuum a line, and we'll be okay. Drive the story forwards Blizzard. Please. For us.

Its really sad that a lot of subs pulled away during Pandaria, at least during the early parts of it. Pandaria felt a lot better to me than Cata.
Though a year of Siege doesn't really do well if nothing else comes out.
Hopefully Draenor will boost the numbers up a bit, but WoW is nowhere close to dying.

Not really surprising, this is what is killing WOW, the delay between the last patch and next expansion, it's the same thing every time. Maybe it's time they stop doing expansions and just content patches and charge for them instead.

It's kind of funny though, since they peaked exactly when there was a much longer time between Black Temple and WOTLK.. sure Sunwell, but nobody did that.

So maybe the idea of making catch up stuff so everybody can see the content and everything that makes you have no content but the current tier is not working as much as they expected.

Personally I realized that I'm the only one from my Dragon Soul raid to still play (10 man) and there is maybe 2 or 3 left from my 25 man raid from Firelands.

LFR killed WoW for my friends, and in turn, for myself. If I was one of those people who just wanted "to see the content" then I would watch a twitch-stream play through.

I bet its mostly because of the monkey GMs they hire nowdays. Ban for every minuscule thing. Friends get paid for getting other people banned. I got banned for saying "I[m sorry for being a dick". And a perma-ban for transferring 800k gold to another server. Accused of "exploiting the game economy". All of this combined with this last useless and boring expansion.

Your own fault blizzard. Should have invested in Australian servers. You think you can get away with having a sub par game yet have people continue to play? Just because some management accountant tells you that you will lose money. The investment would have been worth it. Your pricing strategies aren't exactly cost leadership based. Why give us a shell of a product. I know WoD is changing some of the issues surrounding game performance. But as far as im concerned you have annexed a massive player base from the very beginning by refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the oceanic player base.

Good, hopefully this will encourage them to make WoD a great game.

I think what's hurting sub numbers most is that people are growing up, getting families and don't have time to play anymore.

Originally Posted by Saafe

People will come back for WoD and then leave again lol.

but less people will come back and more of the ones coming back will leave. Thats the way it goes when a game get old

Originally Posted by dope_danny

WoW may not be dead, but its certainely starting to look like it will be in asia in a year or two. Maybe its too western? or hell maybe asian warcraft fans hate all the manatory places region altered versions like wow china have that mess with loe?

My thought is this: how much longer are they going to blame the downfall on the Eastern front? I don't know about anyone else, but I'd like to see an actual breakdown of the numbers by region.

I don't pay much heed to these numbers during the post-expansion slow down. After 10 years worth of expansions you sorta tune stuff like this out during this period until the new expansion comes along

Originally Posted by Turaska

I know one thing, Blizzard will be putting lots of overtime into WoD + 6.0 now given how many subs they lost since Q1, if I was a business that was essentially built around 1 golden goose atm i'd be bricking it if it was in decline so quickly, I think their "No content until WoD" thing kind of backfired on them a bit.

Honestly, as a business, the 800k drop isn't really a thing. Money is still being made. And lots of it.

$102 million a month if we assume they are all $15/m subs.

there needs to be content more often. if f2p games can do it, so can blizzard.

long gaps in content make it hard to justify a sub. yeah, you can raid with a guild but there still needs to be stuff to do outside a raid.

Drop that fee to $5 a month, charge $20 for the new expansion, you'll get my sub back. You lost it by charging $40 for MoP and not dropping the fee to $5 a month for such an aged game. $15 a month gets me 3 AAA PC games off Steam when they're on sale. You have to stay competitive, Blizzard.

Old Post...So true...this is exacly what happens!!

Originally Posted by ju2au

From Steve Jobs' biography:

Steve Jobs has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.”

The salesmen who led the companies were smart and eloquent, but “they didn’t know anything about the product.” In the end this can doom a great company, because what consumers want is good products.

It’s not just the salesmen. It’s also the accountants and the money men who search the firm high and low to find new and ingenious ways to cut costs or even eliminate paying taxes. The activities of these people further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.

In this mode, the firm is basically playing defense. Because it’s easier to milk the cash cow than to add new value, the firm not only stops playing offense: it even forgets how to play offense. The firm starts to die.

If the firm is in a quasi-monopoly position, this mode of running the company can sometimes keep on making money for extended periods of time. But basically, the firm is dying, as it continues to dispirit those doing the work and to frustrate its customers.

It is pretty clear that Blizzard is milking the WOW cash cow. Increases in micro-transactions and paid services while at the same time cutting development costs have really boosted their profits and bottom line. But this will only work in the short to medium term and will come back to hurt them in the long run.

Evidence of cost cutting are obvious in the game. Slow release of patches, lack of new content, recycled content, recycled models, homogenization of classes and simplifying talents/mechanics all reduce development costs. One trick is to increase the grind and the difficulty to artificially slow down progression so as to hide the lack of content (early Cataclysm).

Activision-Blizzard is headed by a guy who doesn't care about "games" and probably doesn't really understand them either. Expansion cycles reduced from 2 years to 1.5 years to get more profits. Battle.net, Real-ID and integration with Facebook - new ways to suck money instead of working on the actual game. Instead of working hard to maintain server population and factional balance, paid server transfers and paid faction transfers were introduced and promoted. Result? Dead factions and dead servers that even LFD and LFR can't solve.

Blizzard has taken it's eyes off the ball in the "quality" of WOW. Recent loss of subscribers are only a harbinger of things to come.

Originally Posted by Saafe

People will come back for WoD and then leave again lol.

lol not really wod i have played the beta and let me tell you it felt more like wow2 then wod thats how awesome it is so lol at your comment