WoW Down to 6.8 Million Subscribers

Originally Posted by Chickat

Id like to see an accurate graph of all mmos above 250k subs to see what kind of trends they have had over the last 5 years. Is it wows fault that its shrinking, or is it the mmo genre.

While not entirely current (about 8 months since their last update), http://mmodata.blogspot.com/ does have the information you desire. From the looks of it, MMOs peaked several years ago and have slowly gone down. My opinion is that's likely due to other game options, especially free ones, that offer a similar social interaction on top of several MMOs released in the past few years that have failed to progress the genre enough to maintain peoples' interest.

The only still steadily increasing MMO is EVE Online, and as much of a niche game it is I wouldn't consider it a good example.

ONLY 6.8 mil players, time to shut down the servers and kill the game
because "logic"

Originally Posted by lyphe

I and all my chess playing friends respectfully disagree.

It depends on the variety the game offers and the quality. WoW can continue as long as they maintain a high level of quality and continue to inject new dimensions and angles to the game. Chess never gets old because every game is different every time you play it, and it has incredible depth. It may not quite be an apples to apples comparison, but the logic still works. WoW can remain entertaining as long as it remains innovative and challenging.

admittedly pvp almost always outlasts pve due to its far greater range of options in the first four moves of a chess game you can have 318,979,564,000 results, thats why it stays relevant even if only 1% of those are actually ligament and interesting games you can almost never see them all. PvE on the other hand is far more limited in its range

This doesn't really spell the end of shit. This quarter should of course be the lowest seeing as it's the longest period without new content. I am surprised by Blizzard allowing another gap similar to the one from ICC to Cataclysm, but of course if they released anything else, we probably wouldn't have had WoD released until early 2015.

WoW is still by far the strongest MMO that has ever been, even at these numbers and I'm sure that we'll return back up to 8 million or so when WoD comes out. At the same time, why the fuck do we care how many subscribers WoW has.

Vanilla and TBC were the pinnacle. WotLK had huge hype and huge lore backing it. It couldn't have flopped even if it wanted to. Millions played WC3 and wanted to see the Arthas story unfold. What WotLK did though, was add homogenization into the game. This is the achilles heal of WoW. Classes no longer felt unique, gear was now easy to get. The prestige of the game was gone.

They have done nothing to correct either of these problems since and their numbers reflect it. You can look at that graph and tell exactly where they screwed up.

It isn't surprising to be honest though, they have been incredibly slow with WoD and been canceling features in an expansion already being criticized at having a lack of content compared to other xpacs. I'm certain WoD will have to amaze the shit out of the world which it probably will towards casuals, since you have to literally have Autism to not do a decent amount of dps in WoD, so they'll feel good about that.

Wow, lowest numbers since early 2006! That's brutal.

I think the thing is though if you are Blizzard you are concerned, but probably not having a heart attack. If you notice, the one thing they keep telling investors is that they are losing subs, but they are losing them in the sector that is the least profitable. I think in NA/EU they really don't drop that much from quarter to quarter, and what they do lose mostly comes back with the expansion.

I think they are losing big in the Asian market, and heck even some of it is probably getting the numbers closer to what the actual player base looks like.

I think they will continue to decline, not because of the NA/EU market, but because they are losing out in Asia. It wouldn't surprise me to see WoW down to less than 4 million by the end of WoD, with most of the losses still coming in the east and a much larger percent of their players being in the NA/EU markets comparatively.

Blizzard promised they would speed up the patching speed process after icecrown citidel. Looks like old habits die hard.

Not that I'm looking forward to 6.0 really, my Druid will be losing half his spells. I think people are in for a shock. I've always heard of 'not changing too much what people are used to with a game' as a good design philosophy. Will be interesting to see how the community react to this massive overhaul. It's the kind of thing GC always seemed dead against, and with him gone a certain faction seem to be pulling the strings now...

Originally Posted by Pizzakid2093

"WoW is not dead or dying" this has been said for years. Obviously the game is going on. The word that you are all search for is decline. WoW is in decline and has been for a long time now. It will probably only get worse as time goes on.

Yep. May if fade away elegantly.

Or something.

im woundering how long people expected wow to keep growing all things go in and out of popularity.

Originally Posted by Moradim

every time there is a huge decline, people still say "hey, it's still successful!"

...6 mil subs! it's fine!

...3 mil subs! it's fine!

...900k subs! it's...under 1 mil?

at some point, blizzard needs to admit "hey, we keep fucking up". if you don't innovate, or keep fucking over customers with long content droughts, that is how you lose subs. also, i'm not sure a "filler" xpac like pandaland was a good idea. ironically, they lost business in china, the xpac that this was pandering to (no pun intended).

I'm still having fun doing SoO with guild, and just gearing up new alts,
content drought is the best part.. because then the gear isen't useless after just a few months xD

The generation of WoW is over. We all grew up, got tired of it, or found other games to play. Whether it be subscription based or free. Blizzard knows they'll never get those BC/WotLK numbers again. They're just trying to maintain now. I've played WoW since 2007 and miss the old days

Originally Posted by Armourboy

I think the thing is though if you are Blizzard you are concerned, but probably not having a heart attack. If you notice, the one thing they keep telling investors is that they are losing subs, but they are losing them in the sector that is the least profitable. I think in NA/EU they really don't drop that much from quarter to quarter, and what they do lose mostly comes back with the expansion.

I think they are losing big in the Asian market, and heck even some of it is probably getting the numbers closer to what the actual player base looks like.

I think they will continue to decline, not because of the NA/EU market, but because they are losing out in Asia. It wouldn't surprise me to see WoW down to less than 4 million by the end of WoD, with most of the losses still coming in the east and a much larger percent of their players being in the NA/EU markets comparatively.

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.

"which was disproportionately concentrated in the East and was similar to the seasonal decline experienced during the second quarter of 2012"

That's the important part, but it won't get discussed much because drama is more fun.

Originally Posted by Renrawr

Unless it's some sort of business tactic - the drought in content really is disorganised for such a successful company.

This is nothing but me talking, but I really think they delayed it because of Destiny in September.

But if that is not the case, I really think they need to clean house with some of the upper management of WOW. There are clearly too many cooks in the kitchen and no reason that content is this slow coming out for such a big team. I really think the problems is that they have just promoted too many people and created too many ´middle managers´ who don´t contribute actual content to the game and actually get in the way. Like with the character models, it seems like you only have a handful of people actually working on them, but then 10 layers of managers who all have the power to kick the finished product back to the artists.

it is what happened with Microsoft and is happening with Google. You just promote too many people to middle-management positions who do nothing but justify their jobs by delaying the pipeline to ´make things right´...

Originally Posted by Kori

I wouldn't be surprised if they lied about the sub numbers tbh. I'm on Tichondrius which is the largest server in the game and it seems much emptier than usual. All my other servers I'm on are completely empty. That just leaves the question that I keep finding myself asking would they actually lie about that to reassure consumers?

Most of WoW's subs are in the east (china, korea etc..) and have always been. The west make up a small part of the total subs. In addition to that I highly doubt they would lie about the sub numbers given that they don't release them for the public. They release them for investors because they are required to by law. Lying about them would make them guilty of fraud and someone would be facing jail time. Don't think Blizzard would make that trade.

Originally Posted by RoKPaNda

"which was disproportionately concentrated in the East and was similar to the seasonal decline experienced during the second quarter of 2012"

That's the important part, but it won't get discussed much because drama is more fun.

yep, people just look past the fact that WOW is making as much money as it ever did.

I'm sure blizzard will learn their lesson the fourth time with wod and release content more often rather than having 12-15month gaps....

Originally Posted by Hyperfly

The generation of WoW is over. We all grew up, got tired of it, or found other games to play. Whether it be subscription based or free. Blizzard knows they'll never get those BC/WotLK numbers again. They're just trying to maintain now. I've played WoW since 2007 and miss the old days

You can only be new once. If you had told anyone in the industry 10 years ago that WoW would pass 10 million subs they would have called you a liar. If you told them that in 10 years it would still have nearly 7 million subs, they sure as hell would of thought you were nuts. Most MMO's essentially run out of steam around year 4 or 5, they fact they are even remotely holding it together at year 10 is just nuts.