WoW Down to 7.1 Million Subscribers

to be honest them sub numbers mean nothing, i was not able to afford my sub this month so i would be included in the lost number however i got a token.

even tho i have not subbed this month i am playing and blizz are better off after all because the person who sold the token paid £15 for it and a monthly sub is £10.

i dont believe the token figures are not included the below implies they have

"World of Warcraft’s revenue performance at constant FX has been more stable, driven by continued strong uptake on value added service" even after 3mil lost subs yea right tokens are included

It's cause blizzard once again failed to provide good content after the expansion launch. WoD took wow in the right direction but with ashran being a POS and 6.1 being worthless patch I am not surprised honestly.

Originally Posted by Mousa

Here come the Doomsayers!

The "doomsayers" are, for once, right. Why? Because their are a large majority of players that like WoW and don't have nothing to do. There is a strong disconnect with the current devs and the players, leading to the biggest drop in WoW's history.

Originally Posted by Arrclyde-79

Erm, no.... you are missing the big picture. By miles you do. WOW has grown far to big to go back to where they have come from. And if you have no clue at all about what that means when a company takes part in stock exchanges, you better not make false statements like those you do. Going down to a sub number as close to the one they had back in 2006 is not an option to a company that needs to make more profit than "just surviving". And now we have far more countries making the sub numbers compared to back then when wow was on the rise.

Apparently you're the one that doesn't have a clue about the 'big picture'. They were at a similar point a year and a half ago with subscription numbers; the uptick in subscriptions can be attributed to a extraordinary spike in numbers when WoD was released. Only a financially-illiterate person would use a single quarter of change to state an assumption. Should we have said that Blizzard is making all the right moves because the number jumped up 3 million when WoD was released? If not, then why can you turn around and say that they're making all the wrong moves because the number is back to its normal, relatively-stable position?

You want the whole picture? Blizzard stated that WOW had 100 MILLION accounts made, and now there are only 7.1 mio. active. That is a DECLINE in 92.9%. Oh sure..... those are all millions upon millions of bot-accounts, remember? The bot-accounts that never get banned according to those people on the forums. ;-)

It's like you're intentionally trying to be stupid now... maybe you think 'clever' comments will somehow help your misguided argument, but they really won't.

WOW is close to the critical mass. That is the point when they NEED to rethink their business model. And i highly doubt that would be at a lousy 4 mio. subs. Remeber: wow needs to make a profit gain, year after year, quarter after quarter. And if there is no staff to shrink for saving money, guess what will be next?

They're introducing new revenue streams and are certainly still financially viable as a business entity. Until we have further evidence that the subscriber dip isn't simply a regression to the mean (I.E. Having more than a single number to compare), it is absolutely foolish to try and predict the demise of WoW.

Originally Posted by sinofasin

amazing how tbc and wotlk managed to maintain subs through the expacs man

Not only that, but the subs grew then, even during the end of the expansion.

Edit: Just to remind people how silly some Blizzard defenders were, they were saying "it's the end of the expansion! it's normal" back when the cata losses happened. Even though it was the first time the subs had gone down.

I will leave my main issue's with WoD here and why i am going to quit when my 6 month sub runs out:

- Split up community in phased zones.
- No flying.
- Destruction of professions.
- Try to get ppl into raids by downing LFR rewards.
- Removing zones from the map so you can tell the community that you are not supporting this exp. pack
- 6.1 worst patch ever
- placing 5 mounts in and then make 10x a re-color under the we have more mounts then ever?
- No Battlegrounds when you had it on the promotion FrontPage of WoD.
- The PvP balance is nowhere.
- The reputation is the worst in WoW history (ok maybe vanilla was at the same level)
- Treasure hunts that you can only run once (no new treasures pop up what makes it 1 week fun)
- Give followers more fun then the player (you even let them go to Farahlon in 6.2? really? this is just another slap in the face for the playerbase.
- Ashran totally failed to become a grand open world pvp zone.
- Main city's on Ashran are rushed and the worst main city hubs we got for 10 years.
- More raid/dungeon difficulty levels only split up the community more and increase queue times and we get more in 6.2? rolf
- Use alts (just there skins) as followers would increase the involvement of your accoutn alot more yet we get NPC follower that have 0 connection to us.
- apexis crystal daily quest are the worst quests ingame TBC daily quests are like 5x as fun to do yet you get more ingame even when almost nobody is doing them anymore these days.
- World bosses in WoD are a step back from the MoP world bosses in tactics (bossfights) and rewards.
- ps also the launch was bad very bad with the queue boss and the click the tree when you got 1k of ppl wanting to click it all at once.

These are some points that needs fixing for me but when i see 6.2 it only gets worse so i hope ppl have fun with timeless isle v2 but i am not jumping up and down on it.

Originally Posted by Tauror

Holinka wanted Vanilla back. I guess he was successful, the sub numbers are the same as Vanilla.

Honestly, I really hope that this is a wake-up call. I love Warcraft, I play WoW since early 2004 (Vanilla Beta) and I never been as bored as I'm now with WoD.

meh.. tail end of vanilla. basically back to BC and naxx days.

Single largest drop of subscribers in a quarter. Want to know why? Because WoD is awful.

The lack of a content patch did really hurt them

Originally Posted by Torbjorn

I'm still playing but Blizzard has removed everything I really like about the game:
- No flying
- No dailies
- Horrible reputation system
- The removal of Conquest Points in Ashran
- The removal of Tier Sets from LFR
- Professions are useless
- No account bound followers/garrison (= No desire to level alts)
I log in in the morning, do the garrison dailies and then... bye bye 'till the next morning. Sigh!

Agreed on the professions and CP and even on the account bound followers however removing flying was the best decision ever and no dailies is even better!

I believe a big part of the problem lies in the PvE content or the lacking there of. Many say there is a lot to do, but nothing substantial that actually keeps one coming back. You have raids and 5 man dungeons, LFR isn't even fun, it's a joke, dungeons get lame after so many runs, and are not challenging. Garrison gets eventually gets stale, dailies... well, just don't even. There needs to be a brand spankin new PvE system in the game that has nothing to do with raiding, dungeons, etc. that can engage players in a new way, has strong re-playability, challenging, and doesn't cave to n00bs who complain about it being too difficult. Varying degrees to difficulty one can choose from would be good; has leaderboards, can be soloable or grouped, offers great incentives to progress your character if you don't have the time for raids.

Originally Posted by Torbjorn

I'm still playing but Blizzard has removed everything I really like about the game:
- No flying
- No dailies
- Horrible reputation system
- The removal of Conquest Points in Ashran
- The removal of Tier Sets from LFR
- No account bound followers/garrison (= No desire to level alts)
I log in in the morning, do the garrison dailies and then... bye bye 'till the next morning. Sigh!

and thats why I quit. After going from day one leveling to #20 on the server in ilvl (#4 in my class) clearing Highmaul heroic before mystic mode was released and upgrading garrison to lvl 3 on 2 alts I lost it.... I like playing this expansion but its not enough anymore. Unless you're doing garrison, in a top tier raid/pvp guild, or into alts there is NOTHING to do.

Also I'm a healer, and I hate WoD healing with a passion. I dont like having 2 heals... I miss my 3rd and 4th heal I used to have that gave me some utility. I don't like returning to the year 2007 and spamming 1 button for 10min intervals for 3hrs. The stat scaling on gear doesnt help. Doing heroic dungeons and the start of raid had me using all my buttons. Once I got some normal and heroic gear.... all I had to do was delete everything but beacon and holy light and I could top charts. Now 5-mans are clearing 10-man raids and a group of DKs are as well. Thats proof its all bullshit.

It's time to hire new people with new and good ideas OR make it free to play. The subscription cost doesn't worth it atm.

Originally Posted by Megitsune

Single largest drop of subscribers in a quarter. Want to know why? Because WoD is awful.

I think that's pretty much common knowledge by now? Well except for the White Knight defenders that'll defend this expansion until their last pitiful dying gasp of life.

Originally Posted by Wildtree

From excessive testing..
I've toons with garrisons spread out over 4 realms.
They are divided by 1, 6, 2, and 7 characters.
If I browse through all of them once with the following tasks...
Picking up the completed missions
open the scavenger crates
vendor everything
do profession CD's
pick up all ore and herbs
level up the follower gear
collect all orders
fire off new missions
do some AH stuff every other day..
By the time I am through all the toons I am at about 2.5 hours average play time spent in the game...

Now some people like that kind of playing. They don't miss content outside their garrisons.
One could now say that this is counter productive to the MMO aspect. And that's without a doubt true..
But then, so is afk'ing in a capitol city.
At least the former would be more productive.

But not everyone hangs out just waiting for a queue. Many players, myself included, don't raid or run instanced content (unless it's old and I can solo it), but love world content - and there just isn't any at cap.

As for taking 2.5 hours to do garrison chores, HFS, I'd chew my leg off if I did that repetitive insanity.

Originally Posted by Drithien

And so it goes. World of WarCraft keeps trying things to entice players to stay and "have short but fun play sessions on your lunch break" in all kinds of ways as if it is in the same category as League of Legends or Farmville. They will try anything but be an open world role-playing game. Anything. Because open world role-playing games require effort and money, and this, the most profitable of all of them, has been milked dry ever since Crusade.

Which is why there was never a concentrated effort to duplicate what made it successful. World of WarCraft was at its best when it functioned as an open world role-playing game: in Classic. It was a bad such game; even unfinished, broken, and so buggy. But its essence, the game itself through all the practical obstacles, was what people loved: playing in a vast, open world, filled with mystery and the potential for adventure. Most players were happiest in the game when they were just playing around, exploring its tenths of zones, going through its multiple racial campaigns, discovering thins, levelling up getting stronger and delving deeper into the game. Then, Crusade came; and the 30 plus new zones of Classic got replaced with... 8 new zones; the 6 different racial campaigns with just two. How could that ever work? 30-something zones in Classic, for two years, then only 8 for the next two? From six diverse campaigns to just two?!

And what increased? Group and raid dungeons. Only shorter and simpler. Because somehow the tiny minority that raided in classic, and the slightly less tiny but still minority that did so in Crusade, were more important than the vast majority that didn't, and didn't care about raiding much either. Or it was just that it is faster and cheaper to develop dungeons than zones, and easier to stroke people's ego than challenge them. So we were flooded with easy content and instanced dungeons, while most of everyone was pushed towards them.

Only World of WarCraft is not Diablo. Most people didn't play it for the runs for loot. They played it for the same reasons why similar games are so popular: Skyrim, Zelda, Red Dear Redemption, Rust, Grand Theft Auto, MineCraft; huge worlds with lots of things to discover and do with a character that you create and shape is what attracted most people in the game to begin with. And as bad in them as it was, it was still good enough for it to become immensely popular and profitable. Imagine what would have happened if it kept getting better in the right way.

Now though? What to do. Now the market is flooded with all sorts of games, offering so many different things for so little when it comes to "short and sweet" gameplay that World of WarCraft is at a massive disadvantage; pay a monthly fee for arena when League is available why? And there are so many, and a lot of them so good, games in the open world and/or role-playing category, and World of WarCraft is still so ridiculously bad at both of those areas; want open world, see Skyrim; want diversity, see Divinity; creativity, see MineCraft, arcade fun; Grand Theft Auto; story, Bioware; classic rpg Pillars; heck, even for grinding Diablo II is better than World of WarCraft, and you only have to pay once. And they have lost so many of the devoted fans, and failed to instil a gaming ethos to their fans when they could still do so, when the game was at its most popular and about the only viable choice in its genre, and most players were new to gaming and pliable; instead they mollycoddled their fans and turned them into instant gratification brats and constant-reward addicts.

How to turn this around? Perhaps they could try by coming up with a better expansion next time, one with more zones, more and better campaigns; were exploring and questing were the major gameplay not the filler; include systems to diversify your character; alternate paths; in-depth systems for crafting (to finally become interesting, how can you make a gameplay feature about making stuff so fucking boring is beyond me), talents (to finally have some meaning and offer personal choice, and stop catering to obsessed supposedly-pro leet players, most players don't care about cookie cutter builds, they do care about playing around with builds though, how hard is it to understand: give people actual talent trees, they are not among the most fun features in most rpgs for nothing); introduce new systems like hiking, climbing, and survival skills for exploring; make a better, bigger game, with actual role-playing open world content; not excuses to pass the time. But even then, do they still have the credibility to lure players back after so many misfires? And even if they do, will the executives above let them? I don't know, but because I love this game I hope they can and do turn things around.

Everything you said is so very, terribly, totally true, but especially this, "They will try anything but be an open world role-playing game." Like you said, vanilla WoW was buggy, broken, and flawed, but it was all those things the current crowd of Blizzard defenders love to hate (immersive, social, time-consuming, even grindy). Classic WoW was a Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game - WoW became a success with amazing raids that no-one ever saw, and because running a tough 5-man dungeon was something you did for a whole evening or afternoon once or twice a week. It was a social fantasy rpg with (lovely) cartoon graphics.

Originally Posted by MaraStarfury

That doesn't at all explain the large nose dive in subs that has never happened so sharply. Look at the graph, this trend has never happened before so drastically. I could not disagree enough that to say a third of the playerbase left because they got their nostalgia kick. But hey that's my opinion.

It goes both ways, though. They've never had a sharp uptick like the 2.6 million subscriptions that were added because of WoD.

I'm affraid this is what happens when you hype something as it was originally intended, and then waste incredible amounts of potential. Add to that that we got only one portion of content in almost two years, and you get where the situation is...
Unfortunatelly, that most likely just means that Blizzard will be, again, forced to try somehing "radically different". Which, again, will most likely backfire, not to mention delay content. Nothing will really be learned, things simply do not work that way. Blizzard needs to start giving players carrots to play their game, so to speak, instead of telling them they were so far having fun wrong. If they don't do that, they will eventually cheer through happy masses at Blizzcon to WoW played by a few dozen thousand people.

Originally Posted by Galdor

Time to hire new people with new and good ideas OR time to think about make it free to play. The subscription cost doesn't worth it atm.

Funny thing is, at the end of SoO they promised a bigger development team in a number of a 100 or so I think? And they made all these big promises about WoD, but when it launched and reality set in they could not make do with those promises, some were flat out lies and lots of the original content was cut out to stretch out this sub-par expansion.

Originally Posted by Sunnydee

We all know that next xpack it'll up to 9-10million first quarter then drop. If you cant figure that out then i wouldnt even trust you with a lemonadestand.

I wouldn't assume that anymore actually. I've been loyal since Vanilla, quit in January this year in disappointment (but hope things might change.) There is no one left still playing in my friends list anymore. The next xpac will be the first I don't buy unless it is nothing like WoD. Others I know have quit for good and have zero interest in ever returning, no matter what. I think Blizzard have killed a lot of goodwill towards the game.

Other Blizzard games are still excellent - hearthstone, heroes, d3. It's a shame wow is waning, but Blizz are fine.

Not that I think wow will die. There are older mmos than wow still running. But it will cease to be the focus of Blizzard.