WoW Down to 6.8 Million Subscribers

This is going to cost us a raid tier.

Ive seen people say "Casuals are where the money's at!" and devs say "You people consume content too fast". Content is dumbed down so dirty casuals can breeze through it. Then they get bored because new content isn't released every month. A drought of dumbed down content for the dirty casuals should have resulted in more subs lost. I'm impressed it stayed this high.

Also not really surprised at a sub drop. I unsubbed for the first time in eight years as well. Half to save some money and half because I was getting bored as hell. All five of my friends have unsubbed as well, at least until the expansion hits.

Originally Posted by gorocz

WotLK is when subs stopped rising actually...

They only stopped rising due to a content drought. Who knows what would have happened if the game had kept it's momentum going strong.

As far as I'm concerned, it's time to put WoW isn't retirement and wrap things up. Stop trying to be innovative and new, that's only tanked your sub numbers.

Wrap it up, this bird is done.

You can really tell how it resembles a bell curve.

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.

Starcraft and Diablo franchises have each individually been as profitable for Blizz as the Warcraft series, and in fact arguably much better considering they reached similar numbers in dramatically shorter time periods.

WoW is certainly a big deal for blizz, but hardly a singular "golden goose."

Originally Posted by Melllvar

If you was to go on my server now you'd see that far from being dead, wow is looking as healthy as it's ever been.

However me and my guildies are so thirsty for new content, I can tank SoO in my sleep.

So yes wow isn't dying, it just needs to new content to rebound.

Yea because the population on yer server is the tell tale for the blizzard execs.... "Hey guys this server is booming were ok were all getting new jets this christmas"

Originally Posted by tru

Not true.
Content patches should not last for over a year.
If they released smaller more frequent content patches like they said they would...
MoP didn't appeal to a lot of ppl from the azn theme. It was a xpac that was a lot harder to love vs other ones.

no matter how many new raids you add it wont bring someone back who is simply tired of an mom and raiding. same can be said for pvp or pet battles or what have you. unless blizzard turns wow into a new type of game the only thing new content will do is stem the bleeding, and that's not a bad thing. WoW is the most successful game of its type we have ever seen, it just cant last forever no reason to hate on it.

I'm not really that bothered about the loss of subscribers. I still enjoy the game and that's all that matters to me on a personal level. WoD is guaranteed to sell enough to make back the development costs, so a loss of subscribers really isn't an issue for Blizzard either.

Not surprising. Why am I going to stay subbed waiting for new content for a year when I can just do something else for a while?

/shrug

Did anyone expect this quarter to show an increase? Subs have been falling since Sept. 2012. Honestly though, I don't care. I like the game, I know enough people still like the game to make it function as its supposed to. WoD will get my resub, and I assume many others as well.

Blizzard - "we're going to make content faster than ever"

looks like 800k people just said "you're full of shit".

I never understand why people care about how many subs the game has. If it's not impacting how you play or why you play who TF cares. Of course thye are losing subs as there hasn't been any content in close to a year.

Originally Posted by tru

Yea because the population on yer server is the tell tale for the blizzard execs.... "Hey guys this server is booming were ok were all getting new jets this christmas"

Oh it will rebound. It is certain there will be a big surge come WoD. But then, 2-3 months after there will be another large drop becouse lots of casuals will just play new xpack for a short while. The overall state can be determined by the long-term trend. Not by the xpack surges or large drops due to content droughts.

Surely the huge lack of content will lose WoW of some subscribers but I honestly don't see what's so difficult about planning merely one year ahead with content patches, on paper setting back 5.3 and 5.4 one month and a half each doesn't seem difficult at all. Throne of Thunder lasting for just half the time of SoO and being about the same size just looks like a massive failure on planning.

No getting it right on the third time here

That graph is a picture of the market rebuking this expansion, plain and simple.

Was probably not a good idea to establish a precedent for pre-raid gearing to be easy over the course of a 4-yr period and then take that away from customers who had grown used to enjoying it. Only innovation I have appreciated from this expac has been CMs and cross-realm technology. The "Legendary" which is so legendary everyone not only has it - but is required to have it by any semi-competent gulid - and the pointless grinding during offhours of tasks that are not fun, I have to imagine those are the culprits.

That's just spitballing, I don't claim to know the true cause for this expac's commercial bomb. But they definitely did something very wrong here.

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.

it's generally the pay to play genre. f2p is thriving when the cash shop stuff isn't completely broken or awful

Originally Posted by Mongo42

This is going to cost us a raid tier.

Ive seen people say "Casuals are where the money's at!" and devs say "You people consume content too fast". Content is dumbed down so dirty casuals can breeze through it. Then they get bored because new content isn't released every month. A drought of dumbed down content for the dirty casuals should have resulted in more subs lost. I'm impressed it stayed this high.

Im curious at the rate of content is consumed say now vs BC days.
I loved how our guild was the majority of the way through T5 in BC at xpac end we felt accomplished.
Duration of MoP running lfr to get geard for flex to run normals seeing that many boss deaths of different difficulties and I still never felt accomplished.
oh and lolwelfarelegendary

No surprise here, content drought accelerated the decline of WoW's already declining numbers.

Letting this happen is a big mistake on Blizzard's part. When people leave for extended periods of time, they discover other things and the chances of them coming back and staying get lower and lower. Even if WoD gets a lot of initial buys from people coming back, it's already too late. Those people are no longer hooked on WoW, they've tasted the outside world and it will forever color their experience of the game.

But I guess that's what Blizzard is banking on. They've continued to demonstrate that they're more interested in cashing-in then they are on the longevity of the title at this point (which, considering it's age, is no surprise). They'll get the flood of extra people who buy the WoD xpac at it's increased price, and then try to get them to spend extra on cash shop items (and maybe try to catch some wallets with a longer-term sub plan deals D3 style) before those players leave a couple months later.

hah!
/10 chars

When blizz is down to 2mil i will say wow is dead or dying, but.. 6.8 mil is still 6.8 mil.. it's hell of alot of people