10.3 million subscribers

[Kalyyn]

Crap, it's already starting.
Well, it's been fun, but General Discussion is no longer safe. If you need me, I'll be hiding in Fun Stuff.

[Deleted]

Deathwing alone is better than everything from 4.1 and 4.2 combined, throw in transmog and the 3 dungeons and shazam!

the deathwing fight is extremely underwhelming and boring so i have no idea where you are getting this from, and transmog is something you are going to use once to change the look on your gear to whatever you want.. thats hardly something thats going to keep people busy

overall 4.3 is just another patch that will get old very quickly

[helheim]

10.3 is still a really high sub base, i actually thought it would be lower by now.

they acknowledged in the call that "over half" of their "subscriptions" were in "the east", while also acknowledging that the majority of lost subs were from "the east", where wow just launched in china.

those eastern subs aren't worth nearly as much as NA/EU subs as they don't pay as much as we do.

what that means if you can read between the lines is there are approximately ~5 million NA/EU subs.

math plz: 5,000,000 x 14.999 = 74,950,000. china subs pay .06c? get expansions for free? netease gets half of that .06c.

1.7 million lost subs is ~20% of the player base. that is huge, no matter how you slice it.

glad i sold my stock last week.

[dan828]

Honestly, I don't believe it. I think somebody fucked up the numbers, BADLY. It doesn't make a lick of sense. How is it that the highest recorded loss in subscribers was recorded now. It's bullshit. Assuming Asia did complete the content "too quickly" then why were there be no major drops at the end of Wrath content, or better yet TBC content was completed. It's not logical. There is no way to remedy the fact that a 800, 000 subscriber loss could NOT come from Asia given the history.

I'm pretty sure they said it was mostly in Asia, coinciding with the release of Cata there.

[Courierrawr]

the deathwing fight is extremely underwhelming and boring so i have no idea where you are getting this from, and transmog is something you are going to use once to change the look on your gear to whatever you want.. thats hardly something thats going to keep people busy

overall 4.3 is just another patch that will get old very quickly

Blizzard needs to get off their ass and make another Ulduar, these crappy 7-8 boss raids aren't cutting it.

[antonatsis]

to people saying this is not a bit thing for the game

ill post it like this

at this point wow has lost

1.700.000 players in the last 9 months.i think its more since they had more that 12.000.000 at a time

so 1.700.000 x $15
=
22.500.000 a month
=
337.500.000 per year

the company lost 300million per year do you know how much money are those?

don't see the loss in subs see the loss in money,if they keep posting positive numbers till mop comes since last time they showed loss in subs they had a positive number in income then the market is what bobby makes it to be and no one can complain about the game :P

for the people that say this is nothing,its a big loss if you are an investor and want to see positive numbers

for the people that say WoW is dead,WAR has like 2-3 servers and its still going.For WoW to die it needs to lose around 10.2 million players which will make it a game that is going to its death

don't be a hater and don't be a fan-boy,easy

also keep in mind that WoW lost those 1.7 mill without a competitor on the market.In 1 month guess who is coming to town?besides santa that is :P

[ZenX]

Well, lets hope that this overall loss of subs over the year teaches them "catering to casuals" was not a bad idea, essentially the problem was not because the content was consumed fast, however, due to sheer difficulty at release taking the fun out of players who played WoW as a game, not a second job, hence, there was no content left for people to consume...

Hoping they've learned from their mistakes, the game when it had this "hard" part which the respective South Park episode was made for almost didn't have half the subs it has today, that should've told them something, but no, thanks to all the "elitist" crying in WotLK we ended up with the burnout that was t11 at release along with t12 that had the worst learning curve for a raid due to how everything was some until rag and at raider's had to endure "the wall".

Why is 4.3 better? Because overall, it does have things for everyone to do, with dungeons having decent item drops and fun fights, and with the raid having a proper ramp-up in difficulty, along with DMF future that a lot of non-raiders would love and transmog feature that will be interesting for everyone.

4.0: The worst end-game content, frustrating heroics and no proper entry-raid
4.1: Remakes of two-raids as heroics, which people used to clear for Lols for previous the expansion
4.2: A 7-boss raid that was hard for the ordinary at start with 7 bosses, with terrible loot tables and a daily-hub that required you to grind your eyes out over the course of a month.
4.3: 3 x New Moderate Dungeons, an 8-boss raid, armor customization and a major upgrade to a monthly event.

I'm just hoping their next worst to be at least better than Cataclysm, because it has really devastated the World of Warcraft...

[Wildmoon]

WoW won't go anywhere soone people. It still have 10.3 subs.

[Deleted]

the deathwing fight is extremely underwhelming and boring so i have no idea where you are getting this from, and transmog is something you are going to use once to change the look on your gear to whatever you want.. thats hardly something thats going to keep people busy

overall 4.3 is just another patch that will get old very quickly

yeah that is just true! Last week i was on PTR again an well I´ve tried the 2 DW fights and they were super mega underwhelming TBH Transmog is a feature that is coming like 3 years too late and it will not keep myself buys very long because you don´t change your gear every day and so you don´t farm all day long old content.

[Blockygame]

The people saying "lol that loss is nothing!" seem to be just as unintelligent as those parroting "lol wow is dead!". It would be nice if people on both sides would wise up.

Care to elaborate?, no use insulting "both sides" if you're not going to contribute anything worthwhile to the thread. Caring less is probably where you stand on this news so why even post.

OT: I don't think anyone would have been surprised at this news at all, we certainly expected it, on another note though Blizzard did report better than expected earnings so something must have happened and I was thinking the annual pass might have had something to do with this. With the subscriber drop pointing more towards the Asia region I feel that it's not really relevant to other regions as I certainly haven't really seen any major decline in people over the last few months, if anything I've seen some people come back, population on my server seems to be high most days.

PS: Get ready for people to start over-analyzing the subscriber drop without factoring everything in.

[Malefic]

Just so people know. The closest subscribed game to WoW is Aion, and that has less than 3million subscribers.

[Deleted]

Deathwing alone is better than everything from 4.1 and 4.2 combined, throw in transmog and the 3 dungeons and shazam!

Deadwing will be dead soon enough or they overtune it and it gets frustrating , the new dungeons will keep people busy for a week or so and than it's old crap and transmog will for most people be a 1set thing where they occasionally have to use it and to top it off the release of this patch is around the same time some other major games are either comming out or have come out.
I doubt the patch is going to help much, imo we'll see an other sub loss like this before MOP comes out, than it might go back up, for a while at least.

[Pancaspe]

That's 7.3 million more than SWTOR will ever have.

[BrerBear]

People saying WoW is dead are extremely naive.

To put it into perspective MMO's like Rift etc are circa the 1.5mill subscribers mark (I believe), and they're living happily.

Rift announced one million accounts (includes beta accounts and unsubscribed) in February and then went silent, except for when they closed off all those servers.

[Varyk]

Just so people know. The closest subscribed game to WoW is Aion, and that has less than 3million subscribers.

Aion has over 9 million subscribers.

[bigjenk]

It is not dead by any means but mist release in west will be offset by further drops in the eastern half of their sub base as cata lull sets in for them as well. Its a good thing they didn't release same time for china or else we would be looking at well under 10 m subs now probably.

[helheim]

Care to elaborate?, no use insulting "both sides" if you're not going to contribute anything worthwhile to the thread. Caring less is probably where you stand on this news so why even post.

OT: I don't think anyone would have been surprised at this news at all, we certainly expected it, on another note though Blizzard did report better than expected earnings so something must have happened and I was thinking the annual pass might have had something to do with this. With the subscriber drop pointing more towards the Asia region I feel that it's not really relevant to other regions as I certainly haven't really seen any major decline in people over the last few months, if anything I've seen some people come back, population on my server seems to be high most days.

PS: Get ready for people to start over-analyzing the subscriber drop without factoring everything in.

annual pass doesn't factor into q3 as it was announced in october @ blizzcon. those earnings are likely from china which only recently launched wow. and most of the subs lost were also from "the east" meaning that it likely was not particularly well received.

[Butterball]

Wow.. that decline, its just .. wow..

I'm not surprised they lost subs. What with end endless za/zg, a raid zone with only 7 bosses and a dailies zone that was simply murder to do on more then one character, a lost was inevitable.

I am surprised at the rate of attrition. It seems that a lot of people notice the lack of content in cataclysm and have voted with their wallets. Blizzard have no one but themselves to blame for this, the slow rate of patched in content, the removal of promised or planned features, and whats given only seems to be half the size it should be, the shared lock outs leaving people hanging around with nothing to do...

Lets hope that Mists reverses this and brings it back what it was in WotLK....

[mvaliz]

I thought they'd lose some subs but 800k surprises even me.

Yeah, I was expecting only around 2-5... particularly with the fanboys spouting out about how it was released in China recently.

I mean, if it was released in China... and they took a LOSS of 800 subs... holy hell, how many people left WoW in the USA!?

[Deleted]

I was fairly pessimistic about the results but I didn't think it would be as high as 800,000 in a quarter. That is a lot of revenue, regardless of how many subs remain.

What interests me is how Blizzard will respond - my heart says they will ramp up the content to try and recover the subscribers, my head says they will just pump out more premium pets and mounts.