You'd have a point if not for the fact they are not 24/7 subscribed!
I'm well aware some businesses think like this. To them I say: welcome aboard to the 21st century! The whole reason of the name still working like this is legacy reasons, "we do it like this because that is how we've always done it."
http://investor.activision.com/events.cfm
anyone can register
Last edited by But I Hate You All; 2013-02-07 at 04:15 PM.
It will be down mainly due to the fact that 10man raiding guilds now make up over 80% of the raiding guilds and do nothing to contribute to realm communities like 25 man raiding guilds. There is a reason why realms like Kazzak EU are thriving, because 25 man raiding guilds still have a strong presence there.
With that being said MoP is much better then cataclysm but because blizzard fucked over 25 man raiding its just gonna go downhill.
Around 9-9,5m subs. Don't expect any more or any less.
Why?
Well, i have no apparent proof, but my guild went from having 800 member (1-2 months after launch) to disbanding a week ago. My guild wasn't one of those social things either. We were realm 3rd in raiding and a powerhouse when it came to PvP. Whenever i asked where guildies went, people would just reply "went on a break/quit." I'm just using my guild as an indication.
Most of my friends have quit purely because the prestige factor is gone, everyone pretty much just gets the same gear and titles even if its an xpac later. They miss the days where titles like hand of adal, scarab lord etc had to be gotten in current content. To them achievements mean shit and not visible enough.
Even though I have told them MoP is better then Cata they still not interested. Also mentioned feat of strengths but they say it's not in a form of a unique title and just something hidden away in your achievement sheet.
There was a poster on these forums (who got mysteriously permabanned, hmm...) who claimed to have insider information from Blizzard, saying they expected and were planning for considerable losses after MoP released. He also thought WoW was in bad shape in China.
Now, I don't know if this guy was for real, or was a fraud, but it's food for thought. It could be that Blizzard makes deliberately conservative internal projections so they can exceed them and keep Vivendi/Kotick off their backs. Bouncing back from the Cataclysm debacle does show the game has great resilience, so I'd be careful of projecting too many accounts lost.
(Who knows what China is up to, though.)
---------- Post added 2013-02-07 at 04:40 PM ----------
More likely, they either (1) realized they couldn't actually get the titles now, or (2) realized the titles were mostly worthless in RL terms. But "the game is no longer worthy of ME" sure sounds better.
Last edited by Osmeric; 2013-02-07 at 04:51 PM.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
probably 300k loss. imo
It's either stable or going up. NA/EU numbers will have collapsed but it won't matter because even a modest amount of growth in player counts in Asia is enough to offset the NA/EU players who are fed up. But they certainly won't give a breakdown on that.
Came here to see what the sub losses are, yet it seems they haven't announced it yet
Still time to place bets, good to see a lot of people are placing them already. My bet is still 300 - 500k loss
OBVIOUS loss in na/eu. can't say anything about china, or the whole of asia for that matter.
i predict a loss of 500k
My coffee cup predicts a loss of...
-650k players.
I'm sure the guys at the very top (Morhaime, Pardo, etc.) along with the finance department are more aware than we can ever imagine of the fragility of the subscription base overall. The results of Cataclysm along with the sheer age of the game would dictate that there's some sort of plan in place to adjust as they go along. It's just good business. They can look around at the MMO market and see what's up. They know that at this point they're an outlier and that the usual rules don't apply. That's one of their difficulties I would imagine.
It's another reason to find these threads entertaining largely because there's so much assumption about Blizzard having panic attacks, etc. over this. I'm sure they don't want to see huge swings back and forth and giant drops but I'm certain they're ready to make adjustments as the inevitable happens. I believe that their biggest problem at this point is the volatility of their subscriber base versus the size of the company and how long it takes them to turn what is a very large boat.
Nonetheless we're a very long way away from seeing the game fold up or anything like that.
Blizzard could still use some new and different IP's though.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
If they close servers then ppl will consider the game dead. But I do agree. They have to do something about all the ghost town servers that are piling up.
---------- Post added 2013-02-07 at 05:08 PM ----------
We have already seen few panic attacks in MOP. Item lvl upgrade one patch - not the next. Daily quests to death one patch - change it all the next. What we do know is that BLizzard is conserned at this stage that they can very well see the same downfall of MOP as in Cata. The main reason it happened in CATA was because acording to them... there were still so many players in first tier of raid that they chanceled the next one and gave us 2X 5man dungeons. And the same is happening now cause ppl will not be waiting more than 1 or 2 more months for fresh raid content. They got till end of March probably but if not we will probably see large drop in subs for 1st quarter report of 2013.
In terms of numbers - China will pull the "sub" numbers up for 4th quarter. I expect at least the same number as last time. If not - I consider MOP launch in Asia to be major failure.
Last edited by Duster505; 2013-02-07 at 05:11 PM.