February 7: Blizzard Conference Call

[But I Hate You All]

over 9.6 million subs most of the lost was from China

[BenBos]

*8 yr old game that has gotten updates and new content over them 8 years

The 8 yr old game rebuttal is kinda invalid since they do update stuff

But it beats ALL those 0.000.000 sub based game with 9.6 million PAYING subscribers...

BTW the situation in 2009 was different: all these other games STILL had subscriptions , now they don't.

[ihyln]

Ghostcrawler hates flight, but is smart enough to know the damage is already done.

Ghostcrawler dislikes dailies, but knows a radical shift would scare players.

Ghostcrawler knows to tell haters to shut up.

I'm sorry, but GC isn't the problem here. In fact, giving him MORE free reign could be part of the solution.

He's so smart he added old world flying in Cata.

He hates dailies but he's so smart he's adding MORE dailies

He's so smart he tells haters to shut up when he's obviously a detriment to the game.

This is the result of having a biologist designing a billion dollar game. A complete fuckup by any other standard.

[Deleted]

Morhaime just said "majority of the loss is from China"; which suprised me a lot.

[Cybran]

I was close with 9.5-ish

[BenBos]

over 9.6 million subs most of the lost was from China

As I thought when I watched the HIGH revenue of this last Quarter.

[Leonard McCoy]

How is it weak?
If the numbers from sites are correct, they are still holding around 50% of the entire MMORPG-players in their game.

Well the figures from the first week of Mists sales were weak relative to what cata or wrath or tbc sold. The figures are around on the web. Cata sold like 7 or 8 million the first day. Mists only sold like 3 or 4 million the first week. I can't be arsed to check them out but yes the sales were anemic. Unless it picked up over the months and weeks?

[BrerBear]

The announcement was pretty much a yawner. Maybe something interesting will come out of the conference call. Activision stock is up in after-hours trading.

More than eight-year-old game still retaining vast majority of its subscribers, and many folks who tried out the expansion and then put it aside will be back for a new major content release. Game will continue its slow, albeit successful, decline for many years to come.

All the downers who were predicting one or two million sub losses can go pound sand for another three months. Cries of mass exodus due to <dailies, CRZ, raiding too hard, raiding too easy> proven once again out-of-touch.

[masterman]

Ghostcrawler doesn't dislike dailies. I haven't seen any indication of that. Furthermore I don't think he even dislikes CRZ.

CRZ is one of the best features added to WoW. Why would he hate it? The bugs have already been fixed with it AND it solved their problem of low pop servers

[Mordredofmia]

I'm not surprised. The condescending theme of "Slow down" in MOP to the point where even the NPCs are saying it is exceptionally frustrating especially when paired with all the things they added that aren't things to do, but just make all the things we used to be able to do take longer.

If you want to see numbers go up, to get players excited, then put more game in. Pet battles was a good step. Transmog was an awesome step but one that just makes doing older stuff again have a reward. But Daily quests? That's not the type of content that would have stopped people from leaving in Cata. You gotta spend money to make money. Adding a bunch of daily quest hubs and throwing a gear carrot behind them isn't content. Who would want to spend $15 a month to have to daily quests on every character they make?

[JhanZ]

The bigger problem here is it shows a continuing trend.

We're going on a year and a half not without a gaining quarter for the game, and now we've gone through one full expansion and into another without a gain.

That is officially a trend toward losing subscribers. It's not a blip anymore, many players simply do not want to play WoW anymore for whatever reason.

Agreed, WoW is definitely on a downward trend now. And it's going to keep oozing subscribers unless they either successfully flip those subs onto Titan or revolutionize the game on a massive scale. It's an 8 year old game, it's not immortal. People know what WoW is about, and I can totally understand someone not finding excitement in playing anything anymore.

So, it's up to them. At what point do they draw the line and say "Okay, we've lost enough, we're at the point where radically changing this game could not possibly do more damage than letting it go down even further and just following our usual route."

That's the question. When does that happen? Or does it not happen at all and do they misdirect players onto Titan? We'll see.

[Leonard McCoy]

Morhaime just said "majority of the loss is from China"; which suprised me a lot.

What's funny is I had so many people on so many forums tell me they had added more grind to the game to appeal to the chinese...

[BenBos]

Relative to the other expansions yes it's weak. Relative to other pc games obviously not but pc gaming is a small market overall with the exception of warcraft.

So Doctor McCoy : it was confirmed that western subs stayed stable (see the revenue) and Morhaime comments...

that means the expansion wasn't weak then ...

[Leonard McCoy]

CRZ is one of the best features added to WoW. Why would he hate it? The bugs have already been fixed with it AND it solved their problem of low pop servers

Actually no it didn't and it wasn't designed to solve low pop servers. Low pop servers are still low pop servers. Only now with CRZ you see people out in the world. Well seeing people out in the world isn't the only thing servers do.

[But I Hate You All]

So Doctor McCoy : it was confired that western subs stayed stable (see the revenue).

that means the expansion wan't weak then ...

A lost is a lost.

[PrairieChicken]

What? I think you're the first person I've heard saying such a thing...

Perhaps because there were no Koreans to tell you the truth?

Oh by the way I an subscribed in KR server and have WoL and watch SC2 torneys, so I am not someone who couldn't be trusted

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

How is running 7 dungeons on Tuesday and raiding Saturday any worse than running 1 dungeon/1 scenario EVERY DAMNED DAY and then raiding on Saturday different in any meaningful way.

Some of us actually like the freedom to play when we choose. Whether you play 7 hrs on Tuesday or 7 hrs spread out over 7 days to get your valor it's still 7 hours spent in game, but one is far more efficient than the other for no particular reason other than it means on average, most players will have to do more work to get their valor as anytime any player fails to log in for a day they have to do more because they missed out on that days bonus.

Because when you play the game 8/30 days a month, you can't really justify the nearly $2 a day.

That was one of the leading player complaints going into MoP "There's not enough for us to do at the cap to justify a monthly fee."

Now they're complaining "There's too much to do at the cap to justify playing the game."

[BenBos]

A lost is a lost.

Not in revenue (as could be seen by the spreadsheets already) ...

1.6 BILLION dollars.

Pfeww. If you think that a present day game is considered a HUGE success with 50 million dollars revenue...it is clear western subs stayed stable as Morhaime said.

[dercaderca]

400k+ might not be all that much, but with this being a new expansion and the holiday season, these numbers are pretty bad. We'll be in for some fun stuff in 5.3 and 5.4.


Predicting a loss equal to or more than this for q1

[ro9ue]

I think once Titan is released we'll see them get a little more ballsy with WoW changes as a testing ground for the new IP.