WoW Down to 9.6 Million Subscribers

[SodiumChloride]

It raised enough eyebrows for an investor to ask a question regarding the stability of the player base.

They should not expect a "stable" player base. WoW is a game with a population that fluctuates a lot over time depending on various factors. This is why Blizzard doesn't like to merge servers. If there is a spike in population because of new content or whatever, players are going to get log in queues and everyone will get pissed.

[Deleted]

yea that`s for fkin up my class and changes every week to pvp

[Darthballz]

So WoW starts it's decline then a patch comes with new raid content and people come back. Then rinse and repeat. New expansion announced and they all come back for it. Almost the same damn cycle.

[Bahska]

Blizzard counts every sub in Asia as a full sub, when in reality they are only 1/10th of a Western sub. WoW really only has 5.3M subs.

Because that wouldn't be illegal at all right? they are a publicly traded company any lie to investors could get them in hot water even this type of lie.

[Deleted]

Must mean that from launch to 2008, the game was dead. Weird, everyone tells me the game was best during vanilla days.

[Immitis]

What we can say for sure that the grind in MOP is aparently not solving any issues. So - BLizzard already failed to improve on Cata model when it comes to that. We are only 4 months into the expansion - and Im one of those that left cause of the new systems. Nothing in 5.2 will make me return. If something - It just proofs to me I did the right thing leaving the game when I did.

actually it is or did you miss the part where he said that they made more money THAN THEY EXPECTED TO. i dont know what world you live in but better than expected is always a good thing

[Deleted]

dlc and expansion are the same thing

That's a really ridiculous statement. DLC is adding some stuff like new weapons (or items in general), outfits, maps, campaigns and all that stuff. An addon on the other hand usually changes the whole playing experience.

[Pendragon]

I just hope the loss includes the anti-daily whiners.

[Buu]

So what? A decline is a decline, WoW's "golden age" is long over, the game is going to keep losing players, will you still be using that defense when it's down to 3 million players?

When they just came from a crappy downfall in Cataclysm, losing millions at each quarter, this number don't make me take that argument seriously. Yes, the amount of people they lost, and still have not to worry about is what their competitor can't even reach as total. WoW still great, deal with it.

And I'll not even mention the effect that new character will have the day they are released...

[Tharkkun]

there will NEVER be an mmo with more than 5 million players besides wow atleast in the next 10 years, why? because wow was a freak success not the norm.

blizzard took everquest made it alot easier and more casual and slapped some warcraft lore on it and somehow managed to take a genre that only had about 500k people interested in it and made it mainstream.

i bet if you went back in time and told chris metzen one day wow would have a million subscribers he would laugh in your face and say i wish man

Blizzard is quoted as saying they hoped long term that Wow would hit 1 million. Long Term. They hit 3.5 million the first month and the servers imploded. Some people seem to forget that Wow was pulled off the shelves because the subs were growing faster than they could install infrastructure.

It was definitely a freak success and no other MMO has come close or sustained more than a million subs since. It's nice that trolls love to laugh at it's decline but overall Wow is kicking the shit out of every MMO.

[Immitis]

That's a really ridiculous statement. DLC is adding some stuff like new weapons (or items in general), outfits, maps, campaigns and all that stuff. An addon on the other hand usually changes the whole playing experience.

no, thats just what alot of companies make as dlc because their greedy. dlc means downloadable content, expansion means an expansion of content. both mean the same thing just because some companies choose to charge you for new outfits doesnt mean thats all dlc is

[Madicus]

So what? A decline is a decline, WoW's "golden age" is long over, the game is going to keep losing players, will you still be using that defense when it's down to 3 million players?

Your logic is ignorant to the overall trend of WoW. To further illustrate imagine if you gained 5,000,000 dollars one day and lost 200 the next, all of a suden you have a money problem? Nope

WoW was trending down (though still up overall) until mop, they're lower than they have been but they're still considerably larger than any other game, not to mention the added competition means WoW has to be better than they were just to not die off.

It's a bad sign and they need to step it up, but you're logic is incredibly lacking.

[Tax]

Im more interested in the NA subscription numbers. Would be interesting to see how many players fill up these 250 servers. I dont care how well wow is doing in asia.

[Deleted]

Because that wouldn't be illegal at all right? they are a publicly traded company any lie to investors could get them in hot water even this type of lie.

I think what he means is the 'Chinese farmers' who mostly have more than 1 account

[crunk]

yes.... yesssssss!


once the game declines back to a nice, sustainable, six million maybe they can return some of the vision to the game and make it fun for real mmoers again. its easier to design a game when you don't have to cater to nine million people complaining about this and that. 4-5 million more noobs to go and we'll see the second golden age of wow.

[Frozenshiva]

The saddest thing right here is all the reasons people find to HATE stuff.
I'm not really a fan of "love friendship and tolerance" but this is still ridiculous.

Long live hate. Because that's what makes us better than beasts..oh wai...

[Duster505]

an 8 year old game is in decline it seems. but still providing entertainment for a lot of people, not sure why people feel the need to posture about it either way. you think wow was gonna last forever?

Pet battles and pandas provide entertainment for some ye.

But from my point of view. If a 12 million sub based MMO game is not able to keep their game updated with decent content and good progress... Then it shouldn't be a sub based game. Thats how bad Blizzard is doing atm. They have failed alot of their former players with very poor choises in the past 3 years. LFR for example is a total insult for ppl that want to do raiding - but are unable to spend 20-30 hours per week in normal raids. Thats the first thing Blizz needs to fix. PROPER raid progress in normal mode.. Right now less than 3% of the playerbase have done all bosses in normal mode. Reason ? Cause Blizzard made normals harder than what they were before. At the same time many old sub based gamers that want to play meaningfull raid progress and still have real life are focred into LFR... Or like me... just quit. Cause LFR is the lowest of low - almost as low as daily quests. And guess what... thats the two things BLizzard offered for their RPG systems in MOP....

[Thetruth1400]

500k is more then most other P2P mmo's have in active players. Give me a break.

That 500k is, in the least, a drop of 5% of the player base. That's pretty horrible to lose 5% of your customer base in three months time, especially when it's holiday time and more sales are expected. While I'm not claiming that WoW is dying, there is an obvious downward trend. Bringing back the 800K subscribers that were lost pre MoP is pretty much invalidated now with this drop of 500K.

Are we seeing the end of WoW? Not really. 9 million is far and away an extreme success. Are we seeing WoW no longer in it's prime? Definitely.

[Aquamonkey]

Because that wouldn't be illegal at all right? they are a publicly traded company any lie to investors could get them in hot water even this type of lie.

Because they have a very loose definition of a sub. Asia pays by the hour. If they log in for 1 hour in that 3 month period, they get counted as a full $15/mo Western sub. Asia has 50% of the subs, but only 10% of Blizzard's income comes from there.

Western region is essentially paying for Asia to play the game.

[Joey Ray III]

The golden age in my opinion ended the day patch 3.0 was released.

amen, brother.