1.3 million sub drop

[Deleted]

Minus 10% playerbase in just 3 months, that's not something you should take lightly.

[Ryethe]

Something worth noting: If you had 6 month recurring subs, those would have just started expiring last quarter if you didn't by MOP. There is also the factor of accounts that have recurring billing setup but have not played in a while.

To a shareholder these numbers don't matter. You don't care why someone is paying you month over month, just that you are getting money from them. However, from Blizzard's POV this doesn't help them determine if they are going down the right path. No matter how good MOP is, they already quit a long time ago. Blizzard on the other hand should (and presumably does) have number for how many people who were active in MOP have gone silent and how many new subs have been added. This tells them just how successful their model is.

Don't get me wrong, these numbers are bad. It's never good to loose subs but it doesn't tell the whole story and it certainly is not automatically attributable to the current state of the game.

[Prancing Minstrel]

Its an interesting number. Part of me wonders if its the lack of dungeons. - which in turns makes me wonder how many players dont even do raid finder and once they are bored of the current endgame heroic dungeons they just call it till there are more.

I do think they underestimated the popularity of 5 mans, scenarios are just a run-in-and-gank fest that really don't fill the hole. Hopefully they will learn from the outcry and add a lot more in the next expac.

[Stuffs]

3M. At 3M it will be at its lowest ever almost since launch and will be a sure-fire sign it is on its way out. I just wonder how many subs we have to have to keep people from using the "It's not 12M so it must be dying" argument. Can't have it both ways.

It is skimming a lot of fat, which is indicative of a lot of issues. Its dropped 4 mil subscriptions since WotLK, that is definitely reason for concern

[Therm]

Pretty sure a massive chunk of that is PvPers, PvE is great this tier, pvp is just getting more silly each season

[Deleted]

I gotta say this isn't really a surprise, we are going towards year nine and yet they still have 8.3 million subscribers. That being said, I don't believe anything is gonna change the slow decline that WoW is having, which is okay, nothing lasts forever

[-Superman-]

So first it gained subs and now 800k lost is not so bad?? The beginning of MOP saw a rise to over 10 million six months later almost two million of them have left. This is bad there is no other way to spin it.

Subs come and go with every new expac. The most noticeable was Wrath's end and Cata's launch. We had what 12M at the end of wrath and the numbers went DOWN with the launch, not up. It is still above 5M subs and WAY above 3M subs (which is the sad amount some other MMOs have). The fact that it still has over 8M in 8 years is stellar and people need to recognize it.

[Ashcow]

as someone who is currently looking at coming back to WoW, i gotta say, this doesnt affect me in the slightest.

[McNeil]

I don't get why people go all like ''WoW still has more subs then any other MMO!!!''

..... so what? That doesn't mean that its not a huge loss to Blizzard. They have hired so much more guys to bring content faster, yet they keep losing a lot of subs. Thats still a major loss for Blizzard, it doesn't matter if WoW still has a lot of subs...

[Elim Garak]

10m is a huge number...
9m is still a huge number...
8m is a pretty big number...
...
7m is a pretty big number too...
6m is a big number...
5m is a big number too...
...

But don't you see the trend?

I bet there were people at the top deck of Titanic who were saying something similar:
"Hey, we are still pretty high above the water!"
While the rest of passengers were abandoning the ship, yeah, from the starboard, at first.

[-aiko-]

thats what blizzard gets for turning wow into a shitty game. they better start making a good game if they want good numbers

This made me chuckle. What do you consider "good" numbers then?

WoW is in a decline, anyone with eyes and a brain can see that. It is still the most popular MMO by an overwhelming margin, though, and it's unavoidable demise is many years down the road.

[Deleted]

The sad thing is that this game is better than ever before. A lot of people are praising MoP to be the best xpac so far and Blizzard is showing more effort and releasing content patches faster than ever before.

[Faroth]

yeah, i think content is very good this expac, but i think poeple are just burnt out, its an old game, i think in the next 2years it will drop to around 5-6million and stabalize there.

Honestly, I think around 5-6 million would be a good place to sustain. When you get down to a stable core of players who still love the game, developers can focus more on a design goal rather than trying to pander to as many people as possible.

8+ million is still HUGE for what may well end up being the final successful subscription based MMO. And that's a factor. A lot of new gamers have the attention span of a gnat and hop from game to game so F2P MMOs are actually far more accessible to them. The irony is Blizzard excelled at the shorter attention/dedication mentality by making an accessible MMO (I loved EQ, but despite that I still never got past level 50 before I quit during Shadows of Luclin. WoW whiners have no clue how casual and quickly accessible WoW remains to this day compared to the soul sucking master that was Norrath).

The very MMO mentality that WoW heavily promoted and helped breed is the very thing that will continue to bleed subs from WoW.

But I honestly think 5-6 million would be the healthiest range for the game itself. That's right, I think LESS subs than they currently have would be healthy for the game, barring the repercussions from Activision freaking out.

[Lumineus]

Holy sh***t, never expected that much of a drop. I expected something around 500k. Patch 5.2 wasn't so fascinating after all?

Normal mode still overtuned, people didn't like wiping on Horridon for two months...?

[Deleted]

Incoming WOW IS DYING. It isn't. Also most likely due to the Dailies qq


We'll get them all back. Things change.

No, most of them wont come back anymore. The game is in fact dying, a very slow and long death that will take several more years and most likely 1-2 another expansions at the very least before it eventually dies for good.

That's quite a huge drop - far more than I had expected.

I guessed about a million in the other thread and people called me a "sky is falling" guy.

I don't understand the fascination with the player numbers. The game is still larger then most. Also this 8+ year old game has more players then most more recent games, but at least the WoW is dying/LFR/LFG have killed the game/this is what happens when you don't focus on the special snowflakes forum posters something to talk about.

Because it directly affects our gameplay. Servers empty, auctions house empties, longer queues for battlegrounds, arenas and dungeons, less people to play with and so on and on and on. Having less players has a negative impact on us and will end up driving even more players away.

On topic. This whole "most players were from the east" thing is getting old. Btw even of 650.001 came from the East and 649.999 from the West they could still claim the mayority of the losses to be from the East. So expect the West to have lost a lot of players also.

[Deleted]

I don't get why people go all like ''WoW still has more subs then any other MMO!!!''

..... so what? That doesn't mean that its not a huge loss to Blizzard. They have hired so much more guys to bring content faster, yet they keep losing a lot of subs. Thats still a major loss for Blizzard, it doesn't matter if WoW still has a lot of subs...

Because an MMO is only dead when it has 0 players. There are MMOs out there running longer than WoW and having only a fraction of WoW's subscribers. Hell, EVE online just hit 10 years and how many people play EVE online? 5?

[muto]

The lack of community is a big thing I think. If Blizzard merged servers, and got rid of LFR and LFD I think socialization would be increased, and there would be a more "homey" atmosphere.

[Cows For Life]

Not much because SC

It's okay, once people are done with Heart of the Swarm, they'll be back?

[Banzhe]

It's funny really the east is continuing to be a pointless waste of time all it does WoW wise is bring losses.

Maybe now they can just say " screw it " and focus on European and North American subscribers.

Tbh, with all the loses always occurring in the East, they can't really float that boat much longer, at least this time they admitted the loss was also in the West.., not really unexpected.

"Quality" content haven't been seen since Tbc, and they've done just about everything they can do to ensure mayhem amongst their player base by removing everything that made people stand apart, which ironically was also what bound them together.

I'll be looking forward to the Q2 when they announce another 1.2 - 1.8m drop.

[ringpriest]

Leaving the "WoW is dying" thing aside for the moment, does anyone else think that a goodly part of this drop might be due to the 1 year agreements finally falling off from the sub numbers. Ever since Blizz started to see Cata as a failure, they've been using various gimmicks to keep the sub numbers up quarter after quarter. There was no particular special deal in 2013 Q1 (as far as I'm aware). Perhaps all that sub-bumping has finally caught up with them? (Or alternatively, perhaps they just decided it wasn't really worth it and stopped trying to artificially boost sub numbers?)