History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hmm i think i've changed my mind. We wont see a massive drop imo this quarter. Something like -150k max. 5.4 brings back people with lootlisland and connected realms.
BUT
The next gen console are coming (wildstar and teso ll hit badly too cuz they have subs = same market), and we wont see an xpac before 6month and everybody looks bored already. I think wow is gonna lose something like a solid Milion before next xpac hits, maybe 2.
Only way to prevent this is to announce something REALLY BIG at Blizzcon.
Last edited by Iseeyou; 2013-10-24 at 09:03 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?"
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people - Martin Luther King, Jr.
5.4 will artificially boost Q3. Q4 is gonna have massive losses.
*~To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.~*
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
1:30 p.m. Pacific Time, 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time, 21:30 UTC
Just for reminder
Yeah, to the ground baby!
Pandas are gonna be the biggest loser out of all expaks.
Rofl
"If you want to control people, if you want to feed them a pack of lies and dominate them, keep them ignorant. For me, literacy means freedom." - LaVar Burton.
I don't expect to see any real loss other than the usual month to month, seasonal and patch variations.
People think WoW is crashing to the ground at full speed, no, not it really isn't, it's just not as popular as it used to be.
WoW is an anomaly, no other mmo came close, and no other ever will, including Blizzards own work, MMO's just aren't THAT popular any more, it's a shifted industry, deal with it, or continue shouting about how it's crashing to the ground and MoP is childish and the worst expansion ever whilst you log in every day and continue to pay that sub.
WoW will not continue to decline month on month for the next five years, the game would literally have to be broken, instead it will either settle as it is now, 6.5 to 7.5 million and jump at the next expac, then go down again to 6.5 to 7.5, or go further down to 3/4/5 million and settle there for years.
/drama
Exactly. Look at the original post. You notice that 1M gain in 3Q? and that followed by a big drop? You know what happened there? A huge F2P game was released in China. People make it out like the game is losing subs because of micro-changes the devs make. No, the game lost a huge chunk of it´s cheap china players who switched to a f2p game marketed in their cyber cafes. Revenues never dropped anywhere near as much as subs did, which proves it was not $15 per month subscribers who left.
While there never was a wow killer in the west, there was in China, and it laucnhed last December. I still expect WOW to gradually lose subscribers, but nothing like 1M per quarter like happened in 4Q and 1Q
If you look at how these things usually trend, you will not generally see things flatten out after a nose dive in one period. They decrease would usually gradually taper off. Also outside of surges from a new expack the rate of decline is about 500k per quarter. We probably still have about a year until the next expack comes out so I think we will likely hit 5 million by then. What will be telling is after the initial surge back up to maybe 6 million, how fast things start dropping again. If the next expack flops it will likely be devastating to the game. Still no matter how bad it gets I am sure they will flatten out above 2 million subs, if next expack is a smash hit maybe as high as 4 million.
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WoWEast only had 1 million more subs than WoWWest back in 2010. If everytime we lose subs it has been Asian subs like people always say, how many subs do you think they have left there? 3 million?(that wouldn't be that big of a loss comparatively) Next time we lose another 2 millions subs I bet it will be all Asia again and the timer after that too even though we would have negative sub numbers for Asia at that point.
Last edited by jbombard; 2013-10-28 at 05:43 AM.