Subscriptions only kept growing in Vanilla

[vsb]

You anticipate wrong - the experience can't be recaptured, and the classic game is inferior to retail.

That's the reality you have to face.

That's not the case for me. I experienced awesome gameplay during stress tests, so awesome that I just couldn't play retail anymore and can't wait for release.

[HazySwayze]

as long as theres enough to raid and pvp, i could care less how big it gets. im just glad its finally almost here

[SirBeef]

Precisely this. The 100 million accounts number actually does help here. That number was released on its 10 year anniversary. So what that tells us is peak subs were 11 million, but 100 million have played. So actually player retention was terrible!

So in the early days, players came and left, but were replaced by more players as the game was fresh, mmos were in their prime, etc.

As the game got older, players still left.. but they are no longer being replaced.. because as the game got to 10 years and beyond, very few new people are going to try it out. My younger siblings would never dream of trying out a 10 year old MMO.

I don't see how this pattern changes in classic. You will get a huge influx early on and this will drop off to hopefully a stable workable population. I don't see this as a bad thing, it's what most classic people want.

Blizzard has even mentioned this. During Cata and MoP they weren't really losing subs, they were no longer getting new player in. They have always had people leaving in droves. just the game was new and fresh enough, and in the public eye enough to warrant a buy from someone new.

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That's a full remake, not a re-release.

Might as well be a different game at this point.

[Relapses]

When you start at zero there's only one direction to go? Did you add that graphic just to tilt people?

[UnluckyAmateur]

Why wouldn't they keep growing when Classic is released? With an entire new population of gamers, fewer barriers to entry, stable internet now the norm, and with no requirements to buy the boxed game. There have been over 100 million WoW accounts made in WoW's lifetime. Do the math.

I anticipate that the number of Classic players will only continue to rise as the months go by.

You're ignoring a lot of factors.

[Kallisto]

I mean, it didn't help that is for sure. I do think general interest was lost, but going from Lich King to a recycled character was a slap in the face too.

TBH I think the Lich King was pretty much credits rolling time for wow if it wasn't an MMO. The story was done and it was the end point (Pretty much defeated the legion for all purposes in BC. Scourge was the last true threat from the WC3 leftover story that wow was.). Nothing was going to see the game continue growth when WoW was by this time over 6 years old and had pretty much done and dusted the story arc that had people coming in which was "Heroes of Warcraft 3 seen from the ground."

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100M was reported during MoP. Vannila, TBC had giant retantion rate. People start quiting game in wotlk and game adopt trend of sub spikes with content updates becousr game become so accessible thay people run out of stuff to do.

It did not. The only way Vanilla - Wrath had a giant retention rate would be if from end of Wrath to MoP (BTW 100 million wasn't just mentioned in MoP they started calling it out at the end of Wrath/Start of Cata) would be if somehow 80 million people joined for a during Cata/MoP and said "Nope."

I know that's how purists of the original 3 would like to think but quite frankly entry/exit was a revolving door during the first 6 years. It's just less and less people have decided to join over the years. People tend to not flock to a 6+ year old game.

[lollerlaban]

Using OP's logic that means that WoD was more successful than vanilla, sorry mate.

[Khain]

Blizzard was probably the most beloved game developer from the early 2000s, anything they released would be a huge success specially after SC, D2 and WC3 which were all considered masterpieces. As for the drop in popularity that's normal, the game is formulaic, a lot of people just grew out of it on top of being hard on entry level players and having a subscription price on it

[Shayd]

I d'ont see why people keep saying that the teenager population isn't going to like it because now there is Apex, Fortnite and all this shit. We had CS 1.6 back then that was really popular too but teenager kept coming on Vanilla because the game was awesome and is still. The feeling of having 120 Horde players raid SW is something that I have only experienced in Vanilla. Even after in BC things started to change to what is now retail, and the feeling faded away slowly.

People are only focusing on "Time have changed" so people won't like it anymore, but the game has changed too in a way that is not appreciated anymore (just look at the subs for BfA going from 8 millions to 3-4 millons in the first patch). Why teenagers now wouldn't enjoy the feeling you get from Vanilla? Why is it so different to do 100 Apex games vs 100 Classic BG?

Lots of people think that time have changed because game design changed. But look at the hype on Classic and other retro gaming. Isn't it exactly what proves that the players aren't fully satisfied with what games design have become? Maybe it's the game producer that are wrong and think they know better than the player what they want?

I'm not saying that old stuff is much better and what we do now is garbadge, I'm saying that maybe it was so popular for a reason and we lost it on the way.

And for my self what we lost is passion, game devs back in the day created games because they were passionate and that what drived them to make so amazing games. Now they're passionnate too but they can't let it out because producers have a check list of what they know is going to work and what they want in the game so it's an economic succes.

[FelPlague]

Why wouldn't they keep growing when Classic is released? With an entire new population of gamers, fewer barriers to entry, stable internet now the norm, and with no requirements to buy the boxed game. There have been over 100 million WoW accounts made in WoW's lifetime. Do the math.

I anticipate that the number of Classic players will only continue to rise as the months go by.

because something new is not the same as something release 20 years ago.
welcome to how the world works.

[Armakus]

Why wouldn't they keep growing when Classic is released? With an entire new population of gamers, fewer barriers to entry, stable internet now the norm, and with no requirements to buy the boxed game. There have been over 100 million WoW accounts made in WoW's lifetime. Do the math.

I anticipate that the number of Classic players will only continue to rise as the months go by.

Uh, I think Classic will be successful but what kind of absolutely ridiculous argument is this? Classic did so well because it was unlike anything else on the market - leagues beyond what any other MMO at the time could even dream of accomplishing. That was 15 years ago. Things are different now.

[Relapses]

I d'ont see why people keep saying that the teenager population isn't going to like it because now there is Apex, Fortnite and all this shit. We had CS 1.6 back then that was really popular too but teenager kept coming on Vanilla because the game was awesome and is still. The feeling of having 120 Horde players raid SW is something that I have only experienced in Vanilla. Even after in BC things started to change to what is now retail, and the feeling faded away slowly.

People are only focusing on "Time have changed" so people won't like it anymore, but the game has changed too in a way that is not appreciated anymore (just look at the subs for BfA going from 8 millions to 3-4 millons in the first patch). Why teenagers now wouldn't enjoy the feeling you get from Vanilla? Why is it so different to do 100 Apex games vs 100 Classic BG?

Lots of people think that time have changed because game design changed. But look at the hype on Classic and other retro gaming. Isn't it exactly what proves that the players aren't fully satisfied with what games design have become? Maybe it's the game producer that are wrong and think they know better than the player what they want?

I'm not saying that old stuff is much better and what we do now is garbadge, I'm saying that maybe it was so popular for a reason and we lost it on the way.

And for my self what we lost is passion, game devs back in the day created games because they were passionate and that what drived them to make so amazing games. Now they're passionnate too but they can't let it out because producers have a check list of what they know is going to work and what they want in the game so it's an economic succes.

Yeah, I can't wait til WoW has 25 million subscribers the month after Classic is released!

[FelPlague]

Precisely this. The 100 million accounts number actually does help here. That number was released on its 10 year anniversary. So what that tells us is peak subs were 11 million, but 100 million have played. So actually player retention was terrible!

So in the early days, players came and left, but were replaced by more players as the game was fresh, mmos were in their prime, etc.

As the game got older, players still left.. but they are no longer being replaced.. because as the game got to 10 years and beyond, very few new people are going to try it out. My younger siblings would never dream of trying out a 10 year old MMO.

I don't see how this pattern changes in classic. You will get a huge influx early on and this will drop off to hopefully a stable workable population. I don't see this as a bad thing, it's what most classic people want.

http://media.wow-europe.com/infograp...fographic.html

[Shammyrock]

solid bait thread

[FelPlague]

100M was reported during MoP. Vannila, TBC had giant retantion rate. People start quiting game in wotlk and game adopt trend of sub spikes with content updates becousr game become so accessible thay people run out of stuff to do.

nah vanilla and tbc actually had horrible rentention rates, just they had higher rates of new players then losing players, blizzard mentioned it was hard ot keep players playing for a long time because there was a lack of content the average player could do once max level. cause the average player did not do hardcore raiding.

[lockybalboa]

Yeah popularity sustained from 2005-2011, and fanboys call this a "fluke" LMAO

[ramayana1423]

This is one of the dumbest threads I've ever seen posted.

[Zmagoslav]

Styil bait thread - classic

Somewhere along the way the OP just decided that product life cycle, market saturation, QoL standards new players expect and novelty are just fake news and shouldn't be considered in analysis.