Shadowlands lost almost half of its playerbase?

[bloodwulf]

I remember how BfA apparently lost "more players than WoD" after the first months according to X people with zero insight.

Yet that was never in any shape or form confirmed by official reports, on the contrary in fact.

Another day, another clickbait by Bellular. He used to be good. The "sources" are laughable at best.

Its a shame, Bellular was a great and informative content creator, but i think as he grew his company, he has to recoup much higher expenses, and this leads him to making Clickbait and desperate videos.

[justandulas]

What game has more population than wow and keeps growing?

League of legends. Call of duty. Fifa. Madden. Minecraft.

Hell, even that new survival game Valheim likely had more active players.

Not bashing WoW just pointing out that games many times the size or as old as WoW continue to grow and thrive.

[Azerox]

This forums have been dejavu for years.

Start xpac/patch > Hype hype hype
Months later > This is worse xpac/patch ever, see everyone quit playing, reeeee!!!!

Repeat.

Welcome to MMO champ.

[Loveliest]

Well, we're kinda done with this tier? I mean what are YOU doing ingame now? Unless your guild is still raiding Mythic or you just keep leveling alts and farming mounts, you're probably unsubbed and waiting for next tier.

[Doffen]

Some people no, other people made money on them with clickbaits.

We can say what we want about Bellular but he is a genious when it comes to earning a buck.

[Thage]

only a matter of time before creating an new expansion will become financially not worth it.
the game is getting less popular and it's normal. nothing can revert the trend. less players, less revenue.
one day, the revenue of one hour working on new content will be negative.

Sure, but we're talking a factor of decades here. EverQuest is over 20 years old and still gets new expansions and content on a regular basis, and there is no indication I'm aware of that the developers have plans to put EverQuest into maintenance mode.

Remember that vanilla WoW was designed to be profitable on 50k players. I would put money on it that most expansions, especially those on the wrong end of the product life-cycle bell curve, are designed to be profitable under similar conditions, because you'd have to be daft to assume one game will hold a multimillion-player userbase in perpetuity. Eventually, WoW will hit the extreme end of the bell curve, but so long as the game remains profitable to develop new content for, we'll get new content.

[Wilfire]

Why are people obsessed with a games population? It's still making a profit, so they'll keep making it.

Has it ever occurred to you that in a MMO, people want to play with huge numbers of other people?

[ldev]

Well quarantine made people to subscribe for longer, but covenants and gearing sucked the joy out fast.

[Doffen]

Has it ever occurred to you that in a MMO, people want to play with huge numbers of other people?

Nope, people just want to play with their friends or guild. If 10 people played together and had fun doing so, having 100.000 or 10 million would mean fuck all.

[Cæli]

Sure, but we're talking a factor of decades here. EverQuest is over 20 years old and still gets new expansions and content on a regular basis, and there is no indication I'm aware of that the developers have plans to put EverQuest into maintenance mode.

Remember that vanilla WoW was designed to be profitable on 50k players. I would put money on it that most expansions, especially those on the wrong end of the product life-cycle bell curve, are designed to be profitable under similar conditions, because you'd have to be daft to assume one game will hold a multimillion-player userbase in perpetuity. Eventually, WoW will hit the extreme end of the bell curve, but so long as the game remains profitable to develop new content for, we'll get new content.

that's an optimistic point of view, maybe, but we've seen that companies can be ruthless and can decide to stop caring about new content (extreme cases being licence termination and server shutdown and conversion by the community to private servers)
I don't know how many IP the EQ team has, but blizzard has many, and if one day 1h of work on another IP is more profitable than 1h of work on wow, I don't see any reasons for them to work on new content for wow, especially since classic games are popular, and new content can potentially lead to revenue loss (bad content, bad press, players realization that it's not like before, etc)

I don't want to sound negative but I think there's chances that 10.0 is the last expansion
we need to see what new games they're working on

[dacoolist]

The games pretty old, I would suspect the playerbase that normally comes in for a new xpac probably has already left.

The big issue too is all of the problems happening at blizz with the WoW team leaving too - bringing new people in to work on the game probably isn't easy.

Lastly the playerbase number issue I always see... 75+% of the time when I see posts like this it's because someones playing on a dead server on Alliance somewhere in North America. I get it, you're mad not only because your faction hates you and nobody plays but because it looks like the games dead.. Don't feel bad, Come over the Horde and stop getting declined for everything in the game and make something of yourself.

[Hellobolis]

Nope, people just want to play with their friends or guild. If 10 people played together and had fun doing so, having 100.000 or 10 million would mean fuck all.

it does matter. a good example is the speed at which world boss groups fill or times of the day when LFR queues take hours.

in the first weeks you can do those things whenever you want. nowadays i sometimes have to turn off warmode to find a worldboss group. and doing LFR or a worldboss between 4-7 AM is pretty hard to do these days too. there is a bunch of things i consider "do it on reset day or it will be annoying to do" currently.

now by no means it's reaching critical low levels or anything, but you can definitely tell.

[Nnyco]

Bellular and google trends, you sure know how to pick top notch data.

[potis]

The games pretty old, I would suspect the playerbase that normally comes in for a new xpac probably has already left.

Ding ding ding, IQ detected.

Dont say logical stuff bro, this is mmo-champion.

WoW has 2 players left in total,rest are communist bots to make the game look alive.

[Wilfire]

Nope, people just want to play with their friends or guild. If 10 people played together and had fun doing so, having 100.000 or 10 million would mean fuck all.

That 50% of playerbase are not just faceless mooks. SL resulted in 90% of my longtime friends quitting WoW.

[Doffen]

That 50% of playerbase are not just faceless mooks. SL resulted in 90% of my longtime friends quitting WoW.

Same with me losing most of a guild in MoP and then lots of people in BfA, and yet, here we are.

[Beastiel]

the SL boom was massively inflated to begin with. Tons of people came back because it was something new to do while they were told they shouldn't be hanging out with friends. The honeymoon phase of the expac is coming to an end at the same time bars are opening back up. This was pretty predictable, many were never going to be in for the long haul.

[exsanguinate]

Why are people obsessed with a games population? It's still making a profit, so they'll keep making it.

Because it says a lot about quality and longevity of current content.

[Lahis]

Blizzard doesn't care whether people are subscribed to play retail, classic or classic TBC. It's all the same revenue to them. Their goal all along has been to split updates/releases between retail and classic so people who lose interest in one might subscribe for the other. The fact that Naxx coincided with the release of SL was only due to SL being delayed and was very much unintentional.

It wouldn't be strange for Blizzard to release classic TBC alpha/beta/whatever soon to tide people over while they wait for 9.1. Then sometime after 9.1 becomes "stale", classic TBC releases. When classic TBC becomes stale, 9.1.5 releases on the PTR etc. It's not coincidence, it's a very calculated move and there's nothing wrong with it. It's just smart business.

Having people play retail over Classic is more beneficial for Blizz, since retail has store bullshit while Classic does not.

[Orby]

Its a shame, Bellular was a great and informative content creator, but i think as he grew his company, he has to recoup much higher expenses, and this leads him to making Clickbait and desperate videos.

I stopped watching his stuff because he was putting way too much out lol. I don't find he is clickbaity but the amount of content he produces is needless. A news show once or twice a week is fine, but not the amount he does.