Bellular analyses WoW's health.

[sunxsera]

Yea, not watching bellular anymore. There is a lot wrong with wow & blizzard ... but i don't need youtubers to tell me every week, i can see that.

Drama sells - and that`s exactly what most youtubers are doing right now. Pretty sure many of them are actually happy with the blizzard situation.

That doesnt mean i' m happy with wow / blizzard right now. i' m not.

[Thage]

Only real takeaways here are that Bellular is doing what he can to exist within the YouTube algorithm (no shade here, algorithms on that site are beyond fucked and you gotta do what you gotta do to get paid), those charts track with what Blizzard themselves admitted (with a million MAUs lost across the company during the COVID-19 lockdowns), and historic trends post-Cataclysm with fewer and fewer players returning to check out the new stuff as part of the cyclical approach hold true, with WoD being the odd man out rather than establishing a new trend. Anything beyond that is only so useful unless someone at Blizzard leaks hard numbers and evidence.

[Icecat]

Wow, you guys are really upset by Youtubers, just like, as a concept. I'm not a fan of the content but it's not like he's overrated or even has an especially toxic community. Y'all really need to pick your enemies better.

I think his logic in this video is fairly sound, for what little information we have to go on. Scraping the WoW armory data for clears is more reasonable than relying on Auction House mods which we used to have to do.

That said, it's not a hot take to say that WoW expansions don't retain players very well. Everyone knows that, especially Blizzard. It's clear that their angle for WoW for the last decade is not reliance on subscriptions or even active users as much as it is bi-yearly expansion cycles with massive marketing pushes. I don't think Blizzard sees Shadowlands as a flop either, and it's delusional thinking to assume that Bobby Kotick will "shake things up at the leadership level". I'd love to see a shake-up, but I'm pretty sure Blizzard sees Shadowlands as "the fastest-selling PC game of all time" (as disingenuous as that statistic is) and a critical financial success that doesn't need many changes.

Hate to be that guy, but our metrics for success in WoW (and what makes a good video game) is obviously very different from Blizzard's metrics. It's been this way for many many years.

[AngerFork]

Not that there aren't some valid points that Bellular has brought up lately, but you have to remember that he largely makes money off of controversy. Some of that is in the form of dramatic clickbait, but he now does a live YouTube show where people donate money to him to discuss their specific complaints with the game, making it more profitable for him to be negative & be a megaphone for community negativity. As someone who used to watch his videos a lot, you can absolutely see how this changed what he does.

He started out with a lot of good criticisms & feedback, but of late it just feels like attacking to attack. He criticized part of the Elune/Tyrande cinematic as being a plot hole, then when someone pointed out a specific plot point that helps tie it in, his response was something along the lines of "yeah, I guess you're right, but I don't really care anymore." One of his recent videos on what Blizz should add in 9.1.5 to improve WoW spent a ton of time demanding Blizz apologized for the state of the game...not just improve the game, but that they must apologize for it. He constantly harps on every last bug as making WoW a paid beta test, never mind the stuff early in the game where Blizz lost everyone's mail for a couple days or the like.

I like his lore videos & his design ideas, but the man is absolutely feeding far more into the negativity of the community & making a bunch of money doing so.

[Asrialol]

After someone pointed out that he tilts his face lift and right constantly I can't watch his vids at all. Before that I could suffer through a few minutes to hear his bullshit.

I thought he quit wow. I was hoping he'd never make wow related vids again. Alas.

Literal garbage.

[Doombringer]

I like reading the deniers here that immediately discredit Bellular or his numbers.

Look, he's not saying his numbers are gospel. The sites referenced do however scrape from official sources, like the Armory. It's about as accurate as one can be OUTSIDE of Blizzard's internal accounting.

And when you see X number of players doing an activity at the start of the expack and Y number of players, roughly 50%, doing the same comparable activity for the latest patch... yeah, there's a decline. Comparing to prior expansions where this activity didn't show nearly the same drop... draw conclusions. Because Blizzard will. They have reporting and dashboards that will display the same sort of engagement internally. Or lack of engagement.

And you don't even need graphs to tell there's a decline. Just go into the game.

[Al Gorefiend]

Why would someone of 'Bellular's marketing team' embed all of the most relevant screenshots of the video, thereby ensuring fewer people will watch the actual video, as is clearly evident by many of the comments in this thread? What an asinine accusation and what a sorry excuse for avoiding the topic.

So you're doing this and he isn't even paying you? Instead of a presentation of your own thoughts and ideas you simply accredit someone else's thereby promoting someone who owes you nothing?

[Ashcrack]

Yea, not watching bellular anymore. There is a lot wrong with wow & blizzard ... but i don't need youtubers to tell me every week, i can see that.
And what are those statistics? why would you compare boss kills from a 6+ months long patch to a 1+ month long patch?

Drama sells - and that`s exactly what most youtubers are doing right now. Pretty sure many of them are actually happy with the blizzard situation.

That doesnt mean i' m happy with wow / blizzard right now. i' m not.

The stats are from the 1st month of castle nathria and the 1st month of sanctum of domination... No one would try to compare stats with different durations obviously.

[taliey]

You don't need a Youtuber to tell you what you can see what is happening with your own 2 eyes.

On the topic of Bellular however - the community is just flat out burnt out scrounging for scraps and giggles. You ever wonder why you don't see doomsayers and 'I quit' forum posts anymore? It's much more profitable to shit on the game now.

We are watching a long drawn out death spiral of the community.

[Kittahsmash]

It's much more profitable to shit on the game now.

This argument doesn't hold water with me, since people have been shitting on this game for well over a decade now...

[sunxsera]

The stats are from the 1st month of castle nathria and the 1st month of sanctum of domination... No one would try to compare stats with different durations obviously.

thanks for the clarification. just saw the statistics and didn' t watch the video. will edit my post.

[ParanoiD84]

Well it should come to no ones surprise if wow numbers are at a all time low atm.

Blizz is lucky they also have classic.

[taliey]

This argument doesn't hold water with me, since people have been shitting on this game for well over a decade now...

I was clearly directing the comment at content creators in general.

For the community, you also get more internet points for saying 'wow bad, heres [personal checklist] to make wow good again'.

[Thelxi]

Pretty grim numbers. I can see why final fantasy is sending them into a panic.

[starstationprofm]

I highly doubt WoW is down to only 2-3 mil subscribers. It's never been this low, and looking at MAUs Blizzard has the same players it had back in WoD, when they also had Overwatch. No way WoW is under 5 mil.

[Mosotti]

They are under 3 or even 2 million on retail alone, but that is also expected for a 2 million years subscription game. However they make the equivalent of many millions of subscribers through store and gold tokens. Combined with classic which is now a much less effort in development and they are pretty safe at least until classic WotLK.

But they really need to think about the direction if the game, for me it seems there’s no way of growing anymore and they should really start on some kind of WoW 2.

[hulkgor]

Wasn't he one of the streamers that stopped covering WoW? I get confused with all the 'high profile streamers' and their shenanigans.

I just imagine all this doomsayers with their "THE END IS NEAR" cardboard signs on the side of the road, as they have for the past decade, whilst buying every expansion, which keep breaking day 0 sales records.

[hydrium]

Games with cyclic content releases have cyclic player activity. News at 11.

You people and your copium lol.

[Kralljin]

Wasn't he one of the streamers that stopped covering WoW? I get confused with all the 'high profile streamers' and their shenanigans.

He's among those WoW Content creators who hasn't made some "We're also covering other games from now" announcement (or one to outright quit) - altough he has already been branching out shortly after BfA's launch with his general gaming news channel.

However, needs to be said that a lot of noteworthy content creators have chosen to branch out or stopped playing / covering WoW for the time being.

[anon5123]

>"Estimation"
>based off of addon downloads
lmao