I think it's time for Blizzard owns up to being "Responsible"

[crusadernero]

How about they be transparent to their Investors and Clients and give us monthly WoW subscriptions so we can make informed decisions with our hard earned money and time when we see how their decisions are affecting subscriptions be it positively or negatively.

While they're at it, they should give us a breakdown by region and demographic. I'm curious how everything reflects back into sub numbers. It would take hardly any effort to

Transparency and Good Faith would go great lengths to show they are confident about the impact of their decisions. A simple overlay of how changes affect the bottom line would be nice for both investors and players.

Why? Why does it matter to you? Why does it matter to any of us? As a gamer, do you decide what game to play purely on how many plays it? Or from how the latest investors call went? If so, I feel sorry for you. You are missing out on many great games because of it.

Imagine sitting infront of your pc thinking "Im not going to play this game, the investors call was shit and I dont know how popular the game is!"

Most of the games I play, I have no idea how many plays it on the regular or how popular it is. The only metric I have is:

Do I like this game?
Do I want to spend time playing this game?

Everything else means jack shit. wow is there to be played if you want to. If you dont want to, thats fine. Dont do it and spend your time on something else.

[Lolites]

We deserve to know if a game we plan on investing time and money has an actual future. There are other games like Warcraft out there. MMO games are the most time consuming and expensive ones. We should make a choice based on facts. They have no reason to hide the numbers. If they are planning to ditch the game, we have to know. Subscription numbers say a lot.

and subs will tell you FUCK ALL about games future, unless they are under few thousands (which is laughably unrealistic) bcs FINANCIAL stats are whats it all about, if the game is making money with 1m subs they will continue to work on it, if its not profitable it could be played by half the world and they would still end it...

thats why literaly no mmo shows sub numbers, bcs its fucking useless statistics, its only point ever was to brag that they reached some new hights or whatnot, and since that was mostly ignored and every decrease (literaly even if game had 5m and 1000 ppl left) all forums were plastered with threads how the game is dying...

[RemasteredClassic]

It's estimated to be currently around 60K concurrent players world wide.

[Viikkis]

I'd be curious to see sub numbers for sure but what I would love to see would be their revenue streams from WoW. I want to see how much whales make them profit with the cash shop and how it compares to raw subscription revenue. But they will never do that.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Yeah cause if it shows higher than expected it's either "Blizz is lying", "Flies are attracted to shit", "It's mostly China", or "Its all bots and multiboxers". However if it was lower then it's "SEE WOW IS DYING I AM VALIDATED BLIZZ WILL SHUT THIS DOWN ANY MOMENT YOU'LL SEE"

Or, get a load of that, if they release their numbers properly without convoluted obfuscation schemes like MAUs or counting someone with a single log-in at a PC bang for 2 seconds as a sub, we can just take the numbers as is. Better yet, show them by region and payment type (proper sub, token, gametime card, time-based model).

Not that there is ever a realistic chance for this to happen unless there was a law (or big profile court case) that made them. But sure keep preemptively defending them while huffing more of their exhaust.

Edit: Btw, it would also be a better argument against the utterly clueless that claim <100k, compared to "nuh uh, you can't know, all the second hand metrics we have are irrelevant and obviously off by 3 orders of magnitude trust me *sniff* *sniff*"

[BarosanuNr1]

Although I'd be curious to see the variations in sub numbers published once again, their relevance has been diminished anyway due to the cash shop and due to multiple games now being unlocked by the same sub (Retail & Classic). In order to make sense of what the sub numbers mean we'd also need a breakdown of all income sources and of the playerbase distribution between different version of the game.

[Gourbaak]

It's estimated to be currently around 60K concurrent players world wide.

you are very optimistic, i think we are only 3 to still play world of warcraft

[ResentfulUK]

It may make sense - especially in an MMO - to care about the player base numbers. Fewer people, means you're going to encounter problems. What isn't relevant though are the number of subscribers, but rather if you're feeling that loss of player base in-game. If you're managing to find groups, get your content done and experience the game then why does it matter?

[epigramx]

Is this really any different than how any other company market themselves though? It's like you have that Pizza place that focus on "voted best pizza place in the city 2018" but they don't mention anything about being #7 in 2019 or #16 in 2020. When WoW was still fairly new and at the height of its popularity, I fully understand why they would push the 'look how many players we have' angle, but 10 years later down the line, no matter how good or bad the game is, you won't have that same number.

You can call it them hiding their numbers to be shady or whatever but I don't think there's many companies out there that would openly showcase average numbers. Everyone wants to look good.

I don't disagree, but other companies being deceptive at it too, doesn't make Blizzard great and it doesn't make other companies that don't do that to be non-great.

- - - Updated - - -

Well, one thing isn’t a lie: They didn’t drop subscriptions from their financial reporting until late in 2015. Legion had already been announced at that point. That’s a long time after Wrath. Five years in fact.

I don't think it matters much that it had those ups and downs but what it matters most is the average across the years and the amount of times that it is lower in the future. The game had clearly a massive drop since its peak on WotLK. Their enemies can clearly use that against them because it's very easy to drop the low blow "the players are five times lower since its peak back in the day when those boomers played it"(or however lower it really is).

[T-34]

Their enemies can clearly use that against them because it's very easy to drop the low blow "the players are five times lower since its peak back in the day when those boomers played it"(or however lower it really is).

I don't think that the the publication of current subscription numbers, high or low, would make any current players stop playing or deterring new/former players to play the game (again).
The only use for subscription numbers in our day and age would be in the old and loved special Olympics discipline "WoW-bashing", as this thread is a perfect example of.

Blizzard's stock-holders don't seem to mind that subscription numbers aren't public any more and Blizzard doesn't want to use that data for promotional purposes any more.
No other MMO publishes subscription numbers so Blizzard is just in line with the business standard now.

[epigramx]

I don't think that the the publication of current subscription numbers, high or low, would make any current players stop playing or deterring new/former players to play the game (again).

Why would you think that? People are naturally very selfish entities that want to be with the popular kids or at least a lot of people act like that. Going with the crowd and what is the new cool thing is an extremely important factor for the success of franchises like Marvel's movies and games like this and whatever else in life.

[Myradin]

Blizzard's stock-holders don't seem to mind that subscription numbers aren't public any more and Blizzard doesn't want to use that data for promotional purposes any more.

From a stock-holder point of view their current system makes more sense.

MAU's gauge activity, and they still share their overall financials. With that you can watch the financial changes, and the change in player engagement.

Subscriber numbers don't really indicate if a player is actually playing, only that they are paying. A good personal example is I forgot to cancel my subscription until recently, despite not really having played all year. Under the old system I'd have counted as a happy subscriber all year, whereas I would barely count as MAU as I have played no blizzard games since like January.

The only group who wants a ton of numbers is those who can manipulate them to say whatever they want to argue about. Honestly I'd say the community is obsessed enough with numbers as is.

[T-34]

Why would you think that? People are naturally very selfish entities that want to be with the popular kids or at least a lot of people act like that. Going with the crowd and what is the new cool thing is an extremely important factor for the success of franchises like Marvel's movies and games like this and whatever else in life.

You might be right, but that is just another reason why publishing subscription numbers doesn't make any sense any more.
The only ones interested in it, as you yourself wrote, are those that don't play the game and who can't let go of it = not potential or current customers.

[rrayy]

Well I would like to actually see numbers to back claims of positive or negative impacts of design choices to the game. Instead of seeing BS speculations of "WoW is Dead" and "All is fine". Also makes Blizzard more accountable in front of it's stakeholders.

People leave for a variety of reasons so sub numbers are never going to give you what you want. The only reason you want themk to give them out is so you can say "see I was right". You want validation of your opinion. Nothing more.

[Osmeric]

Same as MAUs. If they were logged on, they have paid a sub in some way. So there is *some* equivalence. In some ways not. Someone can be subbed, and never log in, or log in for 15 minutes once in the time period, and still counts as a sub. But I don't think they get MAUs out of someone subbed but not playing.

I've wondered if they count someone reading the forums as a MAU.

[ghostprotocol]

nah bro, Blizzard doesn't owe you anything.

WoW is an OLD game. It really is, it's been going on for almost 20 years at some point you're just bound to get tired of it no matter how much you think you love it.

I was with my guild from Vanilla to the end of Wrath.. and by the end we were all tired and uninterested and just sick of it. It wasn't the game it was us.

Have the courage to walk away if it doesn't interest you anymore.

[Niwes]

How about they be transparent to their Investors and Clients and give us monthly WoW subscriptions so we can make informed decisions with our hard earned money and time when we see how their decisions are affecting subscriptions be it positively or negatively.

While they're at it, they should give us a breakdown by region and demographic. I'm curious how everything reflects back into sub numbers. It would take hardly any effort to

Transparency and Good Faith would go great lengths to show they are confident about the impact of their decisions. A simple overlay of how changes affect the bottom line would be nice for both investors and players.

They SHOULD: Yes.
They WILL: Hell No!

IMO there is nothing more to say on that topic.

[unbound]

How about they be transparent to their Investors and Clients and give us monthly WoW subscriptions so we can make informed decisions with our hard earned money and time when we see how their decisions are affecting subscriptions be it positively or negatively.

While they're at it, they should give us a breakdown by region and demographic. I'm curious how everything reflects back into sub numbers. It would take hardly any effort to

Transparency and Good Faith would go great lengths to show they are confident about the impact of their decisions. A simple overlay of how changes affect the bottom line would be nice for both investors and players.

You don't seem to be very familiar with how corporations and investors actually operate.

Monthly WoW subscription numbers were only ever valuable when they were growing and/or high to encourage more people to become investors. Basically, it was advertising that Blizz has lots of customers, so buy our stock because Blizz will be making money.

Once subscriptions started tanking too badly (i.e. during WoD), Blizz simply shifted to what really matters...are they making more profits or not. To the corporation and investor, they really don't care how those profits are made, as long as they continually improve (if at all possible).

Now, as for you, the customer...why would Blizz care? They don't want you making decisions based on viability of game or future decisions. Blizz, like every other corporation, wants you to empty as much of your wallet into their hands as they can convince you. That is your sole job. And Blizz, like every other corporation, will cut costs and even quality as much as they can as long as they keep or improve profits. If you don't understand that this is how corporations work, you really need to start just observing what they do instead of assuming what you think they do is what they do.

The fact that Blizz doesn't publish subscription numbers anymore tells you everything that you need to know. They are continuing to lose subscribers in general, and WoW Classic / BC only stemmed the tide a bit. However, their efforts to squeeze money out of whales (and dependents on the whales like those who buy time for in game gold) have been successful in conjunction with cost cutting efforts, so profits are up. And that is all that matters to Blizz and investors.

[HumbleDuck]

The title and description don't match, I hope it's not you being purposefully dishonest.

Yes, blizz should own up to their mistakes and act responsibly.

No, I don't think revealing sub numbers is the right move.

[Adamas102]

Well I would like to actually see numbers to back claims of positive or negative impacts of design choices to the game. Instead of seeing BS speculations of "WoW is Dead" and "All is fine". Also makes Blizzard more accountable in front of it's stakeholders.

You should be making your assessment based purely on whether you enjoy playing or not. If you hate a choice Blizzard makes but it seems to lead to increased player engagement are you going to change your mind? What about the opposite, if you like a change but subs drop? That's a pretty silly way to approach your hobby.