Originally Posted by
VinylScratch
You mean the numbers where this suspiciously was the one time they weren't trying to shove how many copies they sold down our throats shortly after launch? Q4 report they outright said Dragonflight didn't reach the levels of Shadowlands on sales and Shadowlands was trying to flaunt selling like 4 million copies on launch. Which sounds impressive... until you've played since prior to WoD and remember Blizzard getting super giddy they had 10 million subscribers for WoD launch back when they used to give us those numbers and in one quarter lost literally half of that figure... and now they're selling releases barely meeting HALF of the disastrous "5.4 million concurrent subscribers" that scared Blizzard into refusing to release sub figures anymore.
To say WoW is dying is an understatement, it's been dying and bleeding for over a decade now. It gives the illusion of "being alive" because the servers haven't been shut off and the game is largely populated by people who are either new, or sunk too much time into the game to quit (sunken cost fallacy), but comparatively to the numbers this game used to pull, yeah it's dead. Especially now that players have actual options now in terms of other MMOs that all cater to different playstyles and ideas, it isn't just "Play WoW, or an endless procession of WoW clones with an added Korean grind to everything". Has been this way for a while.
I guess if you're part of the like "Began in MoP/WoD/Legion" crowd it doesn't look as bad, but I think the game looks like a ghosttown to anybody that played in Wrath. It's like two different people looking at the same body, one sees it as Arnold in his prime, the other sees it as a limp, malnourished body just slowly bleeding out pathetically on the pavement. These differences in views created solely by what they saw the game as when they began playing in terms of playercount.
Actually, in the simplest way here's a simple thought experiment. Take Dragonflight, remove World of Warcraft from the title, remove all association to WoW and your existing character from it. Dragonflight releases with everything it has right now, but your characters, collections, achievements, etc are all gone. This is a fresh game release, a new MMO, fresh soil to cultivate and settle... would you play this dogshit for more than two weeks? No, it would die like literally every other half-baked hype MMO release like Bless Online. Dragonflight isn't even relevant, fuck it's barely even alive and even that barely alive status is 90% carried by "World of Warcraft" in the title, NOT "Dragonflight." It's also why you'll never see a WoW 2, because they're aware the second they lose the sunken cost players they are beyond fucked because not many people who still primarily play MMOs trust Blizzard to deliver the starpower they did almost two decades past.
If FF14-2 and WoW 2 were to release on the same day hypothetically, I have no doubts people would go with FF14-2 because the single biggest alienating factor for players is the absurd MSQ grind to fully enjoy the game, as well as stomach ARR. That goes out of the window with a fresh game where XIV would shed its biggest weakness for bringing in new players. Similarly WoW loses it's singular biggest strength of "I've played the game for so long, I can't just quit because then it meant nothing!" It'd be like watching Tyson in his prime fight a 5 year old and pulling no punches.