Influencers got their will, Bliz listened to their feedback, yet noone plays game

[Reive]

Game keeps reaching new peaks, WoW is afraid to disclose exactly how much Dragonflight copies they've sold. You do the math there brainiac.

1) The game peaked in 2021 when all the e-celebs started shilling it. 99% of them don't play it anymore

2) Ffxiv's peak<wow's lowest point

3) square enix doesn't announce numbers either

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Game keeps reaching new peaks, WoW is afraid to disclose exactly how much Dragonflight copies they've sold. You do the math there brainiac.

Has square actually put out any recent info other then total accounts created? A google search comes up with nothing but sites making up numbers like mmopopulation and the steam charts don’t paint of trend of new peaks instead pointing to a huge drop off after the 2021 boost.

[Aucald]

Let's not derail this thread into Game vs. Game rhetoric, such as WoW vs. FF14. Return to the topic at hand, in this case, the role of influencers on Dragonflight and future WoW content as opposed to butting heads over preferred titles.

[VinylScratch]

1) The game peaked in 2021 when all the e-celebs started shilling it. 99% of them don't play it anymore

2) Ffxiv's peak<wow's lowest point

3) square enix doesn't announce numbers either

1) Out of curiosity, do you like assume most of modern WoW expansions aren't sold on streamers shilling the hell out of the alphas and betas on Twitch trying to hype the game up? It's a mutual relationship, streamers want new content to give to fans and money, marketing wants to use the metrics of the streamer for reach. They'll do it for every game. I can tell you right now a lot of Shadowlands launch sales were driven by the streamers like Asmongold who all said "No dude, it's so much better, this will be so good dude just believe me dude! It feels so good to play!" That all noticeably got very quiet. Asmongold is so desperate for WoW to be good he constantly hypes up every expansion and patch without even actively playing the game. If you really want to talk about e-celebs carrying games, you are not in the spot to do it.

2) Lol, okay buddy how many people do you think are playing this game right now? Back in Shadowlands until a suspicious API change to the armory occurred in like August of 2021 (conveniently around the time a lot of YouTubers like Bellular were disseminating the website publicly for people to look at) from an intensive armory scrape taking just characters that were at least level 51, and had a covenant (very generous) the entire armory had about 2.1 million characters fitting that description that had played in the last 2 weeks. Characters, not players. How many characters does the average WoW player have? I myself have four, my old RP partner on WRA has one of every class on both factions at level cap... Let's be fair and say each player only has 2 characters. That's around 1 million players, and that's giving you the best case scenario.

Since I imagine you probably aren't going to carry that logic forward. Shadowlands sold I believe uhh 4 million copies on launch day. Dragonflight we heard nothing about, so it's safe to say not only was it less, it was less by such a magnitude or at the very best broke even that Blizzard was anticipating mockery for the number. This isn't conjecture either, every time a number is favorable they shove it in your face at every opportunity, when it's not favorable they get oddly quiet and then you're seeing lines in Quarterly Reports during SL of "Diablo 2 Resurrected's profit margins were largely offset by World of Warcraft not making as much revenue as it used to" as a footnote on a page very far into the report itself. Then the report before that or maybe two before, the quarter right after SL's launch quarter so when it's still new but a few months old... Blizzard was very fixated on mentioning how many new players were playing, they sure dodged alluding to the state of player retention though. Safe to say the numbers aren't favorable.

3) No but at least they don't actively try to undermine census harvesting. Think prior to Endwalker releasing so when a lot of the streamer hype had died down Luckybancho which is usually pretty reliable was floating 1.6m players at endgame as in completed the MSQ and alts aren't exactly common in FFXIV, they are far more catered to in WoW where you need a different character to play a different role. Remember that wowranks number I gave you of 1.9-2.1 million characters? Yeah sorry with even just assuming everyone plays only two characters in this game (meanwhile a lot of people cried about having to micromanage 5 in mythic guilds so odds are a more realistic denominator here would be 3)... yeah sorry it's outclassed and then some. Sorry maybe next time?

[Lolites]

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.

wow, you really like to throw numbers around without having a clue what they mean, do you?
sub numbers =/= initial sales
initial sales of SL reached 3.7m copies, making it fastest selling wow expansion (and briefly pc game) in history
for example wo which you mentioned only had 3.3m, wrath only had 2.8m initial sales, but thats completely different figure than sub numbers
DF didnt reach inital sales of SL, which is true about literaly every wow expansion, every pc only game released before it and quite a lot released after it...
that doesnt mean DF sold poorly, it just mean it didnt break the record...

- - - Updated - - -

Game keeps reaching new peaks, WoW is afraid to disclose exactly how much Dragonflight copies they've sold. You do the math there brainiac.

how many copies Endwalker sold? bcs i cant find exact figure, but if you know how amazingly it sold compared to DF you surely have some numbers...
i found that there was some 900k pre-orders for it, which is LAUGHABLY low compared to even worst day 1 sales of wow expansion (which is TBC with 2.4m) that we know of... even if day one sales doubled the amount of preorders its not enough to reach levels of wow sales...
for DF, we dont know, we just know its less than 3.7m of SL, which is not surprising as SL was quite ahead

[inafume]

What do you think?

I think the only question that matters is whether you are having fun and enjoying the game. Who cares what Asmongold, Bellular, and Preach are doing. Don't live vicariously through them.

[Yakut]

I have to say I find that weird. As someone with a lot of real life obligations, I find raiding to be much easier because it is just something I can put in my schedule. Two nights a week with an optional third night, I know what I am doing and it is part of my planning. And if need be I can prep for it at some random time and then log in a few minutes before the raid and everything works out fine. Meanwhile for M+ or rated PvP outside of something schedule in guild I would have to form a group and my experience would vary a hell of a lot more so it is not a dependable experience.

I'd absolutely get the plug and play approach when I was more than a decade younger and time table was far more fluid so that meant committing to a raid table would mean I lose opportunities to go out. But now most of my friends have kids, I have a partner and if we want to go out it very much needs to be scheduled ahead.

That's sort of where I am (in my mid 40s at this point), but it has always been easier for me to schedule time to do something (like raiding from vanilla to current or keys from SL to current) than to "seat of the pants" figure something out. Anyone I ever dated in the past got annoyed that I had time carved out for gaming, but it was always a fixed amount so they couldn't complain. My better half hasn't had an issue with it since we met a year ago. We both have our own times carved out and the rest of it (minus work, sleep, and other obligations) we do stuff together.

I don't think either of us could just randomly drop everything to do a game activity. But scheduling is basically Adulting 201.

[RobertMugabe]

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.

SL had more day 1 sales than ANY previous expansion. All other expansions had 3-3.5m sales day one, so your whole argument falls apart.

On the other hand, Blizzard as a whole has had record high MAUs when DF came out and despite a big drop in this quarter, it is still normally within the range of what Blizz would have at this stage.

[Deneios]

SL numbers were big only because BFA was a shit show and they promised to tie loose ends from WC3 and be a last hurrah for fan favorite characters. Them not doing any justice to the characters and absolute shit show with covenants burned out so many people that decided to not give a DF a chance. If DF came straight after legion and the BFA and SL mess never happened this discussion would be utterly different.

[Shadowferal]

Blizz hasn't posted subscription numbers, and they likely never will..

[Reive]

Lmao at using bellular and baldmongold to make an argument.

Anyway, last post about this because i don't want to derail the thread anymore.

1) Out of curiosity, do you like assume most of modern WoW expansions aren't sold on streamers shilling the hell out of the alphas and betas on Twitch trying to hype the game up? It's a mutual relationship, streamers want new content to give to fans and money, marketing wants to use the metrics of the streamer for reach. They'll do it for every game. I can tell you right now a lot of Shadowlands launch sales were driven by the streamers like Asmongold who all said "No dude, it's so much better, this will be so good dude just believe me dude! It feels so good to play!" That all noticeably got very quiet. Asmongold is so desperate for WoW to be good he constantly hypes up every expansion and patch without even actively playing the game. If you really want to talk about e-celebs carrying games, you are not in the spot to do it.

Do not compare the two things. Back in 2021 every eceleb and their family was "leaving" wow to shill ffxiv. It's not normal "marketing", but it's using one game's "failure" to elevate another's "success". People were using final fantasy to crap on wow. This is also the reason why ffxiv copers like yourself are still stuck in 2021 and think ffxiv has more players than wow.

2) Lol, okay buddy how many people do you think are playing this game right now? Back in Shadowlands until a suspicious API change to the armory occurred in like August of 2021 (conveniently around the time a lot of YouTubers like Bellular were disseminating the website publicly for people to look at) from an intensive armory scrape taking just characters that were at least level 51, and had a covenant (very generous) the entire armory had about 2.1 million characters fitting that description that had played in the last 2 weeks. Characters, not players. How many characters does the average WoW player have? I myself have four, my old RP partner on WRA has one of every class on both factions at level cap... Let's be fair and say each player only has 2 characters. That's around 1 million players, and that's giving you the best case scenario.

1) the api change was done in june/july, while the bellular video was made after that but ok

2) you don't play wow 100%. The most you do is probably sitting here doomposting about a game you don't play anymore.

3) Do you like made up numbers? There are single versions of addons that have more downloads than xiv has "active characters" in half the time. Lucky bancho has to make his census last 2 months to keep the active characters above the single million lmao. Ex: latest versions of details: 1.8m downloads in 1 month; Last lucky bancho census: 1.3m players in 2 months.

Since I imagine you probably aren't going to carry that logic forward. Shadowlands sold I believe uhh 4 million copies on launch day. Dragonflight we heard nothing about, so it's safe to say not only was it less, it was less by such a magnitude or at the very best broke even that Blizzard was anticipating mockery for the number. This isn't conjecture either, every time a number is favorable they shove it in your face at every opportunity, when it's not favorable they get oddly quiet and then you're seeing lines in Quarterly Reports during SL of "Diablo 2 Resurrected's profit margins were largely offset by World of Warcraft not making as much revenue as it used to" as a footnote on a page very far into the report itself. Then the report before that or maybe two before, the quarter right after SL's launch quarter so when it's still new but a few months old... Blizzard was very fixated on mentioning how many new players were playing, they sure dodged alluding to the state of player retention though. Safe to say the numbers aren't favorable.

No one expected dragonflight to do that good after what happened in shadowlands. But again, it's just a matter of wow losing to its past self. Wow at its lowest point>whatever you're trying to shill

3) No but at least they don't actively try to undermine census harvesting. Think prior to Endwalker releasing so when a lot of the streamer hype had died down Luckybancho which is usually pretty reliable was floating 1.6m players at endgame as in completed the MSQ and alts aren't exactly common in FFXIV, they are far more catered to in WoW where you need a different character to play a different role. Remember that wowranks number I gave you of 1.9-2.1 million characters? Yeah sorry with even just assuming everyone plays only two characters in this game (meanwhile a lot of people cried about having to micromanage 5 in mythic guilds so odds are a more realistic denominator here would be 3)... yeah sorry it's outclassed and then some. Sorry maybe next time?

Addressed this above. Keep coping and go back to your game. Next 2 hours of content are coming out soon.

[NineSpine]

They tried this very thing multiple times and ultimately decided against it for practical reasons (Opening of the Gates of AQ was the first major instance of this). Too many people in one area caused massive lag both server-side and client-side. Sharding has been introduced since and still has some (albeit to a lesser degree) latency issues there.

Where they can do it practically without harming the player experience, they try. I make no claims as to their success rate, but they do try. Harder content will still never be open world though I know you and a few others are lobbying for it.

I don't care about harder content. Content difficulty means nothing to me. I care about engaging content.

[Asrialol]

Except here's the thing. Old MMOs, and WoW for a time realized the game will profit so long as you deliver an enjoyable experience that is sustainable long term. WoW was designed expecting to peak at maybe half a million players tops ever but was designed in a way that those who did play wanted to keep playing, they were enjoying it.

Wasn't really until the whole Candy Crush thing blowing up and investors seeing video games actually make money then investing in gaming companies that MMOs in particular started to become cashgrabs where instead of there being a balance between profit and playability it's now strictly profit. Content is designed to be cheap to maximize profit margins, content is made so watered down to justify enough players completing it to warrant the resource allocation to developing it... Quite a ways away from when the idea was "Profit comes when we make a good enough product that it sells like hotcakes from word of mouth". Now it's more "Okay, pay influencers to shill the game for us, capitalize on launch sales, give them lip service to keep them around for a bit. When they get pissed off and quit, promise to listen and do better then start making the next expansion to do the same thing because they trust us still for some reason."

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Game keeps reaching new peaks, WoW is afraid to disclose exactly how much Dragonflight copies they've sold. You do the math there brainiac.

I've read this guy's posts and I just can't seem to comprehend whether it's serious or just plain satire.

Surely it can't be serious.. I mean. Right?

Writing long posts which says absolutely nothing.. Can't make this shit up.

[Osmeric]

SL had more day 1 sales than ANY previous expansion.

Where "day 1" includes "all presales". The latter can be pumped up by suitably prolonging the presale period and including incentives like mounts.

[Greenmagoo]

I don't pay attention to what's coming out of the influencers even the old big ones so I don't know what they have been preaching. The bulk of OP's list is popular points discussed for years within the various communities including this one with the bulk not referencing any influencer or mentions of people parroting an influencer.


The borrowed power systems has had a wide range of unhappy players. In general I don't mind these systems while for WoW it wasn't a system I cared for much.

[Caerrona]

Where "day 1" includes "all presales". The latter can be pumped up by suitably prolonging the presale period and including incentives like mounts.

Which all that is... included... in the previous expansions sales aswell.

Not really hard to grasp and a complete fail of some weird shadowlands "gotcha" moment.

Strange.

[Osmeric]

Which all that is... included... in the previous expansions sales aswell.

Not really hard to grasp and a complete fail of some weird shadowlands "gotcha" moment.

Strange.

You need to think harder. By adding incentives like mounts (which were NOT present in all previous expansions), they can shift purchases from "after release day" to "before release day". This artificially increases the initial sales figure, at the cost of reducing later sales.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

You need to think harder. By adding incentives like mounts (which were NOT present in all previous expansions), they can shift purchases from "after release day" to "before release day". This artificially increases the initial sales figure, at the cost of reducing later sales.

Mop was the first expan to add a possible mount with purchase and it was also the worse selling expan with 2.7 million in the first week not first day.

Mounts being added is a none factor.

[Donkeywing]

I don't pay attention to what's coming out of the influencers even the old big ones so I don't know what they have been preaching. The bulk of OP's list is popular points discussed for years within the various communities including this one with the bulk not referencing any influencer or mentions of people parroting an influencer.

I think those 'discussions' turned into a negative feedback loop between communities & influencers; extreme views were reinforced and all nuance got lost. If I am to speculate I would say that did more harm than the actual design in some cases. Conduit energy might've been a somewhat annoying system but the negativity about it was insane (so insane blizzard pulled the emergency break). It also became apparent that no matter how the story of Sylvanas played out, people were determined to hate it. There's even a conspiracy theory about that story - that should be a serious indication how extreme these views were.

[Yriel]

SL had more day 1 sales than ANY previous expansion. All other expansions had 3-3.5m sales day one, so your whole argument falls apart.

But, to be fair, that is just a method to make numbers look good. By now probably most people buy the game digital and most probably preorder. So, of course, you are bound to have more day one sales than compared to a time where most people bought their expansions as a physical copy. Only freaks did those midnight sale things, most people bought their copy somewhere in the first week.
The downside of these great day one sales is probably barely any sales after that because everyone already got it.