WoW Down to 9.6 Million Subscribers

[Lazy Gecko]

The game is closing in on its 10th anniversary. I don't think there's much that could realistically be done to sustain the unprecedented momentum. You can't expect that many players to keep playing the same game for that many years, no matter what you may think of its quality or lack thereof.

[Deleted]

I don't argue that this is a downturn in the size of the player base but did all 500k leave from US & Europe? They didn't lose 1/4 of their market in either of those regions. Those 500k came from the 10,000,000 players around the globe. They lost 1/20th of their player base, not 1/4. Is it declining? I don't think so personally but everyone is welcome to their own opinion.

Players in the U.S. and Europe pay more, so if the sub losses occurred mostly in those places, then yes, it's a huge concern that needs to be addressed.

[Tharkkun]

500k loss? Looks like WoW is dead oh well goodbye all i will miss you ima go play rift now

Rift is dead already. Hello Kitty island is a better bet!

[Renascido]

I do not believe WoW will ever get down to 3 million players -- the folks running the business expect it to perform better than that, and my expectation is that if it ever got below, say, 6 million players, they'd begin the process of shutting it down. "If we can't be completely stinking rich, what's the point of doing anything at all?"

(The exception I see would be if Blizzard could do what Harmonix did and re-privatize, undoing various acquisitions. But I'm not so sure they're in a position to do that. I think they're being treated more like "Guitar Hero" and less like "Rock Band", if you follow my thinking.)

Doubt they will shut down the servers...they will turn into a F2P model, get a lot more people, and then resist for another 3~4 years...then you can call this a "dying MMO"

[Starks]

Mists seems like a good xpac but nonetheless WOW is a day late and a dollar short. The game is old i give it at best 3 more years. blizzard is just sucking the life out of it now. Just like they did with Diablo. The ONLY reason Diablo 3 was top selling game was because it was riding the gravy train of the Diablo 2 success. I can see the next xpac for wow making them money again but its inevitable wow's time only has one more xpac left in it at best. Even a company as small as grinding gears pooped on d3 with path of exile now that's a game of pure old school quality that gamer's today deserve. and the elder scrolls online game looks fantastic. I prey blizzard doesn't put the wow team and jay wilson on project titan cause that's just asking for trouble. LOL we broke 10 mill subs my ass, keep trying to cover up your losses i

[Sarnaxxx]

I think what most of the "500k? So What?" crowd is implying is this. In the grand scheme of things the loss of 500,000 subscribers will in no meaningful way impact the current game. Servers will not be merging. Subscription fees will not be decreasing (or increasing). Expansions and content will not be churned out at a greater pace, nor will micro-transactions burst into being at a greater pace than they already have been.

Subscription-based services are rarely as stable as one might dream. But we're talking of a drop from 10,000,000+ to 9,600,000. That's not even 1/10th of the subscription base. That's not even 1% of the subscription base. It's not even outside the realm of acceptable subscription losses given past quarterly earning reports and the general ebb and flow of World of Warcraft subscriptions.

Every time an expansion launches subscriptions soar. Then subscriptions dwindle down until a major content patch. Then they go back up again. Then as we wait on the next patch they taper down. So forth, so on. One day WoW will fade away into nothingness, but a 500,000 subscription loss isn't going to hasten it into an early grave.

This might be the best explanation on this subject yet.

Thnx

[ro9ue]

9.6 wowwwwwwwwww 5% sub loss

[Mort459]

I wish my "dying" business made one billion+ dollars in profit every year.

[DetectiveJohnKimble]

You don't have any common sense. That's why I call you a fanboy. Because you're too blinded to see what's so obvious with a little thought put into it.

Cata lost subs because of a lack of content. That's logical and expected to happen in any game. Guess what just happened? Sub loss WITH content. What do you think that means? That means they are in deep shit, because even if they pump out content on a regular basis, people are giving less of a fuck more and more.

This is so obvious to see but apparently you can't wrap your head around it.

It's odd to call them a "fanboy" of wow when they have clearly stated that they prefer another MMO (Rift).

"Fanboy" has been overused to the point that it's really just an ad homenim attack that people with poor justification for their arguments must rely on.

[Obfuscare]

I am not at all surprised. If people want to contribute the sub losses when Cata launched to content being too difficult, you may as well jump to attributing MoP losses to content being too grindy. I've been a dedicated raider for years and am sick to death of the new approach so much I'm about to hang up the hat. And I still love high level raiding, but I don't feel like I can focus on that and be fair to teammates if I just skip all the dailies, etc. The 5.2 changes aren't nearly aggressive enough. If the problems they were trying to address were people not having enough to do, give us more to do (pet battles and challenge modes being a wonderful example here). But they need to stop with forcing grindy, time consuming, boring content to character progression.

[Renascido]

Doubt they will shut down the servers...they will turn into a F2P model, get a lot more people, and then resist for another 3~4 years...then you can call this a "dying MMO"

Did Rift ever lived? The highest population that Rift got, was the worst annouced lost to WoW...

[Airwaves]

Everyone is pointless to fight with the people saying it dieing don't even bother they aren't worth the time. Just sit back and watch them make dickheads of themselves.

[Bahska]

How many of those accounts are 2nd accounts and 3rd? I know just from promotions / RAF / SoR I have 4 to my name, 2 active. Many people in my guild are the same. How many of these are unique players? How many in North America and Europe.

Its far easier for a company to see how many active accounts they have then individual people not like it matters much anyway. They are separate accounts regardless of what name they are linked to.

[Lemons]

You are putting a positive spin on a huge loss.

How many people do you think play in the U.S. and Europe? 2+ million respectively? Losing 1/4 of your market in one of those places is not something that you can just ignore.

And you're are putting a negative spin on the numbers. Who's to say the sub loss came 100% from U.S./Europe? You're assuming the playerbase never declines in the Asian market. Then you go on to pretend that the loss was exclusively from one of those countries and thus it's a 1/4th loss?! You're a total hypocrite...you have no room to call out anyone for "spinning" anything. You are the spinning king.

[JhanZ]

It's odd to call them a "fanboy" of wow when they have clearly stated they prefer another MMO (Rift).

"Fanboy" has been overused to the point that it's really just an ad homenim attack that people with poor justification for their arguments must rely on.

Okay dude he's not a fanboy. Happy?

Tackle my post, that's more interesting and fun.

[Mort459]

Listening to people on these forums claim WoW is dying is vaguely similar to when I watch Fox News (as a moderate) and listening to pundits talk about how America is dying because of gay marriage and black people.

[Deleted]

9.6 million is a complete scam and a lie.

They should not count the chinese who do not have subscription models like everyone else. If a chinese plays 1 hour in a year, and pays $0.01 to do so to blizzard, that hardly counts as a subscription.

I wish they would stop trying to mislead the market and tell us how many europe and north american subscriptions they have, because that is what should be compared to other MMOs. Dont get me wrong, I love WoW, but it does not need more credit then it deserves, it already hogs the spot light almost entirely.

I agree.

Why does no one ask Blizzard what actually constitutes a subscription? They seem to be pretty open to questions these days.

[Spotnick]

Some people really don't understand those numbers. The issue is not the amount of people leaving, but the brand new people buying and playing the game. If those numbers drop it's because WOW does not attract enough new players to maintain the player base and allow it to renew itself or grow.

It's totally normal to see people leave the game. Problem is, not enough new people joining it versus people leaving. So the emphasis should be on how to attrack NEW players.

Returning players are not really your goal there, because they are bound to leave again.

How many people you know in WOW that have just started player this game? I know I don't know any. And apparently the community is attrocious against those players because they tell them to learn to play, etc, and obviously don't remember how they were when they joined the game.

Personally I am part of the loss.. I closed my 2nd account which I had up to do RAF to level a monk..

[shise]

Less players = best quality.

Just as basically nothing popular is good.

[Ruvokus]

Clearly this time it's the end of WoW! All those other times were wrong, but this time, WoW really is doomed!