WoW Down to 9.6 Million Subscribers

[Duster505]

The saddest thing right here is all the reasons people find to HATE stuff.
I'm not really a fan of "love friendship and tolerance" but this is still ridiculous.

Long live hate. Because that's what makes us better than beasts..oh wai...

Love very often turns to hate. Many of the haters once loved the game and hate to see it in its current state.

[Kalielle]

Just finished listening in to the investor conference call. Interesting points that were made:

Most of the decrease in subscribers was from China, while other regions remained fairly steady.

The engagement rates in Mists are higher than those they saw post-Cata, and dropped off less fast. But players these days demand more content faster and are more likely to switch to a different game or leave the community. So they are trying to release new content more often. WoW is competing not just with other games but with all other forms of entertainment in people's lives.

5.2 will be out "within the coming weeks."

[MuteTV]

Oh noes.
I fear that the worst of conversations and topics are about to being.....
Anyway, nice to see Diablo doing so well

Got to love these dudes... Who know nothing but love to speak.

What would you classify as the golden age? TBC? You forget WoW was only at 6m then.

Bet he disappeared after this ignorance. Amazing how the ones who talk out their ash seem to have only one comment. Read some replies and learn something.

[Tharkkun]

I think it's also important to note that while 9.6 million is a HUGE number, it is about 20-25% less than WoW's peak number of subscriptions, which topped 12 million world-wide.

That 12 million number also combined a release in China of WOTLK right as we were ramping up for Cata in NA/Eur. I don't think they could time that more perfect if they tried.

[Immitis]

Pet battles and pandas provide entertainment for some ye.

But from my point of view. If a 12 million sub based MMO game is not able to keep their game updated with decent content and good progress... Then it shouldn't be a sub based game. Thats how bad Blizzard is doing atm. They have failed alot of their former players with very poor choises in the past 3 years. LFR for example is a total insult for ppl that want to do raiding - but are unable to spend 20-30 hours per week in normal raids. Thats the first thing Blizz needs to fix. PROPER raid progress in normal mode.. Right now less than 3% of the playerbase have done all bosses in normal mode. Reason ? Cause Blizzard made normals harder than what they were before. At the same time many old sub based gamers that want to play meaningfull raid progress and still have real life are focred into LFR... Or like me... just quit. Cause LFR is the lowest of low - almost as low as daily quests. And guess what... thats the two things BLizzard offered for their RPG systems in MOP....

not sure if cereal O-O

[Tharkkun]

Blizzard counts every sub in Asia as a full sub, when in reality they are only 1/10th of a Western sub. WoW really only has 5.3M subs.

When they release a complete breakdown of subs based on country/region let us know. Otherwise you're guessing like everyone else.

[jschulth]

And here I am only needing 9 others to play. Plenty to choose from.
Works for me.

[Deleted]

no, thats just what alot of companies make as dlc because their greedy. dlc means downloadable content, expansion means an expansion of content. both mean the same thing just because some companies choose to charge you for new outfits doesnt mean thats all dlc is

To me an addon is something you can either buy in a store or download and DLC is something you can only download (hence the name).
I don't see companies make out DLC as addons. I only see them make DLC as DLC, being a little extra that you can download for that game.

[l33t]

i knew guildwars was gonna keep leeching subs, i bet swtors free to play model have pulled subs from wow aswell!!

ROFLed as madman on this. You forgot Tera f2p is also mass stealing wow subbers, yes indeed, true story.
We fanboys will quit wow when idiotic and lazy game developers will give us something better than it. It is really a total shame that a game with what, 8 years old or something, is SO much ahead of every other mmo created today.
ps. By the way, always wondered, what is the reason for posting this kind of news? 500k loss is really nothing for wow. I hope this 500k are that "omg, I dont get my super easy drops from lfr, so i quit" and "omg, we don't want dailies, we want free loot, free gear and free everything coz we pay blah blah" kind of whineys left.

[zox2]

A lot of my friends actually came back to wow recently, so I feel a somewhat opposite trend. I do believe that MoP is the best expansion so far, it has waaaay more stuff to do than I actually have time for, and the content is pretty fun for me. They seem to be able to keep to their timetable so far, so things are looking pretty good from my perspective.

[GrieverXIII]

Only 9.6 millions subscribers, damn game is dead :l

[MuteTV]

Numbers even out. Stop comparing the game dying to them not remaining at the highest subscriptions recorded. It's ridiculous.

The fact remains. This dispute as been going on forever:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7fBjaa0odE

[Immitis]

To me an addon is something you can either buy in a store or download and DLC is something you can only download (hence the name).
I don't see companies make out DLC as addons. I only see them make DLC as DLC, being a little extra that you can download for that game.

thats because alot of companies are greedy. and sell on disk dlc. basically things that are already ingame that they locked out of in normal gameplay so they can charge you extra for something you shouldve gotten for free

[kojinshugi]

"Diablo III was the #1 best-selling PC game at retail, breaking PC-game sales records with more than 12 million copies sold worldwide through December 31, 2012." .... That's because Diablo 2 LOD was a real success, not because of Diablo III itself. That game is already dead.

D3 is far from dead. It's not the game to end all games that people expected, but the vast majority of those 12 million buyers are not hardcore D2 veterans who are disappointed in an originally shallow endgame grind. It still has a healthy playerbase, and it sold 12 million copies.

Would you consider equally strong D3 expansion sales as evidence of its success, or would you find a way to rationalize that away as well? Or can we expect "People hoped Blizz would fix the mess that is D3, were gullible and bought it. It's dead!"

"Mists of Pandaria was the #3 best-selling PC game at retail." I like the new Asian Theme, but it doesn't feel like Warcraft, i miss Warcraft a lot.

No one cares? How do your personal, individual, and vague feelings of nostalgia have any bearing on discussion of the entire global playerbase of WoW?

[Korru]

the saddest thing right here is all the reasons people find to hate stuff.
I'm not really a fan of "love friendship and tolerance" but this is still ridiculous.

Long live hate. Because that's what makes us better than beasts..oh wai...

hate makes me feel alive!!!

[Duster505]

Just finished listening in to the investor conference call. Interesting points that were made:

Most of the decrease in subscribers was from China, while other regions remained fairly steady.

The engagement rates in Mists are higher than those they saw post-Cata, and dropped off less fast. But players these days demand more content faster and are more likely to switch to a different game or leave the community. So they are trying to release new content more often. WoW is competing not just with other games but with all other forms of entertainment in people's lives.

5.2 will be out "within the coming weeks."

5.2 will launch last week of March.

And as far as BLizz talking about community... Maybe they should actually look at their dead servers and try to create some community instead of forcing ppl to pay 25$ per character for transfers? CRZ are not solution to dead servers. Just makes it worse.

[Aquamonkey]

When they release a complete breakdown of subs based on country/region let us know. Otherwise you're guessing like everyone else.

10% of their income comes from Asia. They have a different pay model.

[Deleted]

maybe this will result in Bliz devs getting off their ego train, and stop trying to force players to play the content they want to......that dailies-rep thing was totally retarded.

then again, not sure what they could really do, after cata, to get it so wrong again in MoP, most of the people I know who quit, swear they wont ever go back no matter what, and have moved on to cheaper and arguably better games.

Still, its not like 9.6mil is the brink of death is it?

[Xilurm]

You know it kinda sucks that I didn't play from the beggining. The only dungeons I got to experience before LFD were Deadmines, Wailing Caverns and Scholomance.

Yeah yeah I know some people say it was hard to do 523648726429 quests in order to get attuned but it makes you feel more unique that way. Not to mention now that CRZ is here the point of servers is gone. This is the exact same reason I moved to Silvermoon EU. My server was somewhat "dead" and with CRZ it felt alive again. There was a problem though. Those players were not from my realm and they could honestly not give a single fuck about me or anyone else outside their realm.

So even though I never played before 3.3 at cap level, I really really want them to make Titan and never put LFD/LFR or CRZ.

[anyaka21]

people said that subs would go up once MoP was released. I guess not