WoW's sub decline: Mirroring the gaming industry as a whole?

[Ellixen]

In the F2P or B2P vs subs, the reason you don't see subs anymore isn't because of "oh its the future" yeah just like always online drm with a 24/7 camera that you can turn "off". It's because they already know that their games won't be up to par and make it in a sub world.

Now before you bash that statement, that is not an attack towards the developers it has more to do with the players. Swtor was decent but since it wasn't as polished as an mmo that's been out 8 years (surprising since most people say they "hate" wow yet always compare other mmo's to it) it got a huge backlash from players, lost a ton, had to go f2p to make it up.

Oh and those saying "well they broke even" umm... that's not a goal a company should EVER strive for. "yea guys we spent 5 years making this game, supposedly 200 mil and now we broke even, okay lets go f2p!!!"

[nekobaka]

Pc gaming has always been a niche market. However, at Wow's "peak" it happened to one of the only options for MMORPG to play. Now the market has quite a few more game options. And those other games happen to have more user friendly price models. The leading two of which are B2P and Freemium. No one really likes recurring payments.

With some of the FPS MMOs that are coming out soon that look like they have a lot of potential it looks like a good thing Titian got reset. Hopefully Blizzard will learn from them while hopefully not getting into the action too late.

WoWs model just doesnt attract new players and it is stuck with trying to keep its current players happy that still keep leaving.

From an investors standpoint overall the games industry has been uncertain these past few years for investors and a general topic with blogs.

[jbombard]

In the F2P or B2P vs subs, the reason you don't see subs anymore isn't because of "oh its the future" yeah just like always online drm with a 24/7 camera that you can turn "off". It's because they already know that their games won't be up to par and make it in a sub world.

Now before you bash that statement, that is not an attack towards the developers it has more to do with the players. Swtor was decent but since it wasn't as polished as an mmo that's been out 8 years (surprising since most people say they "hate" wow yet always compare other mmo's to it) it got a huge backlash from players, lost a ton, had to go f2p to make it up.

Oh and those saying "well they broke even" umm... that's not a goal a company should EVER strive for. "yea guys we spent 5 years making this game, supposedly 200 mil and now we broke even, okay lets go f2p!!!"

SWTOR had a record breaking release. Where that game failed wasn't simply polish, they provided great value for the box price, they failed to continue to provide value to the subscribers, and subscribers waiting for new content slowly left with still nothing coming from Bioware. Bioware failed because they weren't prepared to follow up on their release and by the time they realized that they couldn't get away with sitting on their asses and decided to start making content it was too late.

---------- Post added 2013-06-27 at 11:44 AM ----------

I can't speak for the industry but my spending on games went way down when I started playing WoW. I used to buy a new game almost every month. The more people play MMORPGs the less time they have to play other games. With the number of F2P MMORPG games, it isn't really surprising to see a decline in overall game sales, however I believe WoW itself is partially to blame and the overall industry trend is not necessarily indicative of why people are quitting WoW.

[Hooliganz]

You got it all wrong, it's the Pandaren, flying mounts and LFR.

And the 15 mins. hearthstone.

this
and look at other most played PC games : LOL a free game , Dota 2 also a free game and many other games on steam