How many subs are needed for WoW to remain viable?

[strangerdanger]

With 500k subscribers they make $9 million/year in subs a alone... that is not counting ANY other purchases.

So I'm going to go with 500k-1 million.

[Deleted]

I say 500k western subs to keep the quality standards for years. Unless they sacrifice quality for higher quick profits.
With less player you can scale down things like support staff and hardware without hurting the quality.

[NoRest4Wicked]

Do the maths - 5M x £8.99 a month. No. Just no. The game will sustain itself with 500k subs easily. obviously less updates, but it would still be going strong.

This would be true if everyone paid a monthly sub. It is well known the Chinese do not do this. Since Blizzard does not break down subs by east and west (I imagine for good reason too) you can only guess how much they are truly making off subs. I'm pretty sure estimates are that only ~4 million pay monthly subs, while the rest pay by the minute (and this ends up being less than what we pay). This of course might be wrong, and I'm sure someone will correct me. I'm not going to look it up though.

[ciggy]

depends on what you mean by viable. I know you mentioned pool of players.. They could merge servers and have two servers jammed full at 60k (i think it's 30k per server, i'm not real sure though)

What point would they stop making expansions.. that would mean viability to me, i'd say the break even point for that would be 250..500k (probably on the high side) They could cut down the folks working on the expansion and make that break even point much lower..


Hell, as long as they chuck out an content update (think patch) once each 6 months you'd have a ton of folks still playing.. more than enough to make the game enjoyable..


I see wow lasting several more years the way it's going now, with at least 3-5 million folks subbed.. I honestly don't see it fading for at least 10 more years, but it's going to keep changing. always a new generation of kids coming to the game.. You realize, some folks that play now were in diapers when it was released.

The only thing i really see causing it to fade would be going free to play, but that's just my simple minded opinion.

[zed zebes]

I voted 3.5-4m, but then I realized that I was basing that off their released sub numbers, and that includes China/East which are not actual subs. If you mean straight up $15 subs, then I think 1.5-2m is the spot where they can retain releasing updates 3-6 months and be fine with the sub revenue, plus the added money from China.

So actual subs I'd go with 1.5-2m. You can exist off off of 500k-1m, but I think that would be the breaking point where a F2P model is the bigger money maker without question.

[RicardoZ]

I would say that WoW as we know it would probably cease to exist around the 3 million sub mark. By "WoW as we know it", I mean with regular content updates, hotfixes, balance updates, full customer support, and the game just generally being Blizzard's #1 priority.

After the 3 million mark I think we'd see a pretty sharp drop in the amount and the frequency of new content being added to the game on a regular basis. Bugs would probably go much longer without being hotfixed or patched and the total resources that Blizzard would be willing to put into the game would be on a sharp decline.

I've never been one to join in the "WoW's dying oh no" threads, but once it hits 3 million or less I think we can start writing its epitaph, mostly because it would be indicative of a new game having taken WoW's place as the most popular MMO and Blizzard would bow out gracefully and throw all their resources behind whatever's next for them.

[Bigbamboozal]

As many as Blizzard feels they need.

You and your reality! sheesh! I really love your sig pic now

[mickybrighteyes]

Just curious: how many active subs do you think are necessary for WoW to remain viable?
Personally, I think the number is in the 500k - 1 million range.

Edit: viable primarily in terms of a sufficient pool of players, but also in terms of revenue for Blizzard.

the answer depends on how you define 'viable'. Since I've yet to see a proper definition for 'viable' game success.

[iceberg265]

I would guess 500k western subs.

The key thing to remember here is that WoW reports worldwide numbers when most games only report western subscription numbers. And the non western "subs" make them significantly less money.

I would guess out of the 6-7million left playing, probably 2.5-3million of them are western subs, so they probably have about 2million more western subs to lose before they are in serious trouble.

I think they will probably go free to play before that point though, maybe at like 1.5million, because there is a huge potential to make money with a free to play system.

[Dooney]

Just curious: how many active subs do you think are necessary for WoW to remain viable?
Personally, I think the number is in the 500k - 1 million range.
Edit: viable primarily in terms of a sufficient pool of players, but also in terms of revenue for Blizzard.

Depends on how Blizz calculates its Asian market, which are not "subs."

[iceberg265]

Depends on how Blizz calculates its Asian market, which are not "subs."

They report them as subs to make themselves look better and let their fanboys flex their epeen though.

[Spraxle]

The game will remain profitable till they shut the servers down. Profitable = viability. And when the sub numbers get low enough they'll switch to a F2P model that also has the option of a sub most likely (see: Star Wars: TOR). And by that point Titan will be out so they won't much care. Anything they make on WoW will just be icing on the cake.

[Strafir]

Fans really need to stop giving a shit about subscriber numbers and over analyzing statistics when you don't even have proper data to work with. If the game eventually goes under, there literally isn't a thing you and I can do about it.. Play the god damn game if you enjoy it or quit if you don't. Let the people in charge worry about statistical analytics.

The worst kind of people are those who justify taking depth and rewarding enthusiastic players who play more out of the game because the number in subscribers fluctuate.

[Pandaemonium]

If wow dips under 5million, yes, that is still a lot of players, but it will have slipped by such a degree from it's hey-day that people will consider it dead in the water.

I cringe at the thought of it going under 4million.

[Zoneseek]

If wow dips under 5million, yes, that is still a lot of players, but it will have slipped by such a degree from it's hey-day that people will consider it dead in the water.

I cringe at the thought of it going under 4million.

Why out of curiosity? I have played games that only had thousands of players and they are some of my fondest memories. Ultima Online is probably my favorite mmo of all time and it peaked out around 250k subs back in the early 2000's. Why do you care how many people play the game you enjoy? Pack mentality?

[Deleted]

With 500k subscribers they make $9 million/year in subs a alone... that is not counting ANY other purchases.

More like $9 million/month.

[Vulcanasm]

Just curious: how many active subs do you think are necessary for WoW to remain viable?
Personally, I think the number is in the 500k - 1 million range.

Edit: viable primarily in terms of a sufficient pool of players, but also in terms of revenue for Blizzard.

Viable in general? 500k or less. At current content speed and quality? I'm guessing they'd be OK in the 2 million range. Given how epically bad WoD sounds, I suspect we're going to find out if my second guess is right.

[AVPaul]

Most players have stereotype, that 1M is enough. But they just don't know, that Blizzard said back in WotLK, that it cost they $300k/day only to support servers. It's $9M per month. Divide it by $15 sub and you'll get 600k subs. But don't forget, that prior to Cata hardware was updated and many new servers was opened. So now, I think, it's about 1M subs. 1M subs only to support servers. And what about paying to employees? What about developing new content? So it will take about 1.5-2M subs only to pass zero-profit point. Most players also precipitately assume, that this amount of players is enough to develop the game. But they are always forgetting, that Blizzard is not charitable organization and won't develop game "for fun" only - nobody would develop game, if it wouldn't give them any profit. Make your conclusions.

[Huehuecoyotl]

Pretty certain that currently, everytime they lose a few hundred thousand subscribers they already feel things getting tight.

Hahahahaha. Oh wait, you were being serious?

They have 7m subscribers. Some of those are paying $15 a month, some are eastern subs. Let us assume that the average amount a WoW "subscriber" pays is $10 a month. With 7m of them, they are getting $70m a month in income. So every two months they are getting roughly the same amount of money that it cost to create the entire SWtoR MMO (which I believe was quoted at $150m).

That isn't taking into account the ludicrously overpriced in-game services (server transfers etc) which are basically 99.9% pure profit. Or the fact that they sell overpriced extras in the in-game shop. Or the fact that they charge for expansions.

The simple fact is, there are a ton of MMOs out there that can function perfectly well on 500k playerbases. So why exactly would WoW be unable to do that? Is it the sheer volume of content they pump out? Hmm, I can't quite see that. Did MoP really provide THAT much over the 2 year life cycle? It could be that they have a bloated support structure of course, but even that is unlikely considering that they made a large number of people redundant a while back.

Nope, the truth is they could function on 500k if they had to, but instead of making enough money to hire gold plated prostitutes for their xmas party, they would have to go back to the regular kind. They wouldn't be able to buy a caribbean island every month from the money they make, or swallow the cost of creating (then apparently junking) Titan.

You know any other software company that could work on a massive project like that for so many years, then flush the work they have done and it not even cause a blip on their share price? Do you believe that could happen if WoW was just managing to survive on the subscribers they have?

They could have 500k subs, provide the same level of content and still make a profit. But they don't want to reach that stage, because then they would have to start behaving like a normal company, instead of being the MMO version of Microsoft. Don't believe me? With 500k subscribers, every 2 years they would be getting $140m in income from subscriptions and $40 expansion. Even ignoring their other methods of gathering funds, that is enough to support an MMO and push out decent levels of content.

Which must be true, otherwise why are there so many MMOs happily trundling along with that many players?

[Synstir]

This is not easy to answer..... the infrastructure changes with the number of players.
Now we have quite a lot "dead" servers.... these servers have the same maintenance costs as a full server, just less people paying for it.
This server will need the same infrastructure as a full server, just less people paying for it.

Getting to an answer for how many subs are required to be viable, triggers a lot of other questions about viability.

What we do know is that there are a lot of people who will be paid by Blizzard:
- developers. Here there is a bare minimum of developers needed. Nobody can expect Blizzard to release a new xpac every 10 years, cause the number of subs cannot provide more than 5 developers. The costs for the content-developers (quests, dungeons, raids, encounters, art etc) have to be paid out of the subfee.
- CS. Well once you have paying customers you need some kind of service. The amount here is related to the number of subs.
- CM. This also needs paid people.
- Infrastructure. This doesn't include the servers themselves but everything else. There will be networkcomponents, security etc. This will be dependant on the number of servers/players present.
- game servers. Each server does have a price which will include software, security, hardware, maintenance etc.

And we can add more things to this list if we take some time to think about it.
What this means is that the costs and with this viability is directly related to a number of subs.

If you want to know if 500K subs will be viable, then we need to know how many servers we're talking about and what the release-cycle for new content will be (to determine the number of developers). What will be the quality of cs and will there be a forum or not with blues posting on them.

Blizzard has enough servers and an infra now to support 12.000.000 players, that much we can think of.
There are 7.6 million subs..... and this number is still decreasing. When a breakeven point will be met, is something we can't say really.

Even comparing with other mmo's is impossible as the infra and number of servers are different and will result in different hights of costs.
I don't think WE, as players, can really say how many subs Blizzard needs to keep wow viable.