Bellular analyses WoW's health.

[TidalConflux]

The gaming industry overall saw a MASSIVE increase. So, yeah.. People didn't cut expenses on games - they cut expenses on WoW.

When you have 3 dead IPs and the bloated corpse of BFA, yea that makes sense.

[deenman]

1. "actual clear data"....addon download numbers are not clear data

2. people have been doomsaying "WOW IS DEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" for literally about 15 years now, to claim that "this time they're right!" is just lunacy.

1.did you actualy watch the video?its clear as day endgame content from normal all teh way to mythic has droped by milions

2.yes...wile numbers have dipped in the past over the years,and people have exagerated with doomsaying,this time we can clearly see the drop off is by multiple times that of ever in the past,even wod's low was far higher than todays pop

[DarkAmbient]

The sub fee and pandemic job losses don't seem to have hurt Final Fantasy much.

[MoanaLisa]

The sub fee and pandemic job losses don't seem to have hurt Final Fantasy much.

They also opened up most of the game for free.

[DarkAmbient]

Something for Blizzard to learn from then. I'm interested to see how all the recent events & WoW's decline affect the way Blizzard approach the game from now on. I'm hoping it's a real turning point and the start of a fun first approach to game design but we'll see.

[Nzx]

The game has a lot of issues but this endless cycle of "wow bad ff good" from content creators is getting stupid, and it will be fun to look at when a lot of "wow refugees" and content creators realise ff doesn't have everything they lik, the novelty of it fades away, and they shamelessly come back to wow acting like nothing happened

Asmongold currently streaming to FFXIV to roughly half his normal audience and having to include "--JUMP PUZZLES--" in his title as part of the "content" he's completing kinda speaks to that, yeah.

Here's the thing - I desperately want this game to be better. The number of times I've jumped on my 50 Paladin thinking I want to play one only to log out the moment I think about doing the Maw intro again is depressing. The number of times I've logged into my freshly 60 Shaman and realised I'm 50 something Renown levels, 8 years of Torghast, an old raid run, and weeks of shards/dom sockets behind is depressing. Watching some abilities arbitrarily hit five targets instead of the massive AoE pulls froms Legion makes me sad. But the WoW community obsession with outrage and instant gratification is worse than all of that, combined.

People post on these forums with videos like this and claim the stats don't lie and whatever else, and then when the people who've been paying attention since 2004 say players going to FFXIV is the exact same trend we saw with Wildstar, GW2, the original FF14, Aion, Tera, Rift, AOC, Warhammer, etc etc and they all come back, no one will shut up about how "this is different". The only difference between "WoW Killers" now and "WoW Killers" then is that now you have an army of talking heads who will tell you what you want to hear and validate your opinion that the game is dead because your zero io score 210 alt can't get a +15 run in group finder.

[Ivarr]

That's arguable. The business model seems to rely more on expansion sales to pay for the game. Monthly subscriptions are gravy on top of that.

I do wonder how reliable expansions can be. People love the thrill of everyone starting from square one in a new world. But part of that thrill is the promise of world that they'll find meaningful challenges in for a longer stretch of time. Once expansions don't show that longevity, then players start attaching less meaning to this brand new exciting world they visit and this would lead to them approaching the next expansion with more hesitance.

In other words, the expansions may be an important source of revenue, their sales are for a large part driven by the promise of a new virtual world to call home.

[Aucald]

This thread was left open in an attempt to cultivate a conversation about the health of WoW, but it has strongly segued into game vs. game and "WoW is Dead" type rhetoric, and is no longer constructive. Closing this.