WoW Down to 5.6 Million Subscribers

[Lolsteak]

20-25k and you can do that with your garrisons and professions. You just suxorz at making money.

Currently 44-45k on EU.

[Kryos]

You did not adjust the slope. I would start it at the start of WoD, which puts us at 0 subscribers by 2016

The spike was pretty artifical and the 3 million guys who joined just left a few months later.

[The Iron Fist]

I just listened in to the stream on MMO-C frontpage, and to me it seems like they're quite happy with this Quarter. They are focusing on how to make money from Hearthstone and HotS more than worrying about WoW. They'll release another bullshit expansion and we'll all get it "just to check it out" and hang around for a few months until we realise why we got bored in the first place. And they'll sell that as a triumph again.

I highly doubt anything in the development cycle will actually change in a significant manner.

I think you're right, but a lot of the problem comes from Dev arrogance. WoWs been the biggest dog on the block for 10 years now and the way they talk to the community is quite condescending. They keep playing Mad Scientist with core WoW and/or MMO formulas and you get what WoD is today;World of Instancecraft: Raid or Die - Menu Edition. If they rolled the game design back to the any point during WotLK, the game would shoot back up to 10 million subs. They think they've got it all figured out and treat the player base like a bunch of unenlightened heathens.

[Deleted]

Anyone else feel like the Rocket Man song with a live feed of the broken dark portal was a symbol for the state of blizzard right now haha

It cracked me up so hard, it was perfect!

[Valkaneer]

This Xpac is missing like half the content. Only 2 major content patches, and announcement of no more new content in WoD.

Anyone who has been involved in Beta - Present knows they stopped listening to the player base. Removal of class iconic abilities, broken promises in 6.1, and the constant onslaught of hot fix after hot fix AFTER the PTR which at times made enormous changes in a specs viability. Blizzard has created a volatile gaming experience where from week to week you don't know if your class is going to go from top to bottom of the chart or vise versa.

How about trinkets that can do up to 25% of your dps??? How is that skill?

OR What about half of WoD being a Redskined BC killing bosses we already killed. Blizzard forgot the what made them great, Telling good stories.

I just hope this Pirate / South Sea's Xpac whispering is terribly wrong.

[Nachturnal]

That graph show us the future, rip wow thanks to activision. Waiting new flying mount that we cant use tomorrow on blizzard store!!!

So Activision acquired Blizzard sometime around 2008. http://investor.activision.com/relea...leaseid=320652

Before the holy mega infallible and perfect WotLK came out. People have been claiming WoW is going to die since.... day 1? Why people blame Blizzard's decisions based on Activision is beyond me. Sure Activision sees the sub loss as a non-issue because they're still making record profits, but besides that, all they are is a publisher. They fund the development of games, they fund marketing, sure they may ask for some form of cash shop, but unlike many developers, Blizzard gets a lot of leeway.

Whatever WoW is now, it's of Blizzard's own fault. Maybe because they're overly ambitious, or they lost their passion, or have become complacent due to their success, who knows. But anyone advocating it's Acitivision's fault needs to rethink their process. Activision doesn't develop games. The outcome of a game is purely based on the developer.

[PrismaLin]

The Rocket Man song at the ending of the conference call... very much to me is a symbol of WOW's current state.. and the "we're going to remove flying", along with very little content this expansion is the cause of WOW's decline.

it was very fiting....very sad too...

[Tx20]

Wow, didn't think the losses would be that high after Blizzard doing everything in the last 2 weeks before the end of Q2 (WoD 50% off, patch 6.2 coming, tokens...).

[Ealyssa]

Can we now clearly label "WoD is shit" as a fact ?

No flying was a fail
2 raiding tier was a fail
Trashran was a fail
Dailies were a fail (or the lack of real dailies)
vanilla style nolife reput farming were a fail

I actually am really happy of this drop. Not because I hate WoW, I still play it. But because I really hope that blizzard is done forced to come with content. Another WoD and wow can "die" (no server shutdown obviously, but really changing content release format).

[apoe]

People seem to forget Wotlk was pretty much Raid or Die.

In fact.... that's all it was

What?

Dailies that didn't feel forced.

Valor points and incentive to run dungeons.

The achievement system added in WotLK pre-patch.

Several new dungeons from patches, including the ICC dungeon trio in a single patch.

Amazing pvp. First season was very imbalanced, yet from polls, WotLK s6/s7/s8 is considered some of the best pvp WoW has had to offer.

Useful professions and gathering involved flying around the world, instead of picking your garrison herbs.

A storyline and villain that people actually cared about, thanks to WC3 buildup.

[Grevie]

It's simple, players paid more for less. Brand loyalty gone.

This is how blizzard is keeping their profits for sure.

[Malator]

They need to bring back the old model of what made this game great. They got rid of the immersion experience completely. There is no incentive to go outside your garrison for anything. Simple things could be added to prevent that.

[TeeZed]

I think people just need to accept that the game isn't so fresh and fun as it was 6 years ago, although there's plenty of lore to explore and bosses to kill that aren't recycled, for some reason they chose to revisit old content over and over.

The figures don't add up either, they've got more people working on wow than ever before yet this expansion was probably the weakest to date, with only 2 raids tiers and somewhat abysmal PvP content. They took skills away, they took cooldowns away and any classes that were even remotely difficult to play (Demo warlock) were nerfed into the ground. This expansion pack cost the most out of all of them so far and the most exciting adventures are done by your followers in your garrison. I have no real criticisms about the raiding side as usual it's been great content, but substantially less of it for a higher price, hopefully it's not a year of no content like with SoO...

You also need to take into account the wow token, those numbers would be down a lot more if it wasn't so easy to just do garrison missions and get a free subscription.

Might just be me reading too much into this but it doesn't state that these people work solely on WoW but we don't know the ratios of people on Hearthstone, diablo, overwatch etc. and I think it's plain to see that hearthstone has probably been a much greater investment for Blizzard over the last year than WoW.

Lets just wait till the 6th and see if the new expansion shows us anything that might pique our interest, maybe hearthstone integration! Wait I'll call it now, Free hearthstone card back with the collectors edition of WoW: The Return of the lich king in the emerald dream.

[Deleted]

number is still little unaccurate blizzard release patch 14days earlier for increase this number before 2Q ended i think if show population from start of june number will be one million lower

[Kallor]

My problem with Blizz in regards to WoW is that they listen waaay too much to the popular complaints. I wish they'd just make the game THEY themselves want to play. Music and films that wants to cater to as many people as possible at the cost of the artistry/integrity of its maker(s) are usually bad. It's the same with games.

[Deleted]

Bravo bravo!!! *clap clap clap* bravo bravo!!!!

Gj blizzard!!! Fucktards!!

[Sithalos]

Unbalanced PvP, and 20 man only Mythic is mainly what went wrong with WoD. Arena participation was almost at half a million last expansion and now it's barely 40k. There's also the fact that every small PvE guild is dying due to not being able to progress up to mythic because of limited rosters.

Agreed. Most ten man heroic guilds said fuck it, including mine.

[roahn the warlock]

So Activision acquired Blizzard sometime around 2008. http://investor.activision.com/relea...leaseid=320652

Before the holy mega infallible and perfect WotLK came out. People have been claiming WoW is going to die since.... day 1? Why people blame Blizzard's decisions based on Activision is beyond me. Sure Activision sees the sub loss as a non-issue because they're still making record profits, but besides that, all they are is a publisher. They fund the development of games, they fund marketing, sure they may ask for some form of cash shop, but unlike many developers, Blizzard gets a lot of leeway.

Whatever WoW is now, it's of Blizzard's own fault. Maybe because they're overly ambitious, or they lost their passion, or have become complacent due to their success, who knows. But anyone advocating it's Acitivision's fault needs to rethink their process. Activision doesn't develop games. The outcome of a game is purely based on the developer.

And I would bet Wotlk was done before Activision merged with Blizz. I mean... there's a reason Ulduar was godly, and ICC had welfare epics.

the reason people blame Activision, is around that time, Companies made a switch from pleasing consumers, to pleasing stockholders for short term gain. A business practice likely adopted from Activision

[Tomana]

People seem to forget Wotlk was pretty much Raid or Die.

In fact.... that's all it was

Well, it had a way to obtain raid-quality loot through dungeons and stuff like argent tournament and wintergrasp. Also, it had the best story of probably all expansions, that helped too .

[Lycann]

That is a LOT. Wonder how many people playing HotS specifically though

Since they grouped those games together, its very likely that one them are doing very poorly or that two of them are doing so-so. My guess would be HotS and Destiny are the lowest, while Hearthstone has the bulk of that number.