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World of Warcraft Loses Another 1.1 Million Subscribers
Live
Posted
2012/08/02 at 4:15 PM
by
Ashelia
In today's
Activision Blizzard earnings call
it was revealed that World of Warcraft lost another 1.1 million subscribers last quarter, bringing the game to 9.1 million subscribers. This comes after the previous past quarters show losses as well:
600k
,
300k
,
800k
, and finally
100k subscribers last February
The general explanation offered was that this is the game's worst time in its expansion to expansion cycle: it's only mere months before a new expansion comes out which leaves a huge lull of content and bored players in its wake. Additionally, Diablo III--which sold over 10 million copies, including 1.2 million from the annual pass--took many World of Warcraft players' attention away from Azeroth.
In other words, don't panic. They'll be back, probably as pandas!
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Comment by
Azrile
on 2012-08-09T12:34:04-05:00
1.1 million in a quarter....wow. Quite a hit.
I would be curious - how is the overall MMO market doing?
SWTOR launched last December with almost 2M players. They are now down to about 600k and going free to play. GW2 will sell about 2-3M boxes, but doesn´t have a subscription, so we will never know how well it is doing after a few months. Easier to keep players logging in if you aren´t charging them for it similar to how D2 on battlenet is still huge.
Comment by
Azrile
on 2012-08-09T12:38:19-05:00
Dominated by WoW? Windows are dominating too, but no one will even try to talk its best.
Wow is most played game cause its easy mode, its basic game for kids and noobs. Everyone who find mmorpg will play it.. and then leave it for more difficult/adult games with better content (housing, pvp etc)
wow is not sandbox
wow dont have housing
wow dont have ships
wow dont have real world pvp
wow have only quests and raids. and that is not enough. not for skilled players.
What is this magic game that you speak of that ALL the experienced players are going to? You make it sound like WOW is kindergarten and everyone else has now moved on to HS? but where are they?
The really funny thing is, everything you mentioned above is from UO. Sandbox, housing, ships, world pvp... so UO, which never broke 250k players is where all of the WOW players are going when they grow up? Or maybe you mean Darkfall, the game that tried to re-create UO, but never broke 100k subscribers.
So seriously? where have all the WOW players gone after they grow up? what game? AOC, Warhammer, SWTOR?
Comment by
Rankkor
on 2012-08-09T12:55:09-05:00
If you want to define grinding as just killing enemies multiple times, okay, but there's a difference between killing enemies over and over again because you have to, and because it's part of a fun event or goal (
renown heart, personal storyline quest, achievement
).
Aaaaand right there you missed the entire point.
Please define "a fun event" because fun only gets fun so many times before it becomes repetitive and annoying. Like how the first time I did the 5man "Well of Eternity" it blew my damn brains off due to how awesome it was, but by the 50th time, it was routine, and I did it while reading a book in one hand and tanking with the other.
And when I was talking about grinding, I was NOT talking about the renown heart (which is fancy-wording for QUEST, just because you call them "hearts" doesn't make them anything esle) personal story quests, or achievements. Those are quests and achievements. I was talking about Dynamic Events.
Maybe you haven't played GW2 enough (other than a few stress tests that last barely a few hours, or the 3 separate weekend events that last 2 days) but the bulk of your exp comes from Dynamic Events, not quests, not "hearts" (Seriously, hearts? THEY ARE QUESTS) or achievements.
And Dynamic Events, are just like what I illustrated with "Well of Eternity" or the awesome wow quest "Battle for the Undercity". They're fun the first time, but by the 50th time, you will want to bang your head against a wall rather than do those.
I've watched (and I'm not using hyperbole or exageration) over 50 HOURS of in-game footage of GW2 on youtube (Due to not being currently able to play the game) and wanna know something? those events are nothing more than this:
You wander through a zone for no damned reason at all, suddenly you get a pop up notification that an event is nearby. You can choose to participate, or ignore it. If you participate, go to the event, and start killing mobs, and killing mobs, and killing mobs, and killing mobs, over and over and over and over and over and over again. Why are you killign them? why are they attacking? why should you even care that they ravage a piss-poor mine that you dont' even know the name of? you don't know, and you won't get to know, because they sure as hell don't give any explanation, background, or information.
its just SKELETON ATTACK, DEFEND THE WALLS! And roll with that. Why are they attacking? why are they even there in the first place? nobody knows.
While their branching nature DOES makes them fun, as I said before, its only so long before they get annoying, and lemme break the news to ya; 70% of your leveling is done via those events because the game has almost no quests at all, and the "hearts" (No I'm not letting that go, stupid name for what is esentially QUESTS) are just bread-crumbs and filler that you do in between the personal story and the events.
Hey, I still think GW2 is a good game, don't see this as me bashing the game, if you want I can bash what I don't like about wow, or about SWTOR, or about Lineage II (don't ask me to bash other MMOs I haven't play any other one) but GW2 isn't that much different from wow in regards to the grinding.
At least wow gives you an excuse to be out there recollecting those 20 bear asses, or wiping out kobolds left and right. On GW2, other than your main storyline, expect to spend most of your time wandering off ON FOOT (no mounts here) from random attack to random attack.
Did I mentioned that 60% of the cataloged events so far (yep I checked them all on the wikia) consist of you defending a spot killing wave after wave after wave of mobs till boss shows up, kill boss, event is over? The few that aren't that, are the bane of any MMO gamer...............
(read this in creepy baritone reverberating voice:)
ESCORT QUESTS!
Don't argue with me on this, I've done extensive research on this game (Again proving that I don't hate it, I don't invest this much of my time on a game that I don't plan to play extensively, I did the exact amount of research on SWTOR before joining)
Comment by
161859
on 2012-08-09T13:20:44-05:00
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Comment by
Rankkor
on 2012-08-09T13:30:29-05:00
So seriously? where have all the WOW players gone after they grow up? what game? AOC, Warhammer, SWTOR?
That was kind of my question.
WoW gave new life to the MMO market - no doubt about that. I'm wondering if now that more and more people are burnt out on WoW, is the MMO market in general getting smaller? I don't see any other MMO actually getting larger...
Its because other than wow, there is no other gigantic MMO behemot out there.
When someone leaves wow for good (and yes, out of all the people that leave, some come back, others never do) they never flock to a single game. As such, all the "former-wow" players, are spread VERY WIDE between games like Rift, Tera, Aion, SWTOR, GW1, soon GW2, and a really really wide ect.
IF you pooled together the entire population of all these other MMOs they would outnumber wow by a really large margin, however since they are all separate games, none have reached the height wow has.
Just like for example there are a billion and one cereal brands, all with their own degree of success, but none has reached the exact same degree of success and popularity as Kellogs.
Comment by
588688
on 2012-08-09T13:33:21-05:00
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Comment by
Rankkor
on 2012-08-09T13:48:21-05:00
rankorr - rofl, yes people hate this game.
cause its so
- easy mode (for dumb american kids)
Ya..........let's not go there please.
I don't bother to dignify those idiotic comments with a reply, you should not either. At the very least you ARE making more reasonable arguments (even if I think some of them are misguided).
What's your opinion on my response regarding the Dynamic events? (Bear in mind the last bit, I'm not really bashing GW2, it looks like a good game and I DO plan to buy it)
Players are consuming the game at a much faster pace and Blizz needs to keep up or players will continue to bow out.
This, this so very much. The bad part is they've only gotten slower at releasing new content......
So has just about everyone else. I look at the release date of new patches for other games and they take about the same time, a timeframe of 2 to 4 months. with another timeframe of 1 to 2 years for an expansion.
And blizzard isn't getting slower, in case you missed it, MoP did took less time to develop than Cataclysm.
Comment by
588688
on 2012-08-09T13:56:56-05:00
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Comment by
Adamsm
on 2012-08-09T14:09:54-05:00
Ya but the beta has taken considerably longer than Cata
That's due to the sheer amount of problems that keep popping up.
They have lots of money from players, why can't they make content every 4 months?
Because money isn't everything in regards to content? They need people to program it, test it, work out the bugs, make sure there aren't problems etc etc. It's never as easy as people make it sound to get things out there.
What bothers me is not just that they are willing to let players go 8-9 months with no new content, but that they don't even explain why they aren't making content more frequently,
Because they are working on said new content, trying to get it ready for it's release date? After all, look at the !@#$ storm that RS created; people whined it was too hard, too easy, too *insert generic term here*. You really can't make the player base happy no matter wwhat you do.
What bothers me is that I think they may actually believe that telling players to do old low level content is a viable alternative to making new content at a reasonable rate.
Because it's actually true to a point: A lot of Wrath/Cata players never went back and did that; hell there are a lot of Wrath players who skipped over Naxx/OS/Eye Ulduar and TotC and came in on ICC. And I know I enjoy running old content, and the sheer number of achievement groups that are always active says a lot of the player base does as well.
Comment by
588688
on 2012-08-09T14:20:12-05:00
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Comment by
Rankkor
on 2012-08-09T14:23:00-05:00
@Rank, if you do every single renown heart in a zone you
should
be high enough level for the next, maybe you just didn't find them all. When I was leveling my norn guardian I hit lvl 5 and there was still a LOT of renown hearts that I didn't do, and I only did one dynamic event, and I was only partway through the zone. I was following my personal story and ignoring anything that wasn't relevant to it. And again you can also level via exploring, WvW, crafting etc.
You "should" and yet you DON'T.
Please understand that as far as personal story goes, you only get one (1) questchain every 10 levels, that's right one (1).
Its not the same the STARTING area, than the more advanced ones. If you think about it, you can level all the way to 12 on elywnn forest before you run out of quests to do, and yet, how many other zones allow you to level 12 full levels? not many I can tell you that much. You wont be leveling 12 levels on hellfire peninsula.
On GW2, about 20 levels later, you will find that you could do all the "hearts" in a zone, as well as your personal story and you are still nowhere near the required level you need to move to the next area. Again, this is high-level stuff, not the first 2 hours of the game.
As for the exp gained from PVP, its about as much as the exp you gain in wow from doing BGs, its a slow way to level, by doing a repetitive task, with the exception that while wow has multiple BGs, GW2 has only the one.
And as for exploring and crafting, again, they give lots of exp when you are level 5, but when you are 75.....................yeah no, sorry, you won't ding doing those.
On the servers I played on, barely anyone had any interest in doing old raids for anything but achievements, and even then, there was still very few interested. Most people didn't care because no loot upgrades dropped, so from my experience I can say the players who actually like to run the old raids are a very small minority. As such, telling the playerbase to run old content as a "challenge" isn't gonna cut it.
Surprisingly, I actually agree with this.
Those "Old school challenges" are a joke.
Comment by
588688
on 2012-08-09T14:47:08-05:00
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Comment by
973043
on 2012-08-09T14:56:35-05:00
I think they will never do F2P - because F2P = means FAIL.
What they can do, is what Anarchy online do. Make some content free (extended trial).
Now trial is to level 20, which sux. BUT If they make Trial to level 70 (basic land + TBC) it will be HUGE, many mmorpgs will be pushed to do something more, offer more, because many people know wow is good even if they are not playing, but with this offer, they will come and try it.
+ TBC will be populated again
+ People will be able to look on new azeroth which is really cool too, no one offer free NEW content
(I dont have subs open now, so if anyone can make this topic on official forums, I will be glad)
I agree, the trial is very short (took me just few hours to hit lv20 and gold cap, straight up questing and no addons). The gold cap is holding back the free trial a lot as well (who wants to keep on questing or doing dungeons when you can't earn more gold/ xp?). I also bought all the mounts possible+maxxed my profession to 100 (trial cap) and moments later I hit gold cap again. You just can't expect someone to be really engaged in this experience with many restrictions in place. Another thing blizzard can do is lower the restriction for scroll of resurrection. 1 month game time for free upon return and allow people with a subscription expired before and on July 4th eligible for scroll should spark some interest for players to see what MoP is about.
Comment by
161859
on 2012-08-09T15:06:01-05:00
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Comment by
331902
on 2012-08-09T15:09:51-05:00
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Comment by
Azrile
on 2012-08-09T15:44:55-05:00
I think they will never do F2P - because F2P = means FAIL.
What they can do, is what Anarchy online do. Make some content free (extended trial).
Now trial is to level 20, which sux. BUT If they make Trial to level 70 (basic land + TBC) it will be HUGE, many mmorpgs will be pushed to do something more, offer more, because many people know wow is good even if they are not playing, but with this offer, they will come and try it.
+ TBC will be populated again
+ People will be able to look on new azeroth which is really cool too, no one offer free NEW content
(I dont have subs open now, so if anyone can make this topic on official forums, I will be glad)
I agree, the trial is very short (took me just few hours to hit lv20 and gold cap, straight up questing and no addons). The gold cap is holding back the free trial a lot as well (who wants to keep on questing or doing dungeons when you can't earn more gold/ xp?). I also bought all the mounts possible+maxxed my profession to 100 (trial cap) and moments later I hit gold cap again. You just can't expect someone to be really engaged in this experience with many restrictions in place. Another thing blizzard can do is lower the restriction for scroll of resurrection. 1 month game time for free upon return and allow people with a subscription expired before and on July 4th eligible for scroll should spark some interest for players to see what MoP is about.
Blizzard doesn´t want you to play the trial forever at level 20. They removed the time limit so that real ´new´ players don´t feel rushed to get to 20 before time expires. They want all players to be able to see 1-20 at a nice slow pace and enjoy the game. They don´t want players playing at level 20 for months, if it takes you a few months to get to level 20, that is fine though. 1-20 is the engaging part, playing at 20 is where you should feel the restrictions and want to subscribe to keep playing.
Comment by
Azrile
on 2012-08-09T15:57:49-05:00
Here is a clue. A ton of people do not, and will not ever raid outside of LFR.
And that is fine, but then don't use the lowest and easiest form of end game to claim that things are boring because there is not enough content.
Content and time to access it are two different things. Maybe that's how you play games? Clear them on the least challenging level then complain that there isn't enough to do? There is plenty to do if you have the time and put in the effort. If you don't have the time, Well sorry it's an MMORPG, The devs have more than accommodated you but this is one of those games where you do need to spend more time to get the most out of it.
so really you think as long as there is a raid that 75% of the people have not completed on heroic that Blizzard is ok with it´s pace of content? Heck, why are they releasing MoP.. player should be completely happy since most of us have never done heroic DS. If we have that content available, we don´t really need anything else, right?
And again, fail at reading, it is NOT about ´time´ to play, and it is not about ´challenge´. The big reason most people don´t raid is because of the scheduling required. There is nothing ´challenging´ about saying ´ok, I can be there every weeknight from 6-10pm to raid... and I can do that for the next 12 weeks straight.´ People don´t raid because they don´t want to commit to any type of schedule for a game. I had friends back in Vanilla and BC.. I used to laugh at them.. because not only did they schedule their playtime, but because of their specs, most of the time they were ´on call´.. so they had to schedule and be online at a scheduled time, but many times they didn´t even go along with the guild.
I still can´t believe you really think that because people haven´t cleared madness on heroic that they should not complain about lack of content. Geez, why did the devs ever release BC, after all almost nobody had finished the original Naxx.. clearly there was a ton of content left for players to be happy about.
Comment by
Rankkor
on 2012-08-09T16:00:09-05:00
But here's the thing Rank, when I was leveling my Guardian, I didn't even pay attention to how many levels I had gained, it was a while before I noticed I hit lvl 3, and I didn't notice I hit lvl 5 till I logged off of him to make a Sylvari. Why? Because I was having fun, I didn't care about my leveling speed, I was enjoying the game too much.
Well, the same can be said about Wow, give credit where credit is due. When I had to level in the vanilla zones, it felt terribly slow, like a chore, the game only began to be semi-fun after getting to outland.
Post-cata, the revamped starting areas were so fun, I didn't even cared about the level, I stayed in each zone till the story was completed. Zones like Silverpine (With its Worgen Vs Forsaken war) and Redridge (With its affectionate parody of Rambo) were a breath of fresh air.
However, like all things in life, everything eventually loses its shiny status, and becomes boring. GW2 is too dependant on those Dynamic Events, you'll see. The first levels will be both fast AND fun, due to having more content than you actually need to level up, and said content being new. But those events can get annoying after a while, and they are the main way to level up.
I think you're being too unfair to wow just because you've already played it to death, whereas GW2 is still new and shiny.
Just as GW2 has many breath-taking moments, so does wow, and just as those breath-taking moments became rutine, and eventually became a chore in wow, they will do so as well on GW2, and every other MMO.
Quests with deep dialog and consequence? Very cool, very impressive on SWTOR. By the 40th level you'll be sick to death of them.
Dynamic events with branching consequences? UNBELIEVABLY COOL the first time, by your 100th time stoping a bunch of goblins from ravaging yet another backwater town you don't care about it'll get old.
People apply really unfair double-standards to games these days. Bashing X game for something, whereas praising another that has just as much of the same something as the first game.
Comment by
588688
on 2012-08-09T16:10:31-05:00
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Comment by
973043
on 2012-08-09T19:28:20-05:00
I think they will never do F2P - because F2P = means FAIL.
What they can do, is what Anarchy online do. Make some content free (extended trial).
Now trial is to level 20, which sux. BUT If they make Trial to level 70 (basic land + TBC) it will be HUGE, many mmorpgs will be pushed to do something more, offer more, because many people know wow is good even if they are not playing, but with this offer, they will come and try it.
+ TBC will be populated again
+ People will be able to look on new azeroth which is really cool too, no one offer free NEW content
(I dont have subs open now, so if anyone can make this topic on official forums, I will be glad)
I agree, the trial is very short (took me just few hours to hit lv20 and gold cap, straight up questing and no addons). The gold cap is holding back the free trial a lot as well (who wants to keep on questing or doing dungeons when you can't earn more gold/ xp?). I also bought all the mounts possible+maxxed my profession to 100 (trial cap) and moments later I hit gold cap again. You just can't expect someone to be really engaged in this experience with many restrictions in place. Another thing blizzard can do is lower the restriction for scroll of resurrection. 1 month game time for free upon return and allow people with a subscription expired before and on July 4th eligible for scroll should spark some interest for players to see what MoP is about.
Blizzard doesn´t want you to play the trial forever at level 20. They removed the time limit so that real ´new´ players don´t feel rushed to get to 20 before time expires. They want all players to be able to see 1-20 at a nice slow pace and enjoy the game. They don´t want players playing at level 20 for months, if it takes you a few months to get to level 20, that is fine though. 1-20 is the engaging part, playing at 20 is where you should feel the restrictions and want to subscribe to keep playing.
Unfortunately, not many trials are willing to upgrade from what I see so far on my low pop server. Expecting someone to peek through a cell window and convince themselves "the world is beautiful" doesn't seem to be working.
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