World of Warcraft subscription numbers drop another 8%
In revealing the repurchase of its shares from Vivendi last night, publisher Activision announced that subscription numbers for World of Warcraft continued to decline, dropping from 8.3 million in Q1 to 7.7 million in Q2.
In revealing the repurchase of its shares from Vivendi last night, publisher Activision announced that subscription numbers for World of Warcraft continued to decline, dropping from 8.3 million in Q1 to 7.7 million in Q2.
The numbers represent almost a two million decline in users since the end of last fiscal year. To counteract the decline, Blizzard's CEO Mike Morhaime had said the company would be pushing out more frequent content updates to keep users engaged, but the effort appears to falling short.
Activision should address the decline as part of its regular earnings call next week.
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replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, World of Warcraft subscription numbers drop another 8%.
In revealing the repurchase of its shares from Vivendi last night, publisher Activision announced that subscription numbers for World of Warcraft continued to decline, dropping from 8.3 million in Q1 to 7.7 million in Q2.-
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. The game is nearly 10 years old now, and hasn't even hit its minimum sustainable player base yet. I'd be shocked if the franchise can do anything to restore it to its previous peak subscriptions.
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Yep, but they had to know years ago that this was going to eventually happen.
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The only way to reclaim the momentum is to release a sequel. It will decline to the point where only the most dedicated players will remain like most MMOs on the market.
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But they had the ability and know-how to appeal to the masses.
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Poor WoW, they'll have to close up shop soon.
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Still at about 3x what any other MMO ever managed to reach. I think there's two or three other MMOs that managed to break above 3 million subscribers for the launch period but quickly fell below.
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They'll be making money on this game for another 10 years. If there are 1 million subscribers, they'll be making money.
Something tells me that Blizzard will likely go for another MMO based on a different property, though.-
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Forgot about this. 2016 sounds about right to have the WoW population migrate over.
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You mean 2026? I don't think Blizzard has ever launched a game on time, and there's no way they're churning out an MMO that is being redesigned and hasn't even been announced 3 years from now.
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i wonder how a WoW 2 would be received
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The Cataclysm expansion was basically WoW 2.
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I think Elder Scrolls Online has the potential to beat World of Warcraft. You already have a popular RPG franchise with an established base so its not much of leap.
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I am sure that is what Bioware and EA thought too.
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I said potential to be, I know perfectly well it could fall flat on its face like all the others. TOR failed for a number of reasons. Alot of what I am seeing of ESO has the TES feel to it. I guess we will see in a year. ESO is releasing on three platforms as well so if gets 1 or 2 million on each platform that will be enough to get to the current WOW figures.
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"potential" in the way you've used it means nothing. in that sense, anything that is unreleased has "potential".
elder scrolls online will crash and burn. it will be star trek online, swtor, and age of conan. this is pretty much a rock solid guarantee. you're completely fooling yourself if you think they'll get millions of users per platform. i bet it doesn't hit one million TOTAL users-
I can see them hitting those numbers, I don't see it retaining those numbers past the first month though.
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swtor tapped out at just over a million and it had way more promise than eso. eso isn't going to come anywhere close, even in the first month. in order to match wow, three out of four people who bought skyrim would have to buy eso. and given how anti-multiplayer that community is, i don't see it. swtor had a much better chance and it didn't happen
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Yeah I misread TheEmissary's post, I was saying it could hit 1-2 million maybe in the first month. I would be extremely surprised if it came close to WoW numbers.
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Unlike Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Warhammer Online?
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Unless they do something that is radically different from WoW they just can't catch up now. WoW had 12 years (or more) of development to come where they are now, you can't catch up all that in 3-4 years. So you have to do something that's different enough that it doesn't matter (such like what Eve Online got going). And even then it will be hard to beat WoW simply because people are so invested there. -
You have to realize that WoW became the monster that it is by reaching beyond the niche RPG fan base. Just because X franchise you like seems really popular amongst the people who already like that sort of thing doesn't mean it can and will branch out. People thought the same thing about Warhammer Online because of all the Warhammer fans, but obviously that didn't work out. WoW got huge by appealing to people that had never played games before, or at least MMOs before. That's a hard trick to pull off, and even then I'm betting that Blizzard can't tell you exactly how that happened. The likelihood that another game will repeat that seems very slim to me.
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I honestly wonder if WoW succeeded to the extent that it did only because it was released by Blizzard.
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There's probably a confluence of factors that made it the beast it is, the Blizzard name certainly being one of them. But I think the relative ease of play combined with its rather large initial fan base meant a lot of people were going up to their co-workers, or their sisters, or their significant others, or their uncles, or anyone and everyone who had never played a video game (or a video game like this) and telling them "You should try this Warcraft game", and then it spread from there. And of course that only made the Chinese farming market more profitable so those licenses boomed as well.
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Laughing really hard at this post.
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I wish you could see how many lols you're gonna get on this post.
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The emissary of lols?
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King of High House LOL
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Probably LoL?
I know a lot of people who played or play WoW off and on and moved to LoL.-
This is actually true, a lot of people are messing around w/LoL while waiting for FF14:ARR, Wildstar and/or EQ Next.
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probably opening a window a crack and hissing at the sun
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Plenty of them move back to playing non mmo games. WoW captured a lot of new mmo players and style of them don't want to play a wow clone. That said I know LoL and free to play games are hurting blizzard in China.
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People poopsock shit to get it done asap, and then complain on the forums about not having anything to do at endgame. Blizzard responds by creating a giant pile of borderline insurmountable and completely mundane shit so people have stuff to do.
The poopsockers poopsock it then go back to complaining about not having anything to do, while the people who weren't complaining look at it, say "fuck this" and then find something else.-
Pretty much. They've added a ton of useless, boring, grindy stuff with every major patch. I don't want to do it anymore. None of my friends want to do it anymore. My guild is tired of 30+ bosses that aren't worth the time to push through.
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That's basically what did it for me. I just couldn't stand doing the same quests over and over again.
Also, it didn't help that they ruined the community aspect of the game with the dungeon and raid finders. Sure its quicker and easier to get a dungeon group, but you'll never see those people again.-
Honestly, I couldn't care less about making e-friends on a WoW server. The old days of spamming trade chat to get groups going was pure hell.
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I'd be interested to see not only Blizzard's revenue, but the total spin off revenue from all the businesses built up around the game.
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it has 7 times the playersof the nearest MMORPG. I think it has a lot left
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Our guild lasted for several years. With every expansion we lost some and won some new members, but over time the balance was negative as less and less players that fit into our guild were still active. We have seen lots of guilds disband, people never return to the game and sometimes people coming back after several months only to power through content and quit again.
Blizzard has truly done some amazing things with WoW but also repeatedly stepped into their former mistakes again and again. WotLK probably was the best expansion, all expansions after this never gained as much popularity and were imho inconsistent. It is like they had a roadmap but constantly switched to other roadmaps inbetween, disgruntling large amounts of players and backtracking without ever really getting back on their original roadmap.
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