'World of Warcraft' loses another 1.5 million subscribers ahead of new expansion

[red1776]

I tried WOW years back and just simply did not find the appeal. I then wondered why Eve Online never took off.

 

[Forebode]

The game is old. It's still profit able. The subs are down, but estimated profits are up, slightly. They should just keep doing what their doing till the operational costs are too great, then have an F2P version to release and increase the gold cost on tokens.

 

[HiDDeNMisT]

Exactly, a new update came out you would spend a bit of time leveling your main and then maybe a new alt trying out a new class then afterwards try out the odd new dungeon or raid, then you would grind a few dailies before finding yourself eventually logging in doing 4 or 5 dailys then spending the rest of the day idling in SW.

I played wow when it was at it's peak, with 40 man MC raids, or when Paladins and Warlocks had quest chains for their "free" mount, back then the game was fun, exiting then as patches came out especially now I feel they dumbed down the entire game. You could max level alts in hours (if not minutes), for me atleast and I reckon many others leveling was one of the fun parts of the game but they kinda ruined all that.

Yes. I do not have an alt because the lvling in the game is so tidius and boring. Id rather just play my main and call it a day.

 

[Squid Surprise]

I fail to see how they've "ruined the game"... they still have more subscribers than ANY OTHER and are just as profitable as always... yes, inevitably they will die... all games do... but charging less would be pretty stupid...

Milk as much as you can for it... THEN maybe drop the price and charge more for "in app purchases"... once it becomes unprofitable, they can simply drop it and replace it with a new game... World of Diablo or World of StarCraft anyone?

 

[HiDDeNMisT]

I fail to see how they've "ruined the game"... they still have more subscribers than ANY OTHER and are just as profitable as always... yes, inevitably they will die... all games do... but charging less would be pretty stupid...

Milk as much as you can for it... THEN maybe drop the price and charge more for "in app purchases"... once it becomes unprofitable, they can simply drop it and replace it with a new game... World of Diablo or World of StarCraft anyone?

The game went from bad to worse since cata. Ive played since the end of vanilla so I kinda know what it is. They tried to do things in the game to make it better and it didnt work for them and lost subscribers. They went from 12 million to like 4 or 5. That is really bad IMHO.

 

[9Nails]

WotLK was indeed the best. Classes felt different from each other, getting purples wasn't a significant undertaking, and there was the presence of the spooky Lick King in nearly all the PvE leveling zones. By the end of the expansion you really wanted to kill his face!

 

[Squid Surprise]

I'm not arguing whether the actual gameplay is better or worse... I'm asking you if it's worth Blizzard doing anything if THEY are still seeing similar profit margins.... Gaming is a BUSINESS...

 

[Emexrulsier]

I want a true NWN sequel. That game was far superior to wow, with true multi-classing and so much variation in character builds. They did bring out Neverwinter but this was attempt to cash in on wows success and wasn't true to the original NWN games.

 

[gingerbill]

Who would have guessed playing the same game for 10 years would get boring ?

I find the people who endlessly moan about the game and take pleasure in it losing subscribers incredibly sad. WOW was a brilliant game , I played it for years with my friends and eventually got bored as expected so I play different games now. No need to hate the game because I don't play it anymore.

 

[Amaranthus]

This graph shows my exact levels of interest in WoW.. Now I leave and come back and leave again.. It's mostly nostalgia.. and love of the lore that brings me back. The one thing that (Thank God) didn't get too boring yet is levelling via questing for me. I love WoW way too much, but it isn't interesting anymore

Eight#2708

 

[gibbstar]

Looking at the chart alone, Cataclysm was a real cataclysm for the game XD.

that's when I quit playing, right after that expansion. looks like a lot of others did, too.

 

[Ascaris]

The movie, expansion and visual upgrades will help, but the ship has sailed and Blizzard need to start preparing for its decline instead of trying to postpone it by ripping out difficulty that made it so much fun in the first place.

I think a lot of people are missing the point with WoW, including the corporate people who hire the devs. I joined the game during BC, and for the most part, the subscriber chart matches my own opinion of the way the game is going. BC was the best IMO, with WotLK being decent too. In both cases, Blizz made it feel like my character was really there, part of the fight against the "big bad," whether that was the Burning Legion or the Lich King and his undead army.

It all started to go downhill with the new devs. Cataclysm was a disaster, and not just in terms of what was happening to its characters. It seemed like the devs wanted to um... wet everyone's Wheaties... make sure everyone gets a little bit to make sure they know the devs despise them. No sacred cow would remain unharmed; some bit of the game each player enjoyed would be hacked out for no apparent reason. Harmless little things that added to player enjoyment were removed. The "war on fun" has been an ongoing accusation against Blizzard since that time, and not without justification.

The reason for the mass exodus starting with Cata was not that everyone suddenly got tired of this game that had by then been around for six years (and been growing nearly all of that time). It was because it was the first expansion developed by *****s who had no feel for the game, and no respect for it, its players, or its lore.

While it had always been a part of WoW, Cata was when the Blizzard habit of nerfing a class or spec into oblivion, then gradually building it back up, began in earnest. Bit by bit, Blizz took away something each player enjoyed in his own way, and usually for the most inane reasons possible. Eventually, the nerf bat hit each of us... the spec that was your favorite, the reason you keep playing, one day was obliterated, with the play style you enjoyed completely changed for no reason other than to change it. Often times, that change coincided with a bonecrushing hit from the nerf bat at the same time.

There's only so many times they can do that to their player base before people get fed up.

After Cata came MoP... which featured the "big bad" of... anger. Yeah, the living embodiment of negative emotions. We'd all thought that Cata's Deathwing was a lackluster baddie (despite the massive amount of damage Blizzard had done to the game in his name... all your favorite leveling zones are all wrecked now! Uh, but it wasn't new Blizz devs marking their territory... um, it was Deathwing that did it! You should be really mad at Deathwing now!)

WoD started strong. The Iron Horde (the big bad of WoD) is front and center again, which is good (although how it relates to the present my character lives in is still a mystery). It seemed like a winner in the first days. A lot of people were saying it was the best expansion since BC in chat... some even said it was better than BC. The euphoria quickly wore off when people starting hitting the level cap, realizing that the good leveling experience didn't suggest in any way that the end game had much end-game content. The new PVP zone, Ashran, has been a poorly executed, cobbled-together mess since the beginning, and the efforts to fix it have only made it worse. Dungeons, even heroics, don't drop any gear worth the time to get them, and there are no marks of whatever to make it worth people's while to run them regularly. Progression raiding is just about gone... I don't do that myself, so you'd have to ask one of them why that is.

That's why I don't think people are leaving because WoW is tired and old. They're leaving because Blizz has disappointed pretty much every player with callous, poorly-thought out decisions that really make you think Blizz hates its customers. Not just once, but repeatedly. If there is a bone-headed move that is sure to enrage players, you can bet Blizzard thought it was a good idea, and rushed it into the game without a thought (ignoring the words of wisdom invariably offered by the long-time players who still test such things on the public test realm).

WoW has immense gravity because of its size. It pulls people who have quit back in, because they often meet someone else (IRL or otherwise) who plays WoW, and they think it would be fun to play with this new person. If WoW is any kind of a decent game, it can again grow, even though it is just about the only remaining subscriber-based game left. They just have to stop giving boneheads free rein, and when the subscriber numbers stop rising and go off a cliff, figure out what you did wrong, and FIX it! Stop doubling down on failure. It has not worked for the past five years, and it won't work now.