World of Warcraft subscriptions continue a downward trend

A few musings:

- Blizzard sent free copies of the base game for subscribers to give to their friends roughly two weeks before the subscription numbers were tallied. If those copies were counted among the subscribers (and, from their methodology, they probably were), the real drop might be greater than this number indicates.

- The biggest advantage WoW has over the competition is that it has the most people playing; plenty of players are still playing WoW because they have friends that play there. While this is a great thing for the game when subscriptions are stable or growing, when players start to leave the game, this can have an avalanche effect in that players might start leaving because their friends left.

They dumbed the game down to much, quality is lacking, raids and dungeons are just plain boring race tracks.

@Ren54 They pre-ordered SWTOR which is quite a bit mroe similiar to older WOW

So where did they go? Oh, I know. To a game that does what Blizzard hasn't figured out how to do in 7 years. Frequent content updates. People don't want to pay $15 a month when I get content, if we can even call it that, once every 4 to 6 months if not more. I want to pay $15 a month to a company who listens to the players and patches content at record speeds.

Kind of odd the most interesting thing to say about this game this year has been that they lost another 1/2 a million-ish subs this quarter.

At least the whole RealID fiasco was entertaining to read about.

@Ren54 Um...Back to the real world?

I think that due to the bad economy some players may be cutting back on multi-boxing or just quitting the game all together.

Personally I found the Molten Front to be an interesting idea but it has become a dull grind. The number of marks you need to grind to unlock the various stages is way too much and it seems like Blizz artificially extended the grind just to make the hardcore players happy.

The problem with the difficulty of Cataclysm dungeons was that Blizz never bothered to tell players about it in the game itself. Many players never read blogs like this site and were completely blindsided by the need to use crowd control, etc.

I loved, and still love WoW. But like most people it's just grown stale for me because I've played for 6 years.

Now that being said, and I'm MOST definitely not a WoW hater (exact opposite actually).

WoW IS slowing coming back down to earth, not dying, simply losing a lot of subs. And this is all before TOR and GW2 have even released.

The reason is that it's simply run it's course for a lot of us and also the time between content releases during Cata has been abysmal and not worth $15/mo while we wait for them. I strongly believe they've INTENTIONALLY held back content over an over because they were waiting for TOR to release and wanted to try to steal their thunder. That didn't happen, so now a lot of the playerbase is pissed off at the lack of content and turning away for other games, or simply taking a break.

Also let's not forget that more than HALF of that "11 million" are coming from China. So realistically in the western world they only have about 5 million or so, give or take because their "estimates" aren't exactly accurate. That's the US and Europe. And most of that 1 million in lost subs this year is from the western market. So realistically they've lost about 1 mil of the 6 mil subs they have in the US and Europe. That's a BIG deal since only Rift is really giving them a run atm.

By next year, with or without a "PANDA expac!" (Oh god!), they will have a much lower sub rate than pre-Cata. I'd say maybe 6-7 million total, and only 2-3 million in the western market.

Unless they rethink all their business decisions, they game will continue it's inevitable decline due to age and lack of inspiration by the development team.

But all in all, I still love ALL my time in WoW and wouldn't trade it for any other game.

I think we need more good, hard examination of the facts here, than fanboy devotion or conversely WoW-hater exuberance!

@Triskelion

The age of the game is irrelevant. WoW was old when ICC was out for a year, but it didn't shed paying customers. The change that led to the drop in subscribers is Cataclysm, which has been a horrendous expansion.

If Blizzard is smart, they'll crank out Deathwing and move onto the next expansion this spring and actually add some new content that people will enjoy.

@Triskelion

Meh... don't care as much about the specific developers. But overall Cataclysm was depressingly repetitive from the same crap I spent doing for the past five years or so. Quit in January and never bothered looking back. Just wish I didn't waste 40 bucks on the expansion pack only to see it was just the same "stuff" in a new and shiny looking toilet.

Cataclysm just isn't that good and really didn't improve the game. Too much overhaul of old stuff and not enough new. Plus everything keeps having that "been there, done that" feeling. Myself and many other I know have quit and are waiting for SWTOR.

It's because of Rift.

""WoW's longstanding grip on the MMO market is no longer quite as strong as it once was.""

except theres still no other single MMO out there that comes remotely close to the sub base wow has, even -300k