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WOW's slow death?
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Played Wow for 5 years and it's Blizzard who's killing the game.
They thought Zynga model is the way to go. They were wrong and now they reap what they sow.
I have all seasons of "the big bang theory" and watch them over and over because there isn't anything good on tv anymore but that show
Agree
Yes I'm going to stick with that, mostly because the hype was nowhere to be found on MoP. On this site and others there was no activity at all on MoP. I even remember looking weeks before and not seeing much at all anywhere, like nobody was talking about it really.
Grats on making the 10000 thread on WoW's demise. Age is the major factor really. The fact that it's still as successful as it is after all this time is amazing. I enjoyed my time playing it but finally got bored. It was just time to play something else.
I don't find it all that surprising that sales for MoP are low. Before Blizzard stopped separating West (US & EU) subscriptions from East (Asia / China) accounts, The asian market always had the lead (post WoW-China version release early in WoW's history).
In 2011 WoW suffered 2 consecutive major quarter losses (combined in excess over 1 mil), while still reporting gains in China Game Room Passes. The hit to the Western subscription market was immense last year. Blizzard tried to change the trend, saying that more recent losses are attributed to China, but damage to the West was already done. Gamers just did not see much value in Cataclysm, myself included.
For what it's worth, WarcraftRealms.com had a huge spike up to 1400 players average per server during peak hours when Cataclysm hit. This time around for MoP it's around 600, with overall playtime not really changing much over the past year.
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyfactionactivity.php?serverid=-1
Also, drifting on to another part of this discussion, I do see digital sales as rising .. but at some point it will just cap out. Anecdotally, the only way for me to buy a digital download game is if I don't really care much about it .. it would just be a throwaway game title. If I value the game and intend to play it for a good deal of time, I'll insist on having the physical box. I'll admit though that if publishers / companies continue putting out these cheap boxes in recycled DVD cases with nothing inside but a disc, I may stop buying them, or just stop buying their games alltogether.
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
yeah seriously people on this site cannot stand wow and its success , they gotta make thread after thread about how its failing . Yet guild wars 2 is not even close right now to its actual numbers of people playing it. I play both games and can tell you right now that guild wars 2 is no where near as populated as wow is. There is server queues still on a lot of servers in wow and most are hitting high population still. Yes people leave because of its age and fact if you play anything for 2 or 3 years or more , you are going to burn out and try new things. Ive left wow about 6 or 7 times since 2003 beta and have played about every mmorpg out there. But i still buy blizzard games because they release quality , other then D3 that is. MOP is a solid expansion regardless of the hate on this forum about it. Yes there is things people dislike , but there is also plenty of things people do like. People on this forum need to grow up and learn to stop bashing success because they do not agree with the direction of the game they play.
LOL come on was this a shot at calling GW2 a wowkiller again? Can you fanbois just move on already. According to your almighty XFIRE GW2 numbers are way down. I dont play either WoW or GW2 but it seems like the GW2 fans are in desperation mode now that MOP has launched.
Why do people think that losing 2 million subs hurts Blizzard so much.
A game with 300k-500k subs is considered a successful MMO, so what does 10million tell you?
The game won't be dead even if they lose 9million subs.
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
Oh, for a game developer its not big, but a greedy publisher... yeah... they tend to go "OMG wtf" mode if massive profits drop to being very good profits. Sure, people go crazy as well but if you thinking people jump the gun... oh boy you would cry knowing how insane publishers get. You lose 10% of your population and I bet blizzard probably had people fired for it.
Still, its slowly dwindling down but its got some time. As much as I feel its a steaming pile of garbage compared to its old self (Sorry, I know so bias and very over-dramatic but its destroyed the game that much) I have no expectations it will be dead anytime soon. Don't get me wrong, its dropping in numbers quite significantly % wise that other game companies would hit the red button for, but its not really that huge of a decline to warrent a closure anytime soon.
I personally still feel they are slowly dumbing down WoW purposely to barney level to grab the casualist of casual (shush, I can make up words and phrases) until they can't get any more to bite, then release titan after they don't think they can grab any more people to potentially peek on back for nostolgia value.
The point is, like the article says, even if you give the benefit of the doubt on digital sales, lets say they are 2x of what retail is, which is being very generous considering for cataclysm digital sales were only 57% of the sales, that puts them at around 2 million sales. Whereas cataclysm did 3.3 million in the first day. Its now been 3 or 4 days.
That is BAD news for blizzard. VERY bad.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Do all of you realize that 1 portal come up with the "news" out of some analysts opinion and the rest of portals just c/p it?
As I wrote before, wait for official numbers.
It's just an estimate by some suits who can't really grasp the emotional aspect of people buying games... It's not like buying a new TV or a car, this is an artform we're talking about, after all.
I've seen analysts fall on their face too many times to bat an eye at this anyway.
The truth is, the actual numbers could be *much* higher, or inded, *much* lower - we just don't know!
Personally, I don't care, I got my money's worth from the starting area of the Pandaren alone - that's how good it is (in my eyes). Had to play on an alternate low pop server, seeing how there's 58(!) full servers in the EU atm and my main one with a 3k queue lockout...
as long as Dave down at the pub is a top shelf investment banker with a Ivy league MBA he would probably tell you the same thing as that article
Face it, WoW had a remarkable run but Blizzard at it's peak was the Blizzard of Diablo II and vanilla WoW. While it is no Funcom it's spiraling down the bowl and unless they do some major changes wil be there soon
I won't hold my breath on anything official, game companies seldom make press releases saying their game is not selling nearly as well as they thought it would
I miss DAoC
If MoP was a BIG succes we would already know it, the numbers would be there for the world to see it.
Its clearly MoP dint sell good enough for the net to know the 24 hour sales.
There is a major chnase MoP is already a failure sale wise.
I remember hearing TBC sales within 24 hours, it sold millions and millions of copy's and blizzard was very eager to bring out those numbers REAL fast.
Now not so much...
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Well, for Cata which was the best selling of all of their expansions, they released the sales data a week after release, so I expect it to be similar for this one (not the best selling expansion part).
Sorry OP: You made the mistake of writing "numbers" instead of your actual topic in your first paragraph: Derailment ensues...
Old age, top heavy pop and elitism is kiling WoW. I subbed for a few months around WotLK release and again for a month (played a few hours for 5-6 days) about 4 months into Cataclysm.
Not especially thin skinned, but saw NOTHING communitywise that would keep me ingame... Quite the opposite. (And that is on 6-7 different EU servers).
Total newcomers, seemingly needs to be masochists or total idiots to actually stay with this... Much friendlier communities ARE to be found in other games.
We dont need casuals in our games!!! Errm... Well we DO need casuals to fund and populate our games - But the games should be all about "hardcore" because: We dont need casuals in our games!!!
(repeat ad infinitum)
Fact: Cataclysm sold more than 3.3 million total at release, announced 6 days after launch.
Let's see if Blizzard is quick to say how many MoP expacs sold in 2 more days. If they stay silent, you know it bombed, if they announce it big, you know that digital sales exceeded expectations, furthermore that the market has dynamically moved over to digital distribution over retail sales as a whole. Right now as it stands it is going to take a LOT of digital sales to make up for the 60% drop in box sales.
Blizzard made their first official announcement about Cataclysm sales on 12/13/10. Cataclysm was released 12/7/10. That's a difference of 6 days.
So what evidence are you using to support your claim that no released numbers within 4 days is VERY BAD news?
Edit: I miswrote the dates - corrected. Also, here's the link.