SWToR will have a record joining, just like WoW did..
RIFT was fun for 1month then well blah..
Left WoW in patch 4.1 - Not because of graphics, was due to lack of mature ppl and crappy PuGs..
WoW will hit full F2P sooner or later by next year at least or they will end up like SWG and shutdown..
Funny part is.. the Origional WoW Dev's are now working on the new engine for SWToR, how ironic.. Let's hope they don't come out with a SWG-NGE or CU.. *but then that was sony's hand*
Everyone keeps acting like WoW is dying or something. When they loose around 5 million subs all at once then it might be time to criticize. 11.1 million is just an absolutely rediculous player base. WoW is probably going to be around for a LONG while yet. Im not sure if it will ever drop below a million subs or even close. Most mmorpgs, would claim massive succes with 1 million subs (including Swtor).
If WoW lost 1 million whopping subs it would be less than 10% of their player base. Thats just insane.
The game has its problems but its probably the most successful game....ever.....made. Ever. So they've done something right. Very right. I'll go ahead and add that I stopped playing WoW years ago (around the time of Burning Crusade). I will never return. But my time there was....enjoyable for the most part.
Wow are you people null or something. You all forgot that blizzard has a WoW movie set for next year. That will flock a lot of new players to WoW. That will basically destroy SWTOR!!! HEY WE ALL FORGOT
SWToR will have a record joining, just like WoW did..
RIFT was fun for 1month then well blah..
Left WoW in patch 4.1 - Not because of graphics, was due to lack of mature ppl and crappy PuGs..
WoW will hit full F2P sooner or later by next year at least or they will end up like SWG and shutdown..
Funny part is.. the Origional WoW Dev's are now working on the new engine for SWToR, how ironic.. Let's hope they don't come out with a SWG-NGE or CU.. *but then that was sony's hand*
I seriously doubt that WoW is going to "shut down" any time soon... They can shrug off losses that other games could never even dream of having in the first place. Before the coming of WoW, 300,000-500,000 was considered to be a very healthy player base. To keep that many millions of players for almost 7 years, they obviously have been doing several things right.
It remains to be seen if they can duplicate that with Titan. As much fun as TOR looks to be, its no real threat to WoW. Nothing, besides Blizzard itself (or perhaps Ghostcrawler...^^) is a real threat to WoW at this point. I suspect they will slowly lose players over the years to come (unless there is a serious change of direction), but it will be years and years before they get even as "low" as 1-2 million players.
In many lines of business, fluctuations in both directions within 10% is just random movements.
Our stockmarkets, worldwide stock markets lost more than 10% in the past couple days.
What really matters is sustainability. WoW has more than it needs to sustain its business model. It is still way above the red. Why make a big fuss out of a few % fluctuation in business?
Thousands of games are dying, deep in red, never see break even, or die before launch. WoW is right now the more healthy business in the games industry. Save your doomsday warning for another player.
I think the drop in playerbase is a combination of a number of factors. For one, WoW has been around for 7 years, and players could simply just be getting tired of playing the game. Secondly, Cataclysm rubbed a number of people the wrong way. The sudden spike in difficulty turned away a lot of casual players and many of those who were brought into the fold during WoTLK. As dumb as the whole "dungeons are hard" phase was, Blizzard shot themselves in the foot again by retconning the whole thing by making dungeons easier and by nerfing lower tier raids, which upset a number of hardcore players, most notably totalbiscuit, who saw this as the last straw in Blizzard's continuing concession to the casual playerbase. As a result, they ended up turning away both casuals and hardcore players. Thirdly, you have the general quality of the content. Most of the content in the Cataclysm expansion was for low level players in the form of the world redesign. Content from 80-85 was rather sparse with far less dungeons than WoTLK, fewer zones, and the lack of a new central hub city, though the lack of a hub city can be attributed to GC's vanilla WoW fetish as an attempt to restore the importance of faction capitals. A few new dungeons were added that were simply rehashes of old school WoW dungeons (SFK, DM, ZA/ZG), and the newest raid tier, Firelands, only consists of 7 bosses, not to mention that the zone itself looks hastily put together and devoid of personality. The smaller amounts of content can, I think, be attributed to a shift in resources from WoW to Titan which give creedence to the idea that World of Warcraft is past its peak and is no longer Blizzard's main focus.
All in all, while Blizzard is probably wondering where those players went, the loss of 300,000k really won't affect the average player that much nor will the fact that WoW appears to be past its peak in popularity, sans less quality content. I didn't even begin playing Everquest until 2004, which many will consider towards the end of EQ, but the game was still immensely popular for a number of years. WoW, with it's 11 million subscribers, will still be around for many years to come, and now is arguably just as good a time as any to journey into Azeroth for the very first time.
Ultimately it lies with blizzard whether they wana save this game or not. Any business man will see this as an huge alarm of dropping a million sub and will do something to make the game new again with fresh idea, interesting end game, player housing, new huge continent like kalimdor, etc... if not, and they don't mind the loss of 1 mil sub per year, they still have 10 more years to go.
You guys rly think only 900k left wow game? think again.they put now to play wow for free until lv 20...why do that if they still have 11.1m accounts?i left 2 months ago.played for 5 years.was the best game ever but now old and boring.same things over exp and over patch's.
You guys rly think only 900k left wow game? think again.they put now to play wow for free until lv 20...why do that if they still have 11.1m accounts?i left 2 months ago.played for 5 years.was the best game ever but now old and boring.same things over exp and over patch's.
Come on. Don't take the habit of sounding out alarm just b/c you left a game. I left too but I am never for a second worried about Blizzard or WoW. They are too rich to be worried yet, at least not too worried.
No business on earth only goes up, not even if you are selling opium.
We have once enjoy hours of gaming in WoW. We moved on, let it rest, no need pretending that it marks the end of a game.
You guys rly think only 900k left wow game? think again.they put now to play wow for free until lv 20...why do that if they still have 11.1m accounts?i left 2 months ago.played for 5 years.was the best game ever but now old and boring.same things over exp and over patch's.
Come on. Don't take the habit of sounding out alarm just b/c you left a game. I left too but I am never for a second worried about Blizzard or WoW. They are too rich to be worried yet, at least not too worried.
No business on earth only goes up, not even if you are selling opium.
We have once enjoy hours of gaming in WoW. We moved on, let it rest, no need pretending that it marks the end of a game.
I dont know about anyone else, but I enjoyed the game for years, the first hack of my account took 3 weeks emails, new email address and I ended up losing a week of game time. The second hack started out with the same procedures, Ads that told me to buy thier super secuity system and on the 4th week I surrendered, closing my account for good.
You guys rly think only 900k left wow game? think again.they put now to play wow for free until lv 20...why do that if they still have 11.1m accounts?i left 2 months ago.played for 5 years.was the best game ever but now old and boring.same things over exp and over patch's.
Come on. Don't take the habit of sounding out alarm just b/c you left a game. I left too but I am never for a second worried about Blizzard or WoW. They are too rich to be worried yet, at least not too worried.
No business on earth only goes up, not even if you are selling opium.
We have once enjoy hours of gaming in WoW. We moved on, let it rest, no need pretending that it marks the end of a game.
Who said im worried about blizz?
Sigh, pls read, did I said you did? I said I am not worried. Period.
While I agree this doesn't mean the end of WoW, its still gonna be around for a long time.
But to the argument that 300,000 subscribers is nothing to Blizzard, all I can say is that, in a business, money is money, 300,000 subs means 4.5 million dollars a month gone, thats 4.5 million that they will never earn.
A decline is a decline, surely Blizzard will care about it.....Bring on the f2p :P
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW? As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
While I agree this doesn't mean the end of WoW, its still gonna be around for a long time.
But to the argument that 300,000 subscribers is nothing to Blizzard, all I can say is that, in a business, money is money, 300,000 subs means 4.5 million dollars a month gone, thats 4.5 million that they will never earn.
A decline is a decline, surely Blizzard will care about it.....Bring on the f2p :P
While it is a hit in revenue, however one would need to look at the investment Blizz is putting into it, so in the end it might not be a real loss afterall. Many speculate that Blizz is investing less and less into WoW since Titan is being developed which has their top Devs of the WoW team and with SWTOR and GW2. Blizz might simpely put in minimal resources into WoW much like ANet did with GW while developing GW2 at the same time. There will be expansions and patfches but not near the quality in the past where they had their full team working on WoW.
While I agree this doesn't mean the end of WoW, its still gonna be around for a long time.
But to the argument that 300,000 subscribers is nothing to Blizzard, all I can say is that, in a business, money is money, 300,000 subs means 4.5 million dollars a month gone, thats 4.5 million that they will never earn.
A decline is a decline, surely Blizzard will care about it.....Bring on the f2p :P
The suits and investors may see it that way. But I suspect that WoW could lose several million subs without reality dawning on Ghostcrawler... ^^ If it continues in this direction, the investors will eventually panic. That will force the suits to do something. Until then, its business as usual.
Ultimately it lies with blizzard whether they wana save this game or not. Any business man will see this as an huge alarm of dropping a million sub and will do something to make the game new again with fresh idea, interesting end game, player housing, new huge continent like kalimdor, etc... if not, and they don't mind the loss of 1 mil sub per year, they still have 10 more years to go.
It doesn't quite work that way, the decline could become critical for them when SW:TOR and then GW2 hit...WoW is a really old game now and while it will still make money likely it will be below one million subs in a couple of years time.
Now, it's probably been said before (I just didn't have the heart to read through 18 pages of posts), but no one stays on top forever. While I too am looking forward to both GW2 and TOR, I doubt they will bring down the beast that is WOW. Sure they'll lose some more subs, but they'll retain plenty. There won't any WOW-killer, it will just keep on with a slow decline, with spikes when they add new content.
Still leaves 11.1 million playing. Blizzard makes really good business decisions, I'm sure they're already moving people from WoW to Diablo 3 and Titan, knowing that revenue will continue to decrease on their older product and ramping up their newer ones to be the next giant cash cow.
They've never been like SOE and killed the golden goose!
I really enjoyed Wow right up until the hacks started. First my partner's account , which after jumping through all the hoops and getting it back was hacked again even though he had the key logger. Most of his gear and gold gone as well as our guild. ...He quit. Then my acct. was hacked and I had to jump throught the hoops. Since I was really enjoying the game I fought to get it back. Then over the summer I let it lapse and while I was away I was hacked again. Now I get weekly letters threatening legal action for selling my acct. (which I did NOT) I have tired of the crap that comes along with the game and no longer care if they lose business.
Time to move on people! WoW may not be dead but it's been in it's death throws for a few years already.
I really enjoyed Wow right up until the hacks started. First my partner's account , which after jumping through all the hoops and getting it back was hacked again even though he had the key logger. Most of his gear and gold gone as well as our guild. ...He quit. Then my acct. was hacked and I had to jump throught the hoops. Since I was really enjoying the game I fought to get it back. Then over the summer I let it lapse and while I was away I was hacked again. Now I get weekly letters threatening legal action for selling my acct. (which I did NOT) I have tired of the crap that comes along with the game and no longer care if they lose business.
Time to move on people! WoW may not be dead but it's been in it's death throws for a few years already.
Sorry to hear about your account. I've played since late beta, and I've never had any problem. But I do tend to be a bit on the paranoid side, when it comes to security. I had one of the first of Blizzards authenticators when they initially become available.
The best security is multi layer, and evolves to match the threats as they evolve.
I'm quite certain that just about any game in the world, would LOVE to make the amount of money that Blizzard does from WoW's "death throes"... ^^ Don't count WoW out quite yet. The only real threat it faces at this point is Blizzard (and Ghostcrawler...^^). I'm certain that over time, they will slowly lose more and more players. But they could lose a million players a year, and still be around for more than another decade... ^^
Comments
MMO's come.. MMO's go..
SWToR will have a record joining, just like WoW did..
RIFT was fun for 1month then well blah..
Left WoW in patch 4.1 - Not because of graphics, was due to lack of mature ppl and crappy PuGs..
WoW will hit full F2P sooner or later by next year at least or they will end up like SWG and shutdown..
Funny part is.. the Origional WoW Dev's are now working on the new engine for SWToR, how ironic.. Let's hope they don't come out with a SWG-NGE or CU.. *but then that was sony's hand*
What some games would give for 300,000 players.
Wonder where they went.....or better yet, where they are going.
Only 11.1 million subs? Guess the head of Blizzard will be eating Mac&Cheese for dinner from now on.
Well put.
Everyone keeps acting like WoW is dying or something. When they loose around 5 million subs all at once then it might be time to criticize. 11.1 million is just an absolutely rediculous player base. WoW is probably going to be around for a LONG while yet. Im not sure if it will ever drop below a million subs or even close. Most mmorpgs, would claim massive succes with 1 million subs (including Swtor).
If WoW lost 1 million whopping subs it would be less than 10% of their player base. Thats just insane.
The game has its problems but its probably the most successful game....ever.....made. Ever. So they've done something right. Very right. I'll go ahead and add that I stopped playing WoW years ago (around the time of Burning Crusade). I will never return. But my time there was....enjoyable for the most part.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I seriously doubt that WoW is going to "shut down" any time soon... They can shrug off losses that other games could never even dream of having in the first place. Before the coming of WoW, 300,000-500,000 was considered to be a very healthy player base. To keep that many millions of players for almost 7 years, they obviously have been doing several things right.
It remains to be seen if they can duplicate that with Titan. As much fun as TOR looks to be, its no real threat to WoW. Nothing, besides Blizzard itself (or perhaps Ghostcrawler...^^) is a real threat to WoW at this point. I suspect they will slowly lose players over the years to come (unless there is a serious change of direction), but it will be years and years before they get even as "low" as 1-2 million players.
In many lines of business, fluctuations in both directions within 10% is just random movements.
Our stockmarkets, worldwide stock markets lost more than 10% in the past couple days.
What really matters is sustainability. WoW has more than it needs to sustain its business model. It is still way above the red. Why make a big fuss out of a few % fluctuation in business?
Thousands of games are dying, deep in red, never see break even, or die before launch. WoW is right now the more healthy business in the games industry. Save your doomsday warning for another player.
I think the drop in playerbase is a combination of a number of factors. For one, WoW has been around for 7 years, and players could simply just be getting tired of playing the game. Secondly, Cataclysm rubbed a number of people the wrong way. The sudden spike in difficulty turned away a lot of casual players and many of those who were brought into the fold during WoTLK. As dumb as the whole "dungeons are hard" phase was, Blizzard shot themselves in the foot again by retconning the whole thing by making dungeons easier and by nerfing lower tier raids, which upset a number of hardcore players, most notably totalbiscuit, who saw this as the last straw in Blizzard's continuing concession to the casual playerbase. As a result, they ended up turning away both casuals and hardcore players. Thirdly, you have the general quality of the content. Most of the content in the Cataclysm expansion was for low level players in the form of the world redesign. Content from 80-85 was rather sparse with far less dungeons than WoTLK, fewer zones, and the lack of a new central hub city, though the lack of a hub city can be attributed to GC's vanilla WoW fetish as an attempt to restore the importance of faction capitals. A few new dungeons were added that were simply rehashes of old school WoW dungeons (SFK, DM, ZA/ZG), and the newest raid tier, Firelands, only consists of 7 bosses, not to mention that the zone itself looks hastily put together and devoid of personality. The smaller amounts of content can, I think, be attributed to a shift in resources from WoW to Titan which give creedence to the idea that World of Warcraft is past its peak and is no longer Blizzard's main focus.
All in all, while Blizzard is probably wondering where those players went, the loss of 300,000k really won't affect the average player that much nor will the fact that WoW appears to be past its peak in popularity, sans less quality content. I didn't even begin playing Everquest until 2004, which many will consider towards the end of EQ, but the game was still immensely popular for a number of years. WoW, with it's 11 million subscribers, will still be around for many years to come, and now is arguably just as good a time as any to journey into Azeroth for the very first time.
Any business man will see this as an huge alarm of dropping a million sub and will do something to make the game new again with fresh idea, interesting end game, player housing, new huge continent like kalimdor, etc...
if not, and they don't mind the loss of 1 mil sub per year, they still have 10 more years to go.
RIP Orc Choppa
You guys rly think only 900k left wow game? think again.they put now to play wow for free until lv 20...why do that if they still have 11.1m accounts?i left 2 months ago.played for 5 years.was the best game ever but now old and boring.same things over exp and over patch's.
Come on. Don't take the habit of sounding out alarm just b/c you left a game. I left too but I am never for a second worried about Blizzard or WoW. They are too rich to be worried yet, at least not too worried.
No business on earth only goes up, not even if you are selling opium.
We have once enjoy hours of gaming in WoW. We moved on, let it rest, no need pretending that it marks the end of a game.
Who said im worried about blizz?
I dont know about anyone else, but I enjoyed the game for years, the first hack of my account took 3 weeks emails, new email address and I ended up losing a week of game time. The second hack started out with the same procedures, Ads that told me to buy thier super secuity system and on the 4th week I surrendered, closing my account for good.
Is it really so bad losing 600 thousand players out of 11 million players?
I mean if they had 1 million subscribers only would that be bad for them? Because many p2p games don't reach even close to that number.
Aion for example it only has 200 thousand subscribers in US/Europe i believe. In asia there are 1 million subscribers for the game.
So why is it so bad that they are losing such a small amount of their huge playerbase?
Sigh, pls read, did I said you did? I said I am not worried. Period.
Neverending story with some ppl..just like in trade chat in wow rofl...
While I agree this doesn't mean the end of WoW, its still gonna be around for a long time.
But to the argument that 300,000 subscribers is nothing to Blizzard, all I can say is that, in a business, money is money, 300,000 subs means 4.5 million dollars a month gone, thats 4.5 million that they will never earn.
A decline is a decline, surely Blizzard will care about it.....Bring on the f2p :P
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
While it is a hit in revenue, however one would need to look at the investment Blizz is putting into it, so in the end it might not be a real loss afterall. Many speculate that Blizz is investing less and less into WoW since Titan is being developed which has their top Devs of the WoW team and with SWTOR and GW2. Blizz might simpely put in minimal resources into WoW much like ANet did with GW while developing GW2 at the same time. There will be expansions and patfches but not near the quality in the past where they had their full team working on WoW.
The suits and investors may see it that way. But I suspect that WoW could lose several million subs without reality dawning on Ghostcrawler... ^^ If it continues in this direction, the investors will eventually panic. That will force the suits to do something. Until then, its business as usual.
It doesn't quite work that way, the decline could become critical for them when SW:TOR and then GW2 hit...WoW is a really old game now and while it will still make money likely it will be below one million subs in a couple of years time.
Now, it's probably been said before (I just didn't have the heart to read through 18 pages of posts), but no one stays on top forever. While I too am looking forward to both GW2 and TOR, I doubt they will bring down the beast that is WOW. Sure they'll lose some more subs, but they'll retain plenty. There won't any WOW-killer, it will just keep on with a slow decline, with spikes when they add new content.
Still leaves 11.1 million playing. Blizzard makes really good business decisions, I'm sure they're already moving people from WoW to Diablo 3 and Titan, knowing that revenue will continue to decrease on their older product and ramping up their newer ones to be the next giant cash cow.
They've never been like SOE and killed the golden goose!
No bitchers.
I really enjoyed Wow right up until the hacks started. First my partner's account , which after jumping through all the hoops and getting it back was hacked again even though he had the key logger. Most of his gear and gold gone as well as our guild. ...He quit. Then my acct. was hacked and I had to jump throught the hoops. Since I was really enjoying the game I fought to get it back. Then over the summer I let it lapse and while I was away I was hacked again. Now I get weekly letters threatening legal action for selling my acct. (which I did NOT) I have tired of the crap that comes along with the game and no longer care if they lose business.
Time to move on people! WoW may not be dead but it's been in it's death throws for a few years already.
Sorry to hear about your account. I've played since late beta, and I've never had any problem. But I do tend to be a bit on the paranoid side, when it comes to security. I had one of the first of Blizzards authenticators when they initially become available.
The best security is multi layer, and evolves to match the threats as they evolve.
I'm quite certain that just about any game in the world, would LOVE to make the amount of money that Blizzard does from WoW's "death throes"... ^^ Don't count WoW out quite yet. The only real threat it faces at this point is Blizzard (and Ghostcrawler...^^). I'm certain that over time, they will slowly lose more and more players. But they could lose a million players a year, and still be around for more than another decade... ^^