World of Warcraft Has Lost 600,000 Subscribers Since May

[mcl5000]

They can't win with the difficulty. The people who enjoyed the tougher content in vanilla and BC now have jobs and families and aren't going to spend a bunch of time raiding difficult content. The people who enjoyed the easy content in recent expansions aren't invested in the game from the beginning, so they drop their subscriptions the second they get bored (and wouldn't even bother with difficult content).

I can't imagine there are a lot of people 16-23 that will sign up for raiding 4-5 nights a week in a game that's 9 years old....and people my age (27) are either burnt out or don't have a few hours every night to play video games.

 

[Aris Vasilopoulos]

all the people who talk shit about this game need to chill out... this "low" number of 8.3 million subscribers is for a 10 year old game... activision-blizz is squeezing just over 120 million dollars a month from a 10 year old game from subscriptions alone. you might not like the game, but calling it dead and a waste of time is just ignorant. its like one of the top 5 most played games even with a 15$ per month sub

 

[spunkmerk]

The reason and everyone knows it, is because of the not wanted xrealm.
Every sense xrealm started you here people complaining.
I play and I see the comments why doesant Blizz?

 

[spartanmk2]

The sad thing about WoW is I can take a leave of absence from the game, return 6 months later and there is nothing new and everything is the same as if i never took a break and just logged on the next day...whereas in vanilla/bc if I took a week off, I missed A LOT of things that I looked forward to.

 

[mcl5000]

They can't win with the difficulty. The people who enjoyed the tougher content in vanilla and BC now have jobs and families and aren't going to spend a bunch of time raiding difficult content. The people who enjoyed the easy content in recent expansions aren't invested in the game from the beginning, so they drop their subscriptions the second they get bored (and wouldn't even bother with difficult content).

I can't imagine there are a lot of people 16-23 that will sign up for raiding 4-5 nights a week in a game that's 9 years old....and people my age (27) are either burnt out or don't have a few hours every night to play video games.

 

[master9716]

why play wow when Rift Is free and way better, they had to go free to play bc nerds wont leave wow for a better game.

 

[John Pombrio]

Letting my account expire next month.

 

[nhat11]

The East has far better MMOs than WoW and it's F2P which CN and other asian countries perfer.

 

[phenex]

The problem with the latest WoW expansions is the lack of story to drive the experience. BC and WotLK were great because they relied on the story and lore developed in Warcraft 2 and 3. people wanted to play WotLK in order to finally defeat Arthas, and bring the story that began with Warcraft 3 to a conclusion.

Then Cataclysm and Mysts of Pandaria come out, and we have some new antagonists with little to no back story forced on us, and the plot just isn't compelling. Not to mention all the other BS changes Blizzard has made, such as blending the classes, making the content too easy, too many freebies, etc., etc. There is little compelling about the game anymore, and it has become just a cash cow. If Blizzard had released Warcraft 4, things might be different.

 

[bystander]

I personally think the LFG and Cross-server instances are the biggest turn off in the game. It sure made it easy for anyone to join and get stuff done, but it has killed the social aspect of the game. The part of the game that keeps players coming back.

I loved to do PvP before WotLK. You had grudge matches with teams you knew. When you formed groups, you knew who you were playing with, or eventually you would as you'd be able to stay in contact with people, and getting to know people helped you get into future groups. Now you join an instance queue, join up with some random person from some random server, never say a word and blaze through the instance with no challenge what so ever. Random queue people easily do heroic instances, which was not the case in Burning Crusade and earlier.

All the ease of use is killing the key component for MMO's, the social one.

 

[beayn]

All the people saying it was too easy didn't play hard modes. I think having an easy mode is a requirement. Why should people pay $15 a month and not get to see all the content? In Vanilla, only 1% of the wow subscriber base had seen any significant raid content. Allowing them to see all the content was a must.

Now I had a subscription for 8 years, even paying my monthly subscription while not playing the game for nearly 2 years. I cancelled a few months ago and Blizzard sends me an email with an offer to return... What do they offer for 8 loyal years of $15 a month? ONE WEEK FREE. They couldn't even offer me a free month after all that? It just seems like a slap in the face. Not interested.

 

[neilquan]

For me, the inability for them to find a balance between pve and pvp was the most frustrating. And in the end was what drove me away.

 

[jonnyabu]

I know Blizzard lost me at Wrath. I was an end-game raider and found the difficulty of the end game raids in vanilla and Burning to be the fun part. Making it way too easy took out all the fun. I enjoyed the constant wipes with a group of people working toward a goal and that satisfaction when a boss was downed. But then they turned it into something like Farmville where every Joe off the street could go in and farm the hardest raids (or so it seemed on my server) and it just zapped out all the fun of the game. There was no challenge, no enjoyment.

 

[nottheking]

While there's a lot of complaints that could be leveled against the game (ranging from the experience with instances and raids to the likability of newer content) to be honest, none of it is really behind the decline.

Simply put, all MMOs have a finite lifespan. And in this case, WoW is past its peak, and, for better or worse, headed towards its death. There isn't anything Blizzard COULD do to stop this from happening; at best, they can slow it down with expansions, but as we've seen, by now it's not very effective; while Burning Crusade helped accelerate its growth through the (then uncharted) multi-million-subscribers territory, and Wrath of the Lich King allowed it to hit a record-setting peak of 12 million... The game couldn't grow beyond that, and started to decline.

Ignoring the temporary shuttering of WoW China (taking 5 million subs away for a brief period) the game sank back down to nearly 10 million before Cataclysm pushed it back up to the 12.0 mark seen in the WotLK heydey two years prior... But after that a more steady decline occurred, nearly doubling: the same 10 million mark was dropped only about a year and 3 months after Cata's release, ending a bit below that before MoP launched...

But by then, the expansion couldn't restore the game; it was already becoming old-hat, so it only pushed back past 10 million... And THAT rebound evaporated almost instantly; a lot of them simply quit once they finished the new content, and already, 3/4 of a year since then, we've dropped to 7,700,000 subscribers, or around a million a quarter.

At this rate, (again, for better or worse) the game may likely shut its doors within 3-4 years, or at least undergo a transformation to an entirely different form (such as entirely freemium) after dropping to around 1 million or less subscribers by then. But by then, there will be so much fewer current players that people won't care as much... And a >10-year lifespan will be impressive for an MMO, setting a new record for an "ended" game.

 

[bystander]

beayn wrote:
All the people saying it was too easy didn't play hard modes. I think having an easy mode is a requirement. Why should people pay $15 a month and not get to see all the content? In Vanilla, only 1% of the wow subscriber base had seen any significant raid content. Allowing them to see all the content was a must.

Now I had a subscription for 8 years, even paying my monthly subscription while not playing the game for nearly 2 years. I cancelled a few months ago and Blizzard sends me an email with an offer to return... What do they offer for 8 loyal years of $15 a month? ONE WEEK FREE. They couldn't even offer me a free month after all that? It just seems like a slap in the face. Not interested. [/b]

No, I made it clear, that after BC, the hard modes were super easy, and any random xserver group could just plow through them without even thinking or saying a word to each other. Normal instances were super easy for those still leveling.

In BC, normals required people to talk to each other to get through and hard modes required some coordination and reasonable gear. Until good gear was found, it still could be done with good team work.

If you feel they should have some exceptionally easy content for those who don't want to work in a team, then add a 3rd difficulty, but in WotLK, Hard mode was like BC normal, maybe slightly harder, but not much and there was nothing for those who wanted a challenge. (not talking about raids here).

 

[Reynod]

Some of those gamers have been immersed for like over 8 years ... thats 10% of your life.

Their mum's basement must stink ...