Are WOW's days numbered?

It certainly isn't soon enough to be predicting doom and gloom for World of Warcraft. Contrary to popular belief it never held the #1 spot in paid subscribers to begin with. That honor goes to Runescape. Even if it had fallen from the top spot there many games with a fraction of WoW's subscriber base that are flourishing.

 

Well, I guess every good thing has an end. It was inevitable that at some point there would appear some new game that would get more prestige like it would be LoL nowadays. People started getting used to WoW and probably their only hope is to switch to "free membership".

 

I guess it's the time that even WoW will fall yes. Well, the curriculum of WoW isn't that bad tough as it is online since a really long time (more than 10 years) and it had more than 10 million of active users so I guess WoW has made its time and now it's really the moment to get over with it.

 

It's a 10 year old game. You can slap new paint on an old house but you're still gonna have to eventually fix the interior and get new siding. WoW's the same way. The gameplay and a lot of the concepts that set the tone for MMOs is starting to lose traction. Times have changed, coding's changed, graphics and people's desires for a more dynamic play style.

WoW's had a good run but it's time for a fresh 2.0 if they wanna survive the next 10 years. People love the lore and Blizzard takes care of customers but the game's dated and it's really showing.

 

If I am going to get into the game it definitely needs to be brought up to date on textures, and more content. However there is a large user base, and this gives them time to hopefully turn it around.

 

I hate it when people like the previous poster just respond with generic nonsense to raise their post count. Content is fluid and added constantly in an MMORPG so that isn't a real issue. As for textures? Seriously... Do you even know what textures are? If you actually understood the topic I'm guessing you would have spoke to the graphics engine not textures.

 

I think they are until Blizzard makes WoW free to play. The next expansion, while bringing back a lot of people, won't restore the full player base so they would need something revolutionary to revive the game at this point. Releasing expansions won't save WoW and if Blizzard is still too stubborn to make WoW f2p then they are screwed.

 

The game isn't in need of revival. They have fluctuations in numbers like this all the time both directions. They don't have any need to go to FTP even if they had permanently lost that many subscribers. There are profitable subscriber models out there with 500K players that do just fine I don't think going down to 7 million is an issue.

 

They are actually down to 5.2 million right now and there is no excitement at all for the next expansion. While you are right, there have always been cycles during an expansion.. this is unlike anything previously. they have now lost 50% of their subscribers since the expansion was released less than a year ago.

The thing is, WOW can kick around just fine at 1M subscribers. New content is not an issue because they have always been one of the worst at providing content. A subscription based game that has twice gone a year without new content.

I don´t think they will ever got FTP just because there is a ton of work involved with switching over to a full cash-shop.

 

The terrain texures in WOW are 512, most other games are up to 2048 by now. I do not know what the other poster actually knows and if he was accurate, but I will tell you that when you look at stuff like cliffs and cave walls it is very noticeable that they are low quality.

They have increased the poly count as the expansions have gone along, but for terrain textures, they are still using 512s for most outdoor scenes.

 

They keep re-hashing lore and older game content which they offer up as new updates. It makes it seem like they don't have much new to offer. The last expansion was entirely derivative of BC. They don't add enough new dungeons and the game mechanics don't really improve. The monotony and grind came on a lot quicker with WoD. I think all of this has a larger impact on the subscriber loss than textures to be honest. A game can have terrible graphics and do well if it is interesting.