Dying or Growing?

Everything dies at one point. It's just a matter of when. WoW will always be on a roller coaster ride of subscribers. Every time an expansion is released, many former subscribers come back and with many promotions that Blizzard lets out, new subscribers come as well. So WoW dies down over time, then peaks up again when an expansions comes out. Then it slowly dies down again.

WoW will be hear to stay for a much longer while than a lot of people think. That's the amazement of WoW: it's fun and it's easy to get into.

 

WoW is dieing it had a very long and healthy life but at this stage I think it may have run it's course, there is after all only so much more they can introduce to the game.

 

WoW peaked in WoTLK and I expect the numbers to slowly decline over the coming years. Blizzard knows this and it's why they're working on another MMO with Titan.

 

I think the game is slowly dying. It's normal and it happens in every game. It's just a matter of time before most players stop.

 

WoW has been on the downswing as far as subscribers are concerned for quite some time. Will it ever completely die? Probably not unless Blizz takes down the servers. Right now it is their biggest cash cow so I don't see that happening any time soon.

Someone else mentioned Titan which is supposed to be the WoW replacement. Last I read, Blizz had pulled all devs off of Titan and put them back on WoW so I'm beginning to wonder if Titan is ever going to happen.

 

Sceleratis, I believe they have benched Titan for now, which means it will likely be indefinitely. The last I heard, they realized that it had taken them so long that in the meantime, much of their early work has now become outdated and they weren't making enough progress forward. As in, technology has changed a lot in the last 5 years alone, so the game is already becoming outdated before they were even ready to launch it!

And as for the original question, it's certainly dying. The only growth they have at this point is from the casual gamer and kids who are excited to try the trial version. The realms are dwindling, most of the original players are long gone, and they've alienated the hardcore raiders and pvpers, so there's not much left to work with any more.

 

I think at this stage it's a case of it's already dead and it just doesn't know it yet, the game has gone on for far too long and it hasn't had many good releases and especially because the expansions are far too expensive over here, there is no real desire to continue to play it.

 

And yet, as of last quarter, they still had 7.5+ million subscribers. I don't know the breakdown of what countries those come from, though. They are clearly declining and have steadily since 2010, but there are still millions of players worldwide who are paying for the game monthly. Maybe it's still alive and well in other countries?

 

Which is why I said it doesn't know it's dead, what with the readily available free to play MMORPG's that are out nowadays and most of which having better graphical content, that 7.5 million will drop to the thousands before long.

 

While I think the game is still healthy, I think it grew beyond middle age a few years back. Yes there will always be people who have heard of it and want to try it out to replace those that have grown weary. This wont be enough if a new quality game is released that speaks to the core warcraft community.

 

That is by far the fairest comment on this, it is nice to see a comment that whilst speaks for the argument that still manages to seem to be an on the fence type of argument.

 

It was dying, but this quarter saw a subscriber boost so we'll see. Warlords is going to bring in a crowd that longs for more "ORCS N HUMANS" sorta lore. That'll be fun. I really dig the art direction if they're making more things that look like that awesome Iron Skyreaver.

 

WoD will keep WoW alive for several more years. I imagine that it'll only truly die once Blizz decides to stop making expansions. It will be interesting to see what Titan does to WoW. Will Blizz totally drop WoW content and throw all their eggs into Titan? Should be fun to watch over the next few years.

 

I think the style of player WoW started with is probably dying out. However, it seems to be paving the way for new player styles. In other words, I can't help but feel like it's being reborn in a sense; much like a phoenix.

 

All of the recent developments and stats point toward a once-again growing user base, so the future looks bright for WoW.

 

Its dying slowly but surely just like other great old MMORPG's like Runescape and others. Sadly its really dying out but luckily the new update blew some live into the game again.

 

Wow is still making millions of dollars a month so Blizzard is still winning in that sense. There is a huge spike of subscribers with the new expansion but we will see how many people they will retain.

 

WoW always goes up and down with each expansion but it is still going strong overall. They still keep above 6 million subs on average. With WoD, they're back up to 10 million subs and considering that MoP was kind of a flop, they needed WoD.

 

I think DotA 2 had a lot to do with the dieing of WoW. for americans they only see the game for what WoW had to offer, as an American living in asia I realized very few international players played WoW for the game itself and more people oly used it for a portal for DotA and the tournaments they could have in the internet cafes. With DotA 2 coming out having its own platform it took a lot of the international players off the WoW servers. If you lived here and saw how competitive the Asians are when it comes to DotA you would understand my point.

 

It isn´t just that subs once again reached 10M, there is also the fact that Blizzard added about 50% more staff to WOW over the last 1.5 years. That should be a ton of new artists that can make the game grow faster from a content standpoint. The main reason WOW has suffered so much since WOTLK is those 12 months droughts of new content. Some people unsub and never come back.

 

I think that the game is losing some of it's hype to other games that are getting released, but the same people who play it will continue to play it, so I guess it's at a standstill.