How does WoW bounce back from 3mil decline in subs?

The game is old. I would say if one game plus its expansions has lasted ten years, then it has done its job. Anything beyond that is just a bonus.

I enjoyed the WoD expansion but I unsubscribed to the game three months ago. The reason isn't because WoD was boring. The reason is because I have played the game to death. February a few months ago marked the ten years I've played this game on and off.

It's no surprised top 100 guilds disband from WoW. Heck, ten years is a long time. People graduate, grow up, fall in love, get married, entire countries go to war, people die.

If people are complaining that WoW has lost its touch, it didn't It's just that people outgrow things. Our expectations go higher. Our interest levels go lower. Our patience and tolerance deteriorate. Would you expect people to be able to read one book ten times and still want to read it for the 11th time with the same results as the first two times around? I highly doubt it.

 

I would imagine the same way they bounced back from the 5-6 million sub decline in subs last year. A new expansion, new hype...

Expecting a game to have millions of subs the market shown is very very slim. Expecting a game to maintain millions of subs is even slimmer.

 

The same way they always do. WoW is/was a fluke in the MMORPG scene. A combination of right things at the right time that made it wildly successful, I doubt the majority of WoW's playerbase is actually happy with the game, but they stick around, or keep coming back, because of the high population. The population stays high because a dissatisfied playerbase sticks around/keeps coming back.

It's a catch-22, simply they haven't made enough blunders, or a singularly large enough blunder, to drive away enough people to fall. It's coming though, the whole 'cross-realm zoning' thing is server merges by another name, the leveling game has dyed out to asian gold farmers, pvp twinks, alts, and returnees. Rare is the newbie to WoW these days. A constantly inflated level cap, constant ilvl and stat bloat, the tower eventually topples.

 

More content, more features.

That being said, I dont think Blizzard really cares all that much about WoW anymore.

Hearthstone and HotS are blowing up. When all is said and done, Hearthstone will go down as the most played online game ever surpassing LoL in a year or two. HotS is getting coverage on ESPN and will only grow larger as video games continue to become mainstream. And we still don't know of what kind of success Overwatch will have.

It reminds me back to when SWTOR was flopping just after release and they approached EA's CEO about it. He basically said he wasn't concerned with the game because that had much bigger and more important titles. I think Blizzard has the same approach here.

 

It's not the first time their subs have suffered from a sharp decline and probably won't be the last.



I think the Token system is probably good for the population. Though, I'm not sure how they factor that into their statistics.

The WoW population dips and rises before/after every expansion, so I don't see it as them having much of a problem. Given how flooded the market is now with MMOs and how old the game is, the amount of subs they still have is pretty amazing.

I can't comment on ways to make the game more enjoyable/seductive to the basic consumer-base though, as I haven't played the game since Cataclysm era.

I think, by now, most online gamers have already played the game and grown tired of it. So, most of their retention is just a cycle of resubscribing ex-players for each new expansion.



Seems that every expansion Blizzard releases drives off a big chunk of the playerbase in one way or another. I remember tons of people hating Cata and quitting because it dumbed down raiding/skill, etc

Dumbing things down and making things easier has been their MO for quite a long while. If it's simple and easy enough to grasp, then it's more accessible to the masses.

They do this with all their games, honestly. Anything that seems complicated or overly challenging gets removed or retouched. I think it just hurts more driving away the veteran players in a game like WoW because of how aged the game is becoming. You don't have as much new blood coming into 10+ year old games as you do with say Hearthstone/HotS, etc.

In all honesty, I think current Blizzard is kind of a sad shell of what they were in the old days. It seems like they make alot of dumb design decisions in every game these days. They have a one-track focus on simplicity instead of quality and long-term depth.

 

Promotion for Warlords of Draenor was phenomenal. Sure... leave it to Activision to promise something, saying they know there is a need for it and something new to the mix, just to scrap the idea and not include it in release (DANG YOU NUKE ) but still... The game is very solid and they have improved their class balancing and overall design watch by LEAPS AND BOUNDS I tell you. WoW classes would have issues plaguing them for months, all to wait for patch day notes just to see "new in game graphic for windfury!" ..... -_- And you would have to wait months again praying they fix and help your class compete. Now it seems nearly every week there are balancing changes hotfixed, or patched in. Its very refreshing from the old customer satisfaction Blizzard used to have, which I felt was more along of the lines of "Lol we don't really care.."

More focus on the happiness and content of your customers and their favorite classes is definitely the right way to go and I couldn't be happier with the game

 

They should make you do the garrison missions, instead of sending your followers. Add some progressive way to obtain gear. The badge system from WoTLK was ok in my opinion.
At this point, even an Ahn'Qiraj style gathering event would work.

 

I think they will be able to successfully market expansions, but to me at least, the curtain is already open.. the whole gear grind system is now too obvious and too controlled. In vanilla and BC, there was a gear grind, but it was complicated and not in your face. .. but since WOTLK, the game is just too predictable and too controlled... weekly cap this, weekly lockout, daily this, daily that.. it is all just a very boring spreadsheet, there is no more exitement to gear or improving your character.

 

Two words: Flying sooner. They wanted more land exploration but they took away a major transportation method in the game. The gold gated flying was almost perfect in mists. I suggest they do the same thing for Warlords 6.2 but make it more expensive. If they had the flying compromise in 6.0 or even 6.1, Blizzard wouldn't have lost as many subscribers.

 

I think part of it is just people being tired of the game--it's been out for years and years and despite all the expansions I think it becomes old for other people. There are also a lot of complaints made by new and veteran users that are severely affecting the gameplay of the game. I think that if they add actual content that its audience can become hyped about then subscriptions will rise back quickly.

 

If you look at things purely in terms of money, the easiest way to bounce back after a 3 million subscriber loss is to release more expansions. If you look at a graph of the subscribers you will see peaks when new expansions comes out which generate not only the cost of the subscription but also the cost of the expansion itself. Subscribers do tend to drop off towards the end of an expac or if it does not meet their standards. Some people have been saying they would come back if WoW released a progression server or different servers that relate to different expansions. I am not sure that this would bring back too many people but it would be interesting to see. Now that the WoW token is out, people who buy that are essentially paying 5 more dollars per month which is helping to keep their profits high. What I mean by that is in the US, the token is around 22-23k gold and gold is usually valued at 1k per dollar which means instead of paying 13-14 dollars a month if you get the 6 month subscription you are now paying 22-23 dollars a month. Since getting gold in WoW right now is fairly easy, I don't mind using this system.

 

Kenny, normally I would agree with you, but I think WOW players are going to quickly sour on the old EQ model of releasing an expansion every year for $50 and then add no free content within a cycle. Blizzard has basically already announced WoD is finished, with no more raids or major patches. So what they have basically done is just stopped giving free content between boxes, and instead starting working on a new expansion. Players do not get more content overall, they just have to pay for expansions for frequently. Players will see through it, and expansion sales and subs will drop. This next one will probably be fine, but if they do the 1 year expansion after that, it will be over.

 

The loss is typical for WoW: it's the time people's hype and excitement for the new expansion pack fades off slowly, thus them canceling their subs. They'll be back next expac, don't worry. Also, I've heard that Blizzard plans on releasing expansions more often now, like on a yearly basis. I think I read that in an issue of PC Gamer from about a year and a half ago.

 

yes, that is true, but the way they are increasing the rate of their expansions is by adding less content patches during expansions. Players are going to see that the only thing that is changing is they are paying more often for expansions while getting overall, the same amount of content.

 

Yeah they kind of ruined the fun of PvE for me, I kind of stopped doing PvE all together. I recently started to get back into PvP and the PvP system is pretty decent in WoW compared to other games like Archage where you can get your butt kicked while out minding our own. Plus I am active in RP, so that keeps me playing WoW. They recently added a harbor to the garrison, and a lot of people seemed pretty happy about that. WoW being old doesn't have a lot of bugs that you see in other MMORPGs, so that is why people continue to play it. Plus you don't need a high grade system to run it.

 

WoW has been along for so long, it's amazing the game still has so many loyal subscribers, and I'm one of them. The numbers are going to dip and dive and rise from time to time. There's no surprise in that. Three million subscribers lost really isn't that big of a deal for WoW, which is something that most similar games would literally shut down from.

 

Yeah, saying they lost 3M subs is a bit misleading because the fact is they also gained 3M subs when WoD launched. In reality, they are just back to where they were a year ago.

 

In my opinion WoW has lost this huge amount of subscribers for a simple reason: most of the players of WoW play it because it doesn't really require a huge amount of resources in terms of hardware thus WoW can reach a really wide range of people and so now, with the time passing, the poeple start to buy new PC that supports game with a better graphics and just leave WoW.

 

I'm not sure that releasing expansions that often will turn players away. If it is true that the same amount of content is coming out but costing more money now then, yeah, a lot of people might turn away. I know their plan with it is to be releasing more content now because the expansions are supposed to include a lot more than each patch between them. In Mists of Pandaria the patches had a decent amount of content, but then there was a huge year-long wait before WoD came out. If we get the same amount of content in each patch, maybe with a patch or two less, but the expansions come out quicker, we should be getting more content overall, though it will cost more overall.

I'm not sure if I feel that the WoD patches contained enough content, but I think we need to wait a bit longer and see whether the next expansion actually comes out soon and whether they are creating enough content. I don't think that the "loss" of subscribers really affects the company a lot because every expansion the amount of subscribers they have fluctuates and they have a lot more games being more widely played now, so I expect the amount of content coming to stay pretty much the same until there is a long term decline in the amount of players.