I just started the game and have to agree with you. I just enjoy the journey through the story so this is a great game for me. As is Lotro.
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How many players in North America/Europe? Last I looked up top MMOs, WoW was king in the west. I’m not sure about the East. I know anime type of games like FF14 are popular there. If their player base of 18 million is mostly in Asia, then understandable. As far as MMOs in the West, WoW is the king.
Just looked it up again, FF14 is listed at around a million players. So your numbers must be mostly coming from Asian nations where their preferences differ.
I have high hopes for Cyberpunk 2077 when they release it and the multiplayer option. A GTA like multiplayer with dystopia Shadowrun feel sounds fun. It got pushed back to September sad face =(
There really isn’t one.
Most MMO’s are kinda garbage, in one way or another. The only real reason I’m still here in wow is due to sunk cost, and investment.
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I used the most recent global figures I could find for both. I’ve never really seen the point in breaking them down by continent. Most online games have a large Asian presence, including WoW, just due to sheer population size.
It’s actually a pretty even split across the Pacific, possibly leaning slightly towards western audiences. The last expansion actually broke a million pre-orders, which is a pretty hard number.
Total population ebbs and flows, but there are definitely times it spikes up above the million mark (the release of a new expansions being the obvious times).
At this point, the ONLY reason would have over a million subscribers would be the sheer inertia of the desperate hangers-on and the game’s long history. If not for Classic, WoW would have definitively LOST its position as the top MMORPG on the market.
That being said, you seem to having difficulty processing the idea that another game could possibly unseat WoW… but taking into consideration how narrow an audience the game is currently catering to and how it seems to actively pushing everyone else away?
It really should not be that surprising at all.
But let’s be fair here… do we have any sales numbers on Shadowlands pre-orders? This will probably be the most telling hard number we can possibly get ahold of which can tell us how much momentum WoW has been able to retain.
Shadowbringers broke 1,000,000 pre-orders.
Has Shadowlands done the same or better?
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Where are you getting your numbers? The numbers I’m looking at have a very low western subscriber base, below Elder Scrolls online. Yet it has the around the numbers you listed for WoW. WoW at it’s peak had around 12 million people when there was far less competition.
I break it up by region because WoW is very much founded in Western fantasy tropes other than Mists of Pandaria. FF14 is very much like an anime game with an anime fan base. I know no one that plays FF14 and I know a lot of people that play MMORPGs.
Warframe is very MMO-ish but not entirely. It is definitley a very fun game.
MMORPGs have always had a niche audience. That’s nothing new. I’d be fine with something unseating WoW. I’ve been looking for a new MMORPG for a while. I quit WoW for a long time back in Cataclysm. I returned for BFA because the cinematic was amazing, even if the expansion itself is ho hum.
If not for Legion, I might have already quit. I wish I did not miss Legion. One of the main reasons I’m sticking around for Shadowlands is I don’t want to miss the next Legion. If I had played Legion live, I would have loved it. Legion was fricking amazing. I imagine it took a huge investment of time, money, and imagination to design something that good. The WoW team doesn’t always have that in them. I’m going to check out Shadowlands and hope it will be more like Legion than BFA.
I tried Age of Conan, Rifts, Vanguard, EQ2, Neverwinter, and a few other ARPGs like Path of Exile looking for a WoW replacement. None of them had all that WoW brings. Little elements here and there, but their game play and replay-ability wasn’t there.
I’m not some WoW fanatic. I call it like I see it. Sites I’ve seen show Western gaming for MMORPGs is dominated by WoW by about a 100% margin. I stated I wasn’t sure about Asian gaming because I’ve read there are some really popular MMORPGs made for Asian audiences that are really popular other than FF14. I know their subscriber bases are bigger than WoW given the sheer size of the Asian gaming market, which exceeds the Western one by a good margin.
Shadowbringers breaking 1 million means nothing to WoW if it was mostly sold in China. WoW is concentrating on maintaning their dominance in the West.
I even tried to play some of the Asian games because they looked interesting, better than FF14. They didn’t make the game for Western audience access.
They are to much pay 2 win for me in the Asian MMO market.
I can’t post links. Both PCGames and IGN both reported 18 million registered users for FF14 as of December. Statista estimates around 5 million active subscribers for WoW for 2019. Both figures have problems, but I’m not exactly writing trying to write a research paper over here.
If we’re going to add anecdotal evidence to the mix, I know literally no one in real life that plays MMORPGs. Or likes anime. They all play video games, but I’m the only one that will touch this specific genre. If I want to play games with real life friends, it’s Overwatch, Rocket League, or old-school co-op. These are all people in their 30s and 40s.
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WoW is MMO. MMO is a game of grind, fyi. If you dont like grind, dont play MMO. Play Fortnite and other Single Player SHooting game. You would be frustrated to see the grind of SWTOR becoz it’s an MMO too. You need mats to upgrade your weapon and you need to grind Raids just like WoW.
Vanilla 15 years ago started with TONS of grind. Expansions came to soften the grind and it come to the point that the grind is not that much anymore… like in Legion and BFA. Before, I grind/farm 2 to 3 hours before I spend 4 hours on raid. Right now, I only need 15 min of Emissaries and I am set… or 15 min of doing daily quest or maybe more becoz 8.3 is new. It’s way way better than the grind of the past. That’s the reason I quit my level 60 max’d out Classic toon becoz of the grind… 3000 Furbolgs kill on Timbermaw Hold? 1000 gold on Fast Mount by endless killing of random mobs to sell their gray item drop for gold becoz there’s no Daily Quest that rewards gold there?
The grind is not much in BFA. You could be badazz doing Heroic/Mythic Raid or M+10/M+15 with just minimum grind.
Good luck on the grind on SWTOR. You think you wont grind for those epics in there? I saw it. First hurdle, find a group from low population game that will help you grind bosses. And their population is really low. They dont even have Advanced Group Finder like WoW.
Final Fantasy is, and has ALWAYS been, Japanese.
The Chinese market has little to do with it… quite possibly nothing at all, China is known for only allowing a small number of games onto their market. I don’t know if FFXIV is one of them, but WoW is far more likely to make efforts to appease the Chinese (rat mount, anyone?).
I suggest not mixing the two up.
Read 'em and weep.
https://ffxivcensus.com/
Keep in mind “active characters” refers to character who are completely caught up with the main story quests up to the level cap. Total character counts are not direct relations to active subscribers, that number has NEVER been posted.
But the split between the different regions should be telling.
- 43% North America
- 38% Japan
- 19% Europe
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Spoken someone clearly ignorant of Swtor.
Sorry but the gearing system is superior, you get gear that rises up based on your ilvl from all types of content, you can literally get fully 306 gear with set pieces and legendary from a vendor within the first week and that is 90% of your power with the long grind being small things like bis stats and amplifiers.
But hey, keep worshipping blizzard and thinking grinding is a must for mmorpgs, Swtor has proved differently.
Maybe dont speak about games you have no idea WoW worshipper ; ^)
Oh and btw, all that gear is account bound, you can have fully geared 306 alts the moment you play your main and reach max ilvl and keep collecting loot to share among alts
That’s not even close to more than WoW. How do you get FF14 has more players than WoW off that?
Even if we go with the all characters number rather than the active characters number, that is not more than WoW. And not even close to 18 million.
Like I said, I’d love a game as fun or better than WoW. Because I want that or don’t like some aspect of WoW, I’m not going to pretend some other Western accessed MMORPG is doing better when the numbers don’t indicate that.
I’m going to keep playing WoW as long as I’m having fun and wait for the next great MMORPG to come out. I played EQ way back when. I left EQ when WoW came out and had a lot of fun. I tried EQ2, but they ruined EQ2 with half-assed world design with no racial cities to start and bad end game play.
I would love to have another MMORPG come out that draws me in like EQ and WoW did when they first hit. That would be great, but I don’t believe that game exists yet.
If you’re into Star Trek, then Star Trek Online is an okay mmo. It’s PvP is meh from what I hear (I’m not a fan of PvP so never tried it), but it’s one of the least restrictive free-to-play mmo’s. Excellent character creation system (you can create many of the canon races or a custom alien race), lots of account-bound gear, gear that scales, cross-faction grouping for STF’s (STO equivalent of dungeons), and it’s really cool that many Star Trek characters make an appearance and voiced by the actors that played them. The game’s 10 year anniversary is coming up and I’m looking forward to what the rewards will be.
My only criticism of STO is that it’s too combat-oriented for a game based on a show about exploration, scientific discovery, and resolving conflicts with diplomacy first and combat last. Every mission is the same thing: go to this system, blow up ships in orbit, beam to planet, kill bad guys on planet, beam back up to ship, blow up more ships in orbit, warp out of system, collect reward.
How do you come to the conclusion WoW is still so high?
I gave the answer earlier, produce the number of Shadowlands pre-orders.
Then we can compare them directly to Shadowbringers pre-order numbers.
Until then, I bid you adieu.
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IMO, FFXIV sucks… way too many worldwide fedex quests and boring dialogue. Never made it to endgame because I just couldn’t take it anymore. And the main story is REQUIRED to advance to next expansions.
ESO, you can pretty much do whatever you want from lvl 1.
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I’m really itching for something outside an established franchise or at least within a video game franchise. I’d love a Mass Effect MMORPG, but I also don’t trust BioWare with, well, anything anymore. Not since Andromeda and Anthem.
Bioware will probably be put down by EA if they release another flop.
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