During this period of Blizzard’s potential resurrection, I’m having such a good time following the news. I just really hope the next expansion (and each subsequent patch) is amazing.
I feel that the hype is building and when the game is released, every MMO gamer will come flocking back and Blizzard climbs in the 14m range of players, then surpasses it. And I will sleep well as I age knowing that WoW will be around for decades to come so I can always come back to my favorite alternate universe and see what’s new and exciting.
Maybe 5 million max. Can’t see it going above that. It’s not like the olden days anymore. People have grown up and moved on with families etc.
When Microsoft takes over they could do something and have PC / console as a thing and that could boost numbers.
I really hope Dragonflight hits a home run or else it’s over. The main thing I see is peoples time being wasted over stupid grinds. Get rid of that stuff and they might recover.
Aside from that, there’s literally no way to get the official numbers, and any numbers we do come up, would just be invalid by it’s own flaws in how we get the numbers, (i.e, only taking players from one raid, reddit users, going by sales, etc.) making it pretty worthless for objective measure to gauge in the population of WoW.
Realistically speaking, they have to put Blizzard games on Gamepass. Aside from the Switch port, i can’t really imagine these games just being popular on the name alone, being on a restricted inferior platform like the PS5 or Xbox Series X, based on the (questionable) novelty of playing these games on consoles.
WoW’s problem is that the people making the content always do a great job… the people making zones, art, music, quests, stuff to do… they always do a fantastic job…
…but then it all gets RUINED by the people at the top making stupid decisions about how it all fits together.
The individual parts of Dragonflight - now - might look great. But the individual parts of every expansion look great when we first see them.
So I’m very skeptical, been down this road too many times already. We won’t know if it’s good or not until we see how it all ties together. And by that point, it will be too late.
after seeing them ignore feedback before expansions for the last few, i dont have any faith left. it would be nice if they knocked it out of the park, but realistically, i dont know if they have it in them, their recent past says no.
but we’ll see, i did not preorder DF, and the only others i did not preorder, were MoP and Legion, and they turned out great, so who knows. but maybe ill check in a month or two in and see what people are saying, but all hype for Blizz games are dead for me, i no longer care about D4 anymore either.
What they are doing with DF is exactly what they needed to do to resurrect this franchise. It is obvious that they finally realized that players would no longer stick around simply because it was World of Warcraft. They had to really update the game, and listen to feedback, to jumpstart the player base again. It appears that DF will be the beginning of a “new era” for WoW imo. Having played since TBC, and seen the downfall since WoD, Im glad to be here now to see the game get some of it’s glory back.
Anywho, the 12 million from Wrath will never happen again, sorry. Has nothing to do with the game itself, game could be fantastic, the problem is the landscape of gaming has changed so dramatically that it’s just not the same world anymore. Not only that, there are other things grabbing people’s attention more so than ever before. Games not only have to compete with each other but they also have to compete against streaming services, all of which are competing for eyeballs.
Ditch the obvious systems and borrowed power and it might have a leg to stand on. My best friend quit early in Shadowlands because of the recycled AP system. Conduits just sealed his decision.