As far as player population. By the looks of things I don’t think Blizz will ever be at the double digits again.
They keep making the same hamster wheel over and over and because of this they must know that change will never happen.
I’m surprised of this because most companies want to do better and want to bring in more customers but not this one. They seem to be content and so Blizz will keep making the same hamster wheel over and over.
Can’t really ever know, since they haven’t updated player numbers since what, MoP? Don’t really know. Guarantee you, player count will rise at SL. Always does with the release of a new expansion.
It still feels alive, but I play on servers like WrA and MG, and they’re always teeming with active players.
There aren’t many 15+ year old games still in their growth phase.
Google “product lifecycle graph”
WrA and MG are wonderful to be on because the entire server feels so alive. Even questing zones you’re bound to run into people, whether they’re leveling or RPing. This is very much why I stay on RP servers, even if I haven’t RPed in a while.
For the OP: who can really say? WoW is a 15 going on 16 year old game; the fact that it still has players in the (supposed) millions is a testament in itself. Beyond personal grievances regarding content design and the like, it’s very natural to see a game this old grow less and less over time. Not to mention MMOs really aren’t popular this day and age. No one likes the grind, it has to be immediate gratification (see Fortnite) or high graphic fidelity even if the game sucks (see Last of Us Part II). A game with “cartoony” graphics thst has grind in it? That’s a turn off for a lot of the target demographic of WoW, that being teens and young adults in 2020.
No one can factually say one way or another. All you’ll see is assumptions and opinions. Blizzard holds that data now.
With that being said, it’s less about the franchise and more about the genre. The genre has been dead for more than 5 years at least. And by dead I mean, it isn’t the popular choice by the majority of online gamers in the world. It stands to reason that any game within a dead genre will have a slow growth rate if any.
To be where they are after 15 years, is still a very big accomplishment that this forum tends to overlook too quickly. The game is doing just fine in terms of playerbase.
This is a flawed thinking. I assure you Blizzard as a company absolutely wants more customers. They may be targeting a different audience than you think they should however. Also, there are many different ways to achieve that aside from just having more subs in wow. They do have other IP’s you know?
I am pretty sure it doesn’t grow, it just goes through periods of incline and decline.
I think when they decided to stop reporting population numbers they also made a decision that population wasn’t going to be their indicator of growth though. To them, growth is likely more to do with the game’s ability to generate revenue and not how many people are playing it.
What?
So you see no difference in content from MoP to BfA?
Because I just dipped my toe with one character in Draenor and two characters in Legion and I am having a very different experience compared to prior expansions and each other. (And i still haven’t decided if I like it.)
It has it’s core playerbase now and that’s that. It was never going to stay that high, even though people thought it would.
Every game hits a peak and then drops down to it’s core following, that’s just how it works. Fortnite had that happen, so did LoL, OSRS, Classic WoW, Apex, PUBG, Rocket League, and many others.
It’s just natural for games to do that. It’s never going back to 10 mil, no matter how good the game is. MMORPGs aren’t the norm anymore and will never be, and WoW hit its peak in 2008 - 2009. That’s just what it is.
These people get it.
Judging by how SL looks so far, they’re taking effective elements from past versions of the game (classic, tbc, mop) and implementing them into a modern version. And really, aside from the potential conduit mass farming and persistent class design issues, it has the potential to bring a lot of players back.
By the looks of things you have no idea what you’re talking about since you have no idea what the numbers might even be.
It certainly did with the release of Classic, which is still wow as a franchise.
100% agree with this. Very, very likely.
Lots of high “quality” MMOs on your phone these days, a lot of them are “free” to play. Kind of hard to attract new players to a game that requires a monthly fee. Those other games just need to pull in impatient and impulsive buyers who can’t control themselves.
Considering that they haven’t showed the actual number of players, I would believe For certain that the number decreased and is not growing.
I would say “define norm”. If “norm” in gaming terms means the most popular mode of game on the market, MMOs never had that title. It wasn’t until Vanilla that MMOs got the attention they deserved. Does that mean the MMO market is tiny? If you combine the amount of people who play the top MMOs, that’s a multi billion dollar market. I wouldn’t underestimate this genre.
The norm as in what the kids are playing. Most of us here played Runescape growing up as well as WoW, and maybe some other games like CoD and Gears of War.
The gaming culture is shifting away towards MMORPGs towards shooters, MOBAs, and various looter shooters like BRs; more pro-influenced games like that.
I never said the MMO market is tiny, or that it isn’t a multi billion dollar market. I’m stating the fact that anyone who thinks an almost 16 year old game should be growing in subscribers is very stubborn and naive. I then proceeded to point out numerous popular games on the market now that have had the same peak and fall to its core player base. That’s the way it happens.
This is the topic of whether or not WoW is growing, and I answered as such.
If its growing its not by much, the game goes through expansion cycles. numbers skyrocket at the start and slowly fall as the expansion goes on with small jumps at each major patch. been doing the same thing for the last 10 years.
Its more like stable. There are new players coming in and players moving away as well.
You’ll know the answer to this question if Blizzard ever start revealing sub numbers again. If come Shadowlands, they aren’t popping Champaign and shouting from the rooftops about X sub numbers then you know WoW is still in the same spot it is now.
And we know they’re padding revenue by making formerly not exclusive content exclusive right around stimulus payments time.
So… yeah.