FF hypes harder but churns quicker. It delivers a much better solo quest storyline befitting of its squeenix roots and on the average player interactions are more friendly and accomodating to learning players.
Wow cannot market to save it’s life due to a myriad of company controversies but its playerbase is pathologically loyal to the franchise. The game delivers the widest difficulty spectrum in mmos, there is engaging and fun content at all skill levels, but engaging with endgame content strongly encourages players to join guilds and communities due to pug culture becoming lawless and hellish towards new players.
It’s hard to tell anymore since MAUs and subs haven’t been reported since Cata. Any numbers we may see floating around the web are either outdated or guesstimations.
You could attempt to do some math with the financial fiscal info, since that’s reported pubically, but Acti usually lumps WoW’s info with their other IPs to try to hide it when it isn’t doing too well.
Nope, its long past its prime. FFXIV surpassed it for a time, Lost Ark took a lot of people away, GW2 has been on the rise, OSR is always beloved and supported, etc.
The dip from 12m in Wrath to less then 2m now…yeah it fell off HARD. thats a fraction of what it had.
Here we are almost 19 yrs since WoW came out…how many folks have seen in the forums posted the next WoW Killer game is coming out…haha…and we are still here to this day…
On population of active players you’re probably right. Wow still beats Old School Runescape on MMO Population, but their numbers are all estimates per below (since WoW stopped listing subscriber count in their 10Q financial reports at the end of 2014).
Being biggest doesn’t mean being best or top-recommended. A simple Google search of Best MMOs in 2023, yields many different recommendation (or ranking) sites where WoW is not on top (and not even 2nd and most).
That doesn’t mean WoW is bad or dying!
It just means the online article reviewers have shifted away to a competition that wasn’t even present in the MMORPG space in any significant way 10 years ago and now there’s lots of viable alternatives to WoW.
You have to be deluded to believe Lost Ark took players away. Game was 80% bots within a week. Nor would I say GW2 is on the rise. It has been on a slow decline hovering around the 3.5k mark for the past 6 months.
That depends if it’s 10%, 20%, 30% of players. It sounds like a significant number, most people estimate WoW between 1-4mil players especially a patch after expansions now? I don’t know, barely anyone releases their numbers anymore. At least Runescape does, which is good.
Activision Blizzard won’t use subs because MAU looks better. Remember that dude who transferred enough WoW tokens into Bnet dollars that he was able to spend like 50K just on DI? Taking into account the additional money for someone to buy a token and it was something like $65K of real life money they made.
Take into account all the money everyone spends not on a sub, divide by the amount of active users and the average per player is almost certainly more money made than what a sub offers. Things like OW skins or whatever they sell, WoW store mounts, pets and mogs, I don’t know, whatever else is on the store.
Add in D4 and soon a battle pass and shiny things people can buy, and that average $$ per user will go up. As long as the incoming revenue across all games is enough why would they advertise subs? Their shareholders only care for the end figure, cost to run the company vs income.
Classic/Vanilla WoW was a cultural phenomenon, and lives on in the memory of all that have played it.
It’s probably not #1 anymore, but it was at a point, and no one will forget that.
It’s like Mario 64- it won’t ever die, due to people always wondering why it was so successful in the first place, so they go try it out and become addicted themselves lol.
They use it in a way that makes the game look populated to their investors, when it is just a lie to cover up how bad this game, WoW, is actually doing. They lump MAU’s from ALL of their games into one lump some to the investors. So we really do not know WoW’s numbers, but i would stake my life on, its nowhere as popular as SL, and thats saying something!
I honestly don’t know what this is referring to, as someone that just came back I’ve been slowly catching up on stuff I missed and my friends didn’t link me/talk to me about or in our group chats. Or meme osmosis.
They probably make a lot of money but I would be curious to see the numbers for just WoW.
I guess more for the players, they did used to advertise the numbers in quite a few places and it felt like it wasn’t always just for shareholders.
