wow ended with around 5m-6m subs then tbc ended with about 7m-8m subs and by the time wrath ended it had around 12m subs.thats an average of about 2m-3m subs gained per expansion.
now lets take a look at the end of wrath which had 12m subs and take wods last announced numbers of 5.5m thats 6.5m subs lost between wrath to wod.thats about 2m subs lost over cata and mop and by the time they announced the total subs for wod.
wod had 5.5m subs and if legion followed the same trend and lost 2m subs over the expansion bfa would be at 3.5mish subs at launch .we know about bfas sold copies which was 3.4m it looks like the trend did continue.
if bfa follows the same trend of losing 2m subs the next expansion will have no more then 1m and i believe bfa has around 2.5m subs left.
Mobile phone boom getting cheaper and more powerful, better internet connectivity, and consoles having more options for online play than in the past. As other options open up, PC gaming in general is taking a dive. You can’t expect the same numbers in the past when there’s so many venues a person can take elsewhere especially with the prospect of Free to Play.
yea ill agree with that i think pc gaming will take a big hit with all this game streaming like google stadia.why would i build a $1500 pc if i can play the same game on stadia for $20 a month and mobile gaming as well will pick up more and more.
well classic wow will bring back alot of old players which is why they are pushing it now before the next expansion they want to retain some sub numbers headed in to the next expansion.
Snapshots of net sub numbers with no real understanding of the churn is fairly useless.
100 million accounts created back in MoP shows that people have been quiting at a rapid pace since forever, but new players offset them for a long time.
i doubt wow is attracting any now players kids today like fortnight and pubg ect.wow is to old for them.the peopel that are playing wow are the same ones that always have played.
less and less people are playing maybe because they are getting older and older.
Assuming a trend like that would continue in the same pace until it hits 0 is silly. Such things lose steam as it gets lower. In fact, if you take the line of best fit on a chart of WoW Subs from the start of the decline thru the last reported subs and extrapolate into present day, we would have literally hit 0 subs before patch 8.1. Clearly that hasn’t happened.
BfA sold 3.4 million copies on day 1 (including months of preorders). You know what else sold within 100k of that amount? Every other WoW expansion since WotLK. BfA clearly had to be propped up by a longer preorder period, but point being that statistic is irrelevant as WoW has always had a -significant- portion of its subs buy the game sometime AFTER release day.
Edit: Sorry, WotLK and MoP, 2 of the expansions people praise, actually sold 2.8 and 2.7 million copies by launch day. BfA sold 3.4. WoD and Legion sold 3.3.
i feel my break down was pretty solid i show the trend of subs all the way from wow launch to bfa.i think it was pretty good.i showed what people knew subs were at from wow to wrath and wrath to wod some hard numbers.
This morning in my town the temperature rose 20 degrees from the time the sun rose until noon. By my calculations it should be about 400 degrees by sunday night. I expect all life to end in the greater Denver area. Just following trends.
I think it’s purely speculation on all the forum goers who think they know the actual number of sub numbers. Regardless of trends or the like. WoD was a horrible flop, they lost nearly half their subs in less than 6 months. Legion was a decent follow up post-flop and likely brought back a lot of people. BfA is yet another flop. So, the fact stands … who the hell knows how many subs there really are? Too many mitigating circumstances which can alter the ebb and flow in the fluctuation of the number of players who play.
Unless we’re given a straight up number, then I think you can guess all day long … but the odds of being right are about as good as guessing the amount of money in a jar of change by looking at it from the outside.
Subscription numbers started to decline after Wrath of the Lich King which wrapped up the Warcraft story.
The rate of the decline from the point it started during early Cataclysm up until the last reported subscription numbers in Warlords of Draenor was fairly steady.
There was a moderate bump up, ~900,000 subs, for Mists of Pandaria and a major bump up, ~2,400,000 subs, for Warlords of Draenor.
Mists was a new expansion that totally went in a new direction in both story and art with the Pandaren and the Asian theme. That turned a lot of players off at the beginning but the expansion actually ended fairly strong except for the long content drought.
Warlords was an expansion that was very heavily hyped and specifically towards the Orcs v Humans crowd. It failed to deliver on either it’s own hype (tons of interesting cut content) and to appeal to the Orcs v Human with many of the Orc leaders going down ignominiously and a strong focus on the Draenei.
Warlords also had a massive content drought where the last reported subscription numbers were nearly 13 months prior to the next expansion with the first 6 months bleeding nearly 5 million subscriptions. Undoubtedly that means subscription numbers dropped even further below that 5.6M mark.
Warlords also had 2 major knocks against it that would turn players off of Blizzard and WoW:
Players learned not to believe the hype and thus lost faith in the developers.
Players were actively lied to and mislead from Blizzcon 2013 to Memorial Day weekend 2015 about flying in Warlords and beyond and thus lost trust in Blizzard as a company.
These two issues are directly related to the rapid rate of subscription decline in Warlords of Draenor and also bias players against investing time and money in the game going forwards.
Legion was a hail mary of requested content: the return of the Burning Legion, Sargeras, Titans, Demon Hunters, Legendary Weapons, Ashbringer, class quests, etc. It had a lot of good but also a fair bit of bad as well. And most of the good got scrapped with Battle for Azeroth with the bad being carried over and made worse.
There is nothing available to players to suggest that the subscription decline slowed, stopped, or reversed course but plenty of indications that it proceeded as normal and that current numbers are at an all time low.
If you extend the graph of subscription numbers out at the same rate of decline, then yes, it does hit 0 around 2020. But hardly anyone actually believes 0 is a realistic number as long as the servers are still turned on.
Realistically, World of Warcraft is probably getting near to it’s minimum sustainable subscription numbers, much like many older games that are still running today. However, less subscribers mean less revenue to pay for development costs for new content and more rehashed content as a result (see WQ, IE, Warfronts).
Wrath was bringing in around $180M a month. Warlords ended at just over $180M a year. That’s a huge amount of lost revenue to fund new development.
Warcrafts mechanics are too archaic to bring in new players. They dont want the WoW model of gaming. There is absolutely zero developers making WoW clones, far too risky an investment. People who play WoW and like it, thats great, but its a 15 year old game flogged to death and plays like a dumpster truck.
The chances of subs going up are slim at best. As someone said Wrath and Legion ended what the original Warcraft story was, everything now is just meh, no one cares about a burnt tree and two ladies btch fighting.
My assumption on subs is relatively the same as the OP. It’s been a steady, predictable decline since Cata. There’s nothing that can be done to increase numbers so Blizz just has to do what they can to slow down the decline.
MMOs as a concept is only 22 years old with UO’s release in 1997… WoW has reigned as the clear king for at least 13 of those years. Regardless of what happens, not a bad job at all.
