Looking back at some data regarding subscription numbers and one more modern trend I noticed is the spike and drop patterns after expansion releases and major patches. This didn’t seem to happen for vanilla, tbc, wrath, or even cata.
These spike and drop patterns seem to be the norm now. Even expected by Blizz press release comments to investors.
The spikes are indeed impressive, like back to near wrath to cata levels in some cases… but then dramatically drop off.
This seems to be an accelerating trend and on a deeper level seems to indicate a player base they can’t retain the way they could back in the day.
It’s always happened, there is no “health” data to be obtained from this trend. The drops between major patches/expansions were just less noticeable from vanilla->cata because WoW (and by extension, the MMO genre as a whole) was experiencing explosive growth during that time. WoW’s early days brought a lot of people into the market that had never even heard of SWG or EQ or UO or DAoC etc.
Now not only is the market fairly saturated, the genre has a lot more competition from other online games as a social outlet.
They are marketing the game to appeal to the kind of cyclical player who has always existed, who buys every game, tries it out, and moves on to the next.
Unfortunately they aren’t doing as good a job of retaining the players who came back to play the entire expansion, based on early marketing hype for prepurchases.
And from what I’ve read, ever since WoD, the spike and dropoffs have become much more significant, amplifying with each passing expansion.
Like I said before, official data comfortably supports the degeneration from stable sub numbers to a spike and drop off pattern with an overall decline.
The inference I get from this is that the idea that people are “just got too busy to play WoW” is overstated.
It seems like they have plenty of time to play… they just get bored and leave whereas they didn’t before.
Great for the share holders. 10M+ people log in for a month every other quarter is WAY more revenue per year than keeping 1-2M players happy all year long. So you get FOMO, seasons, instant catch-ups, etc. all geared towards that playstyle. That’s the game wow has been for about a decade now.
Then they should be providing at least token content for those players.
People who buy the expansion expecting to move on in 2 weeks to a month don’t run into the issues that loyal customers who planned on staying for the entire expansion started to run into after a month or two. But who would buy the game if they realized that 1. the hype was probably wishful thinking; and 2. the playerbase is shrinking due to long-term players being unsatisfied with the product.
Vanilla WoW is a 17 year old game and doesn’t exist any more, other than its Classic incarnation.
However, Shadowlands is not a seventeen year old expansion. It’s less than a year old, closer to seven months old. You think Shadowlands is doing well?
