Well BFA and WoD are two worst expos so following that trend is not great (the same trend isn’t seen in earlier expos).
But, its actually worse for SL - COVID continues to boost stay at home activties across the board, so to have this big a loss in a highly favorable environment is a real indictment of SL’s failings.
Funny, I had this exact same conversation with a bunch of guys at work just the other day.
Most people only read headlines - thus the click bait movement was born
I see what you are saying…but I disagree
Staying at home is actually hurting WoW because players have more time to burn through the limited content and burn themselves out.
If everyone was able to move freely the content would last longer than it has
The point being, Covid is not a favorable environment for a game with limited/time gated content
This ignores the fact that loads of WoW players stayed subscribed even through huge content droughts. But when Blizzard decided to emphasize end-game over vibrant world content, they started losing those players either altogether or very quickly.
WoD was where it changed, Legion did better but still hung on to dumb systems, and then it has been steeply downhill since then.
You can’t make a game for the highest level end game players and skimp on the world part of WoW. It guts the game. I’ve been saying this since WoD dropped and here we are.
Search is hard I see 
And people need to brush up on their critical thinking skills. They’d find out these drop offs always happen.
no it doesn’t, check the subscriber history (until they stopped revealing it), the subs always spike at launch then drop as time goes on. the one exception was wotlk but arthas is a recognizeable character outside of wow and even outside of gaming so it’s natural that his patch had the most subs through all of it.
Funny how many casual players never unsubbed for over a decade and didn’t burn out. Bad game design is what is driving players away.
Funny, how we have never had a pandemic that forced a large portion to stay home more than they generally would
I haven’t had any extra time to play the game and it still sucks.
Scary to imagine what the decline would have been if there wasn’t a global pandemic, eh?
China was still on TBC for most of the time the west was on wrath.
I have had 4-8 extra hours to play per week…the game is in line with Legion and BFA at initial release.
it’s just sad that people pay for expansions in whatever game they play and quit in no time lol. it truly ain’t healthy for wow itself if you like it cause everytime this happens the pug life goes straight to crap quick. and i ain’t the only one saying this i have numerous people saying pugging is crap soon as tons disappeared.
Nice on your extra time, are you getting more burnt out because of the extra time?
Edit: I say nice but hopefully, you didn’t lose your job or something.
Relative to the change of people who bought it at launch. So it’d be similar since I doubt they’d have as big of a launch if it weren’t for the pandemic.
all the subs are just gonna be up once TBC releases so i doubt they care about retail right now, these are the devs u ppl have supported for 15 years
A lot of different Dev’s. Not all the same as 15 yrs ago.
Yeah, I have ran out of things to do because I pushed hard at launch due to having so much extra time. Skipped family holidays because of travel restrictions
All my primary reps are exalted, I have made multiple 235 legendaries, and I have the TC mount.
Nowadays I pretty much just raid and M+
Uh…BC, Wrath, Cata, MoP did not lose 41% of players in the first 3 months. This trend is only “normal” by comparison to WoD, Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands where gameplay started a steady decline and Blizz became more and more out of touch with their players.