Yeah, and?
Who says that’s not normal. I’d wager the sub count from Vanilla to now looks like a nice sine wave, descending overall.
Of course the subs drop after a new xpac has been out a few months.
Ok? What’s your point?
well that tells me they suck at the job, 2 months and people leave is quite sad when you think about it.
You said wrath didn’t have spiky subscription numbers because of Arthas being recognizable or whatever.
Those subscriber numbers are global and include China, who wasn’t playing wrath until iirc 8/31/2010.
Just trying to interject some facts into the discussion.
that explains why there is a spike before cata release (nov 2010 iirc), it was launch for wotlk china.
either way I stand by my point: subs drop as hype declines, there’s nothing blizzard (or any company) can do to prevent that. there will be another (smaller) spike with every major patch.
That what happens when you designed an entire expansion aimed solely for Limit and Asmongold. Casuals got shafted hard this expansion not in the fun way too.
It is pretty much par for the course for any live service game to have a sharp decrease in player count after a new expansion/patch launches. I don’t know why this is somehow sad.
Path of Exile skyrockets to the top of the Steam charts any time a new season comes out. Right now, it currently sits at #18. This is the same case for Destiny, Apex Legends, Warframe, etc…
Yeah, I think people are blowing things out of proportion when they doom and gloom the sub drops after each expansion launch.
The current trend per their recent quarterly report was 6 consecutive quarters of year over year growth. That’s a good longer term sign. The Superdata data point of a 41% drop (incomplete dataset not including china) also had some brief commentary that the drop was back to normal levels due to this cyclical trend.
I get that people have some criticism of shadowlands, and I agree with parts of it, but it’s super tiring to hear all the negative spin and doom and gloom when it isn’t warranted.
Like, I’m not surprised that an expansion launched during the holiday season saw a large spike in players, and then by February when people are largely back into their normal school / work routines, there was a drop back to normal sub levels.
It’s shocking, I know.
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What this shows is that wow is just not captivating enough to keep the new players subbed.
This is how people play video games in (current year) though. There are the die hard long term wow players, and there are people who come and check out new stuff for a few months then go play something else for a while, and come back to wow for patch content etc.
I’m honestly surprised that people still don’t recognize video game player habits across the industry.
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I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN!
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I don’t think they measure subs, they measure people playing. I’m still subbed but I play a lot less than I used to and some days not at all
Yeah idk, you can justify it whatever way you want. Realistic fact is there was a point where sub numbers where 10 million. Somewhere along the line they dropped. They came back in MOP. And then never reached those levels again.
It’s not even that (well, it partially is).
The current video game climate is saturated with video games asking players to choose them as their routine-style game, I.E. a game that wants you to treat it as a pseudo-lifestyle rather than an experience you pick up and put down after completing. These games want constant engagement, and not a lot of people really have the time to do that anymore, and if they do, they’re likely to stick with just one. This creates a market that is extremely competitive in striving for player engagement.
For some people, World of Warcraft is not that game. World of Warcraft is the game they pick up and put down after leveling to the max. For some people, it’s Destiny, or Fortnite, or PUBG, or any game that is “always online”.
Even Animal Crossing can be considered among these games. That’s how widespread this type of genre is.
World of Warcraft can’t really compete with that kind of phenomenon. This isn’t 2010 anymore, when World of Warcraft was the only game of its caliber to provide such an experience. Acting like any sort of subscription decrease is indicative of the game failing is an obtuse way of looking at how the industry is evolving.
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Anyone not realizing SL = Fail on an Epic scale is delusional.
Good job Ion! You found the WoW killer = WoW.
Are you folks getting paid by SuperData?
We have what seems like a daily thread about them.
More delusional than the forums that think typical subscription behavior following an expansion release is indicative of “fail on an epic scale”?
Every expansion release: Subs go up, peak, and drop.
Every expansion release: GD shrieks “WoW is dead.”
And life goes on.
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How do you quantify what an “Epic Scale” is?
Pretty much every initial release patch in the last 10 years or so have been huge failures…so what are we using as the standard of success?