Most of the players on this game have the same relation with Blizzard a women will have with an abusive husband.
“he beat me but this time he told me he won’t do it again, so I trust him”
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Argument by analogy is pretty questionable, too.
Really? Why is that? To what do you attribute the drop in customers?
Occam’s Razor would tend to suggest that it’s not a game that people want to play anymore.
Where’s this data coming from?
It’s okay to talk about it. How has Blizzard hurt you?
I still have characters to level, no big deal…
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When Blizzard decided to change its philosophy from “Make great game and money will come by itself” to “Make money, that’s it, just make money”.
It hurts to see the works of such great visionary and master of their craft getting all of their good work butchered by sociopath with only money in mind.
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I really don’t see how anyone who’s paid attention to the history of WoW could say this. Whether you or I like the changes doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, as individual opinons are subjective. What matters is how the overall player base feels, and I do trust that a large, successful company such as Blizzard does research before making most of their decisions. Those data collections techniques stretch far beyond reading what’s posted here in the forums or on some streamer’s YouTube channel.
Some things that come to mind that Blizzard has done out of demand of the players:
- More races
- New classes
- More variety of classes a race can become
- Continuously tweaked leveling experience (happened in various forms between TBC and now)
- Continuous attempts to improve faction/class balance
- A number of non-cashshop QoL changes (from storage systems, in-game travel, in-game mail, professions, etc)
- A number of paid services from the cash shop (server transfers, boosts, race and name changes, etc)
- LFD and LFR for the casuals
- Mythic raids, Mythic + dungeons, Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds for the less casual
- Catchup mechanics/gear for alts and those who started late
- Achievements
- Classic WoW
- TBC Classic
- The ability to have toons in BOTH Classic and TBC Classic
- The ability to hang onto world buffs AND still play your toon without fear of losing said buffs
You know, I seem to recall a few times when they made some bonehead moves, like removing flying during WoD. What happened? Players demanded it get implemented, so they put it back in.
Hell, they even put flying in Azeroth, which is something they didn’t originally intend on doing. They blew up the entire world to give returning players a fresh experience while “improving” the leveling experience to new players.
A pattern I see is a large group of players have a gripe, and it eventually gets addressed. Sometimes these may piss off another extreme group (casuals vs hardcore, for example.) That usually gets addressed, too. This has happened repeatedly since I started playing in 2006.
Oops, my bad. Back in the day it was only 11.5 million:
https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/world-warcraftr-subscriber-base-reaches-115-million-worldwide
Back then ActiBlizz still published their subscription numbers.
As for today, that’s more problematic. ActiBlizz only publishes MAU* (monthly active users) which are more or less impossible to convert to subscribers. (Also, they only release MAUs at the business-unit level: e.g., all of Activisio.) The 2M estimate I remember as coming from Superdata (Nielsen), but they’ve recently discontinued their game ratings service and have taken down their website.
So, looking at MAUs:
https://massivelyop.com/2021/02/04/activision-blizzard-q4-2020-activisions-revenues-are-up-qoq-and-yoy-as-blizzard-maus-drop-again/
Publishes the MAU drop-off for the last few years – note that the data they use is from Activision Investor Relations:
38M in Q1 2018
37M in Q2 2018
37M in Q3 2018 (BFA)
35M in Q4 2018 (mass layoffs)
32M in Q1 2019
32M in Q2 2019
33M in Q3 2019 (WoW Classic)
32M in Q4 2019 (Blitzchung)
32M in Q1 2020 (COVID-19)
32M in Q2 2020 (COVID-19)
30M in Q3 2020 (COVID-19)
29M in Q4 2020 (this quarter)
* What is a Monthly Active User (MAU)?
(Quoting from the 2020 10K):
We monitor monthly active users (“MAUs”) as a key measure of the overall size of our user base. MAUs are the number of individuals who accessed a particular game in a given month. We calculate average MAUs in a period by adding the total number of MAUs in each of the months in a given period and dividing that total by the number of months in the period. An individual who accesses two of our games would be counted as two users. In addition, due to technical limitations, for Activision and King, an individual who accesses the same game on two platforms or devices in the relevant period would be counted as two users. For Blizzard, an individual who accesses the same game on two platforms or devices in the relevant period would generally be counted as a single user.
Note the boldface – you can’t easily translate from MAU to subscriptions.
So a mixed bag of data… but the game has clearly declined in popularity.
Okay, so 2020 was toward the end of BFA. They did polarize their crowd with the corrupted gear. Guess what… they got rid of that. BFA was definitely one of the weaker expansions (which followed Legion, arguably the strongest since WotLK.) Based on a lot of what they did with Shadowlands, they were listening to gripes from players about BFA.
WoW is still doing quite well.
Regarding multiple accounts - yeah, you’re never going to have a solid count. Regardless, 10’s of millions of subscribers is pretty good business for them.
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Especially for a game as old as it is, on top of MMOs being a declining genre outside of Asia.
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That’s one of the points I’ve been trying to make. All games will have a natural attrition at some point. The fact that WoW has had multiple peaks speaks volumes.
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What’s a “PHONE” 
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It’s evidence that fewer people are playing WoW. I doubt MMORPGs in general will ever be as popular as they were in the 2000s. Tastes change.
Couchy
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If it does not come out in May, then it does not come out in May! We move on, but maybe players will take unoffical/datamined information with more of a grain of salt in the future.
Never could understand people who plan vacations around speculations or unoffical information.
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Here’s a little history lesson for folks:
WoW celebrated its 6th anniversary during Wrath of the Lich King - still a relatively new game, but with enough experience in the market that it knows what it’s doing to earn the biggest active subscription base at the time, peaking at ~12 million players
Also around that time, it was pretty much the only game on the market - its closest competitors were miles behind, MMOs that had already begun to grow tired and weary by the time WoW first stepped onto the scene, and newcomers like WildStar, Rift, and even the mighty Star Wars, the so-called “WoW-killers” could never topple the king, all failing to capture something unique and instead trying too hard to be WoW with a new coat of paint. WoW was at the height of its power, still being new enough to not be tired, while old enough to be out of its growing pains, with effectively zero competition
Then came the decline. WoW rode its success into the next expansion, but that did not last long, as subscriptions slowly began to trickle away. People unhappy with Cataclysm’s direction, new college-age young adults no longer having time to play, veterans who simply were growing tired of the game they had played for 6 years now. Whatever an individual player’s case may be, the numbers were falling - but still staying fairly high, and by the end of Cataclysm, while a pessimist may see it as “WoW’s numbers were gutted, game is dead”, a realist will see it as “WoW still has like 8 million active players”
The following expansions would be met with varying degrees of success, with the sub count gradually falling lower and lower, and the advent of actual competition from games like Final Fantasy 14, it seemed WoW’s reign was over. Still, the game has last 17 years and still maintains an active playerbase of a few million, in a time period where mobile and free to play games are at their peak of popularity, and it and FF14 are basically the only still successful subscription-based games on the market. It may not be as strong as it was at the height of its power, but it’s still going strong regardless
TL;DR: a few million active players in a market actively against the subscription model of games is still a few million active players. Stop comparing the current numbers to what they were back when MMOs were the king and WoW itself was the only real game worth playing to begin with
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People dont only stop playing because they are upset about something.
They don’t have tens of millions of subscribers. Anymore.
Hint: there’s a reason they stopped publishing sub numbers.
Please note that I’m not criticizing the game… hell, I’m still playing. I’m just pointing out that they’ve tanked their customer base over the last 10 years.
And the SL pre-patch, as well as SL, itself.
I think they probably do. Shadowlands sold 3.7 million copies on day one. Then there’s Classic.
I work in education. There are all kinds of metrics out there to try to describe a population. Each one has its flaws. Not a single one tells the whole story.
Looking at monthly active users has some advantages over a raw subscription count. How many folks pay for 6 months at a time and quit playing a couple months after they paid for 6 months? I know I have. Hell, once time I thought I canceled and ended up paying for a whole year before I caught the charge (I didn’t like cataclysm, and I was busy with grad school at the time.)
I didn’t take it that way, and I apologize if it seems like I did.
That seems to be a common theme here on the forums. The picture I see is different. I had several long breaks from WoW due to not liking particular things. Cataclysm wasn’t my cup of tea. I came back half way through MoP and quit toward the end of WoD due to life. I came back when Classic was announced. I leveled through Legion and tried BFA. Retail isn’t my thing… but I get why others like it. I also see that retail exists due to Blizzard responding to player demands. Yeah, some of their changes end up going over like farts in a space suit… but they seem to pay attention to those and they do keep trying.
Okay. You got the data. Do with it as you will.