its just an old game now, kids are jumping ship from games at a whim now, one day you are the hottest thing on the planet, next… your game is being uninstalled because people havnt played it for a month. Most wow players were young when they started, the games 16 years on now, you might as well ask why kids dont play monkey island anymore.
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I dont believe it has anything to do with WoW and everything to do with young people and their tastes. With all these phone app games that grant immediate gratification, something that requires time and effort doesn’t appeal to a generation that is being raised on those expectations.
From my personal perspective, if I was a new player starting today. I would probably have dropped the game, the first experience a player gets is leveling. And you barely see anyone unless you just spam dungeons over and over again. A game based around being online but rarely ever seeing anyone for most my experience would disinterest me greatly. It’s like going into a game where the servers are almost completely dead already, it really blows the experience and makes you want to drop it.
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Most of the people I’ve met in game even from its outset were in their 20s to 40s. And it’s not very appealing to new older gamers either.
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Because it’s SUPER fun to spend days leveling up just to play a game with a bunch of cranky old people who yell at you about how you are a trashcan when you make one mistake, right? Oh and let’s not forget the experience of being rejected for not having a high enough IO score. Super appealing to new players. Definitely.
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I think WoW is the kind of game that you need someone else to bring you in to and guide you through the early part of the experience, few people are going to pick the game up on their own at this point. Since the bulk of the playerbase are getting older this doesn’t leave many ways for younger players to get exposed to WoW unless their parents play.
Another thing is the younger generation loves watching streams and let’s play type content, but MMOs are unbelievably boring to watch someone stream due to all the downtime.
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I dunno, I am 19 years old and been playing MMORPGs all my life, at first Runescape then when I got a job, World of Warcraft.
My friends however, do not like WoW, I am not sure what it is, but most of them don’t want to even give a try, the most common complaints I heard from them were:
A- Monthly fee + Expansion is too expensive, especially here in Brazil.
B- They don’t find combat interesting after I showed them.
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Well first, all the comments about younger players wanting instant gratification are lol, but I guess it’s to be expected older folks always like to rag on younger folks. Secondly, younger gamers probably aren’t looking to play a game that is as old as them, maybe even older than them in some cases now. Then there is the fact that rings in your head telling you that “The game has been out for so long, that I don’t even know where to start”. Legit something I had a buddy tell me when I asked him if he would ever try playing the game. Then there is a monthly fee, say what you want but the fact remains that a monthly fee is always gonna be a downside when most other online games and franchises are just pay the price of the game and you get to play it for as long as you want every month without a monthly fee.
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Yeah, games with instant gratification like Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, and Doom.
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Because large numbers of people started playing when the game was more popular and they never quit playing - hence older playerbase.
The number of new players which might be younger just wasn’t enough to shift the age difference. Plus there are a lot more games out there that would appeal to younger players.
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C’mon you mean to tell me you don’t think soulsborne games are instant gratification games? I mean most young people who play them like them so it must be a series that gives you instant gratification.
Easy, Wow is not king of the hill anymore when it comes to gaming and hasnt been for the longest time. Half of them probably dont even know it exists.
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Back in the day Warcraft was new and exciting.
These days its a dusty old treadmill that the devs just slap a new coat of paint on every expansion.
If there was any talent left at Blizzard working on Warcraft it bailed on us years ago.
The spark just isn’t there. Not creatively anyway.
Why settle for sparkless when you can get sparkles in newer games?
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I have a younger brother who is 20. He finds the game overwhelming and was not interested in the meta-gaming required of him at end-game. I directed him to Icy-Veins and he said he didn’t want to have to read “all that” to learn how to play his class. That was the end of his WoW experience.
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Being New is catastrophically Detrimental
- This game so heavily favors long-time players new players feel it’s not worth their time. By the time a new player gets to endgame, they are weeks and months behind. Very few guilds want to help players that are behind and help them gear. There is no incentive anymore to do this and gear is so rare that people don’t want to run mythic + to help new players gear.
Removal of Master Loot
- Back in the day you accepted that you were behind and knew there was a price to being carried. That price was that gear was going to go to the long-time raiders first for the current tier. There is no incentive for players to carry an under geared player since ML was removed.
Overly Complicated Mechanics
- With more add-ons, the game mechanics have gotten way more intricate and complicated. Anytime someone even brings this up on the forum they are quick to be flamed. Why would a younger newer player want to deal with mechanics that take 15-25 minutes to explain?
The game requires you to dedicated more time to play Wow than your job
- Back a few years ago I tried to play League of Legends. Well, LoL has over 130 characters and very complicated build systems and they do major balance patches every 3-4 weeks making you play totally different characters. I felt it would take years to catch up just to be average. Who is going to pay a sub for years just to feel average?
Once behind you feel Ostracized
- Once behind trying to get geared enough to be brought to raid is nearly impossible and takes weeks and weeks. In the first few weeks of Shadowlands people had no problem accepting a 165 ilvl for a Mythic Zero. Now you can’t even get an invite to an Elite WQ at 184 ilvl. People say, “Well start your own M+0”, but do you think a new younger player is going to take on starting a mythic? They are told to start a group for something they don’t understand. They have never even done one before and you tell them to make their own, when they can’t even get an invite without a 197 ilvl. Which is higher ilvl than what drops in Mythic zero. See a problem with that?
Raider IO
- People like to bring up Gear Score when you talk about Raider IO, yet they seem to conveniently forget Blizzard broke Gear Score to stop the toxic gameplay it encourages. How is the prospects of Raider IO going to appeal to a younger or new player? It’s not, yet people defend its use and makeup hyperbolic scenarios that they say will replace it. I don’t care how much you say it people don’t want to spend their own time having to look someone up and research them unless it’s for a guild application. Yes, there are some that are willing to do this. But there a LOT that is not. So forcing the experienced player to waste their time researching to form a group in that way means that there are a lot that won’t.
Gutting of the LFD tool
- For over a decade Heroic dungeons (today’s Mythic Zero difficulty) were on the LFD tool. You didn’t have to have a screening process and a lot more failure was expected. This is where a new player learned to play and could do so with people who knew there were going to be mistakes and wipes. Now success is the only acceptable outcome if you want to stay in the group.
Wow has become a Diablo MMO
- More and more over the years, Wow has picked up many of Diablo’s mechanics. Wow was fun for being Wow not Diablo. Crafting is a joke and nothing remotely close to what it used to be, and there are so many other required things to do you don’t have the time to spend 5 hours of your time crafting which was par for the course in Wow for at least through Cataclysm. Wow, use to not even have dailies or any kind of WQ system. You spent your time farming for Gold because gold was valuable and required to raid. Repair bills use to keep you poor. So you spent your time farming for items to sell on the AH and you farmed for crafting. That was the main mechanics of Wow outside of Raiding. That’s all you needed to do.
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Doesn’t run on phones or consoles, which I suspect is all the gaming gear many younger folks have these days.
That was a joke, but I think WoW does get new players. They just happen to be a little older, and they can afford a $15/month sub. Most of the players in my guild are older, but a lot of them never played before BfA or Legion.
It would be interesting to see the actual data.
I started playing at 57 and have been playing since the last year of Pandaria.
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What are we defining as younger? 20s? Teens?
Do we have empirical evidence here or are we are all just going off our guy feeling? Seems to me much of the playerbase is pretty green