Now it will be 1-60. And WoW is pretty “clicky baity” for kids. The problem is that the price of the subs is prohibitive for most kids to justify it to someone who will pay for them. Taking that the average number of accounts per player in wow is 2,2 and some people play with insane number of accounts, like I saw not few people playing with 10 to 15 accounts, it is not far fetched to think kids are not the exact demographic to cater if you want subs.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
This is 2004 here. EverQuest launched in 1999. Ultima Online launched in 1997. Runescape in 2001. Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, Doom, Quake, Tribes were all super popular online during this time as well.
The online community in the 90s might have been smaller than the community that exists today but it’s largely the same audience who desire the same things.
Look at the market share of video games today. MMORPGs, ARPGs, FPS, CTF, BR which is an extension of CTF are all basically the same carrot.
This is why I said PC gamers have always been a 20+ crowd. Because PCs are expensive. More expensive than consoles. PC games targeting minors are the stupidest thing going. There is an audience for PC games and that audience is mature. Easily. That’s always been the case even in the 90s.
Well in truth girls and boys don’t have the same interests either. I know my ex never played games on our computer when we were together. We both grew up in the same time period but her interests were of course social media (1990s social media) and random hookups.
I wouldn’t put her disinterest in the same category as ours.
Yeah the people who are looking for an online PC gaming community are diverse. Some like WoW, some like EQ, some like FF. This was no different in the 90s. Some wanted EQ, others wanted Tribes, others wanted Diablo. Etc, etc.
The issue here is WoW as a design strategy has a specific way you are meant to play it. Retail has a very, very rigid gameplay loop. My complaint has always been this could be better and easier on the developers if they realized we don’t all come to the game for dailies and world quests. If we had choices such that we could get right into the content we want to play when we login the game would be in a better state than it is today.
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Don’t ya know feelings are more scientific than an unofficial census.
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I’m not disputing most of what you said. But I do think they fumbled in areas where systems have become more convoluted than they need to be. I’m not saying 10 million subs lost because of the fumbles, but it would be unfair to not include some of Blizzards missteps as not having any subscriber consequences.
Where/how did you come up with this?
Exactly this. People who claim WoW is only losing subs because the cycle of life are wrong and people claiming WoW is only losing subs because it sucks are wrong. There are probably as many reasons as there are lost subs. It all matters.
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lol good one.
Taking into consideration the number of concurrent users you can find out in sites like WoWhead and others, and taking into consideration the number of people in openly multiboxer guilds and openly multiboxer players. Actually, among active players might be more, because the total players in WoW are not all active.
I myself used to play in one, and when I used to play in horde, I used to play from 6 to 12 accounts.
Normal people who would pump up the sub numbers don’t care about muh systems and class balance. They played because back in WotLK desktops were still a thing and WoW was better than all the other options.
What killed wow was a changing market.
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I mean ,ok… its a theory… but beyond “hunch” ? You plopped it down like a fact.
EDIT. Sorry, not trying to be confrontational… just chatting.
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It is the numbers, It might be actually more, because there are many multiboxers using like 20 accounts to gold farm. I know one guy who I have seen multiboxing 40 accounts.
One should avoid speaking for the masses. You haven’t any more idea what a “normal” people would do than I would.
Very few, if any, generalities are measurably accurate.
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And that’s a bet I’d love to make. But we’ll never know, will we?
I work in market research for a tech company so yeah I kinda do.
Eventually we will should they continue on the Classic highway. I will be around for the bet.
Oh, one of those. If that were true, you would know that attempting to attribute to one source is begging to be bit on the behind.
Carry on.
You logic is flawed. Just because the total number of players increased from 20 years ago doesn’t mean it is the most popular or preferred genre.
A “dead” genre means that it is not popular, it’s not the favorite and it doesn’t have the same power of attraction (to new comers, investors, business, customers, etc.)
By statistics, at the most today there are maybe 30-40 million players between ALL MMOs combined (and that is a gross over estimation).
In contrast, Fortnite ALONE has over 200-250 million players. Estimated Battle Royal Genre players is around 550 Million.
Numbers don’t lie. MMO’s are not the best gaming investment for any development company right now.
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Couldn’t it be a combination of all those things you mentioned?
It is like voting, people mostly get caught in the trick of divide and conquer.
One candidate cater to the majority of moderates, and a few less radical, and fund a losing candidate to cater to the their disagreeing voters and radicals. As long as those dont vote for the other candidate that can win, they dont need to vote to that candidate doing this trick either.
Same goes for Subs. If a demographic is not paying for WoW, it is just making sure they are not migrating to its better competitors either. Which looks kinda what happens.
Yeah, I mean it was always tenous. Let’s say you have stock holders - are you going to make an mmo which are very, very expensive and laborious to make - taking literally half to a full decade to get started for 1 million people at 15$ a month or are you going to spend a year making a BR where you can have 200 million people and charge them for skins that take a dev a week to make?
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