The sky is always falling. WoW is just as good as it’s always been. The difference is it’s an old game instead of a new game, and when it was a new game it was especially fresh because it took the best of the level-based MMOs before it (EQ and DAoC, mostly) and got rid of most of the grind and the solo-hostile elements. It was such a pleasure to play. If you liked it a little, you liked it a lot and played and played.
It’s biggest problem is one that can’t be solved. It’s an old game. People move on to newer things, though there hasn’t been a newer MMO that’s come close to capturing the audience or the magic. The two big attempts, Warhammer and Old Republic, failed miserably.
WoW is 10 years old. Is it surprising that a 10-year old game doesn’t have the subscriber base it had at its peak? WoW may be in decline in terms of subscribers, but it also may be around in some shape or form another 10 years from now.
It explains VERY well why WoW isn’t not as good as it’s always been.
The difference is it’s an old game instead of a new game
And then maybe read the thread since this superficial thesis has been already brought up ;)
It’s biggest problem is one that can’t be solved. It’s an old game. People move on to newer things, though there hasn’t been a newer MMO that’s come close to capturing the audience or the magic. The two big attempts, Warhammer and Old Republic, failed miserably.
Yeah, so you admit it’s not such a simple equivalence or merely “old vs new”, but “good vs bad”.
You keep misunderstanding everything, or assuming the most ridiculous stuff.
My thesis is that it doesn’t work, not that we should in some way protect kids from Blizzard evil influence. The players are leaving. Same as Diablo 3 was crap and recognized as crap by everyone, only to be admitted by Blizzard too. And then patched.
This stuff affects game design. Short term good money, but long term suicidal business. The huge drop of subscriptions after the expansion is not something that follows the usual curve these games have, and in fact it is unprecedented if you look at WoW’s own curve in the past 10 years. Nothing like this happened before. Something different happened. Blizzard is pissing off quite a bit of players and they are very vocal about this.
I’m not even part of this, I only observed it and reported it here in the forums.
My thesis is that you don’t know how business works. You yourself quoted Activision saying that even though subs are down, revenue is stable for WoW because of the new things they’ve added. This isn’t “it doesn’t work.” It clearly does work, since everyone who knows anything about MMOs would have predicted that WoW’s revenue would be way down in its 11th year of release.
You seem to think that since WoW’s sub numbers are going down then that means it’s a failure. But what it really means is that it’s a game in its 11th year of release. Their own internal models say numbers will be down. In fact, they were shocked at the number of people who returned to the game when WoD launched. So a lot of them left? Not awesome, but certainly no “the sky is falling” moment since Blizzard didn’t expect them to be around in the first place.
But according to you, I guess, if Blizzard gave up all the non subscription revenue, millions of people would return to the game because…why exactly? Are you suggesting that the simple fact that you can buy pets and mounts has driven away millions of subscribers? Or is the more likely answer that people just got tired of WoW’s basic game design, the same one it’s had since 2004? As Mark says above, at its heart, it’s still the same game. And that’s why 70% of the number of people who played it at its peak are still playing it.
Losing 30% of their subscribers is not failure, it’s just what 11-year-old MMOs do.
Better than it’s ever been (except for the whole flying thing), in my book. But yeah, it’s amazing that it still has several million concurrent subscribers at 10 years old, not a failing that it isn’t still hitting new peaks. Especially in a market where almost every competitor no longer charges the monthly fee and may not charge for expansions. There’s always going to be a burn rate and there’s no fixing it, really. People get bored, get lives, find other games, whatever. And if you keep things the same, you’ll lose people who are frustrated with the way things are, and if you keep tweaking, you’ll lose people who don’t like the changes. The trick is to stay in the sweet spot where you lose the fewest people, whatever that may be, and to keep turning out content so that every so often people who felt like they were done with the game as it was come back and see what’s new.
In other words, a bunch of people came back to play the expansion, played the expansion, and then left to save their pennies until the next expansion shows up.
Ignoring the (immensely profitable) blip of the expansion, looking at subscriber numbers year-to-year, WOW is down from 7.6 million subscribers a year in Q1 2014 to 7.1 in Q1 2015. 500k in a year. Sounds like a lot, but when you’re starting out with 7 million of them…
Charles Foster WOW: You’re right, I did lose a half a million subscribers last year. I expect to lose a half a million subscribers next year. You know, at that rate I’ll have to close the place … in 14 more years.
You’re making a rather large assumption that people leave because “the quality is not there.” The quality may or may not be fine; however, the habits of players may be what’s changed. In fact, the entire gaming landscape has shifted around WoW, and the idea that so many people will stick with one product—one with a monthly fee—is absurd to most people when they have so many other options that don’t require $15/month. Players are migratory in the extreme, moreso than they were 1 year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, etc.
The lack of financial commitment is probably one of the reasons F2P is popular with those kinds of players. They can pop-in and out when new content is available and see it when it’s at its peak of popularity, then move on to the next popular thing.
For any F2P or pay MMO to operate, it just needs X players who aren’t migratory. WoW sustained an absurd number of players for an unprecedented number of years. Do you really believe that if they made/make every perfect design decision along the way that their player numbers wouldn’t decrease? That’s what’s absurd; that it’s taken them this long to start seeing a rapid decline is a miracle.
Yes, the point is how you interpret that (and all those players returned for the pre-expansion patch, as it introduced stuff like the models update that people are curious about).
The videos I linked make analysis of the expansion, as well what I read these past months from WoW players. The expansion wasn’t well received.
People had very high expectations for Draenor because Pandaria was kind of bad and this new one should have kicked back things in the old times. But it turns out Draenor is even more a rush job with unfinished or poorly planned features (analysis is again in that video, listing all the features that were cut)
OF COURSE to someone who clicks this forum link and hasn’t played the game for years nor has any idea of what is going on inside it, will likely take that looking-from-afar kind of presumptuous look, pretending of having actual insight on the actual state of the game.
The difference between people who see miracles and people who see cause-effect, is that people who see cause-effect can actually see. Whereas people who see miracles believe their own delusions.
There isn’t anything miraculous in WoW’s success, the quality was there. You can see the archived report I wrote eight months before WoW release (it’s probably in the archives of this forum too). The quality was there, it was expected.
WoW lasted this long because the same quality was NOT found in all its competitors. All those game sucked and all those games fell into irrelevance within months, not years.
The decline is because because in the MMO world, for the most part, there is nothing new under the sun. Sure the content is new, but its the mechanics we are all so terribly bored of. Create a new MMO with a whole host of genuinely new mechanics, and you have your next, big money-maker MMO (assuming there is sufficient content and it is not riddled with bugs at launch).
I still enjoy WoW, in small to medium doses. Yeah, the gameplay model isn’t fresh, but I still enjoy it as long as I don’t grind at it. I log in, do a couple quests, chat with guildmates; or maybe do a guild dungeon run; or maybe just fuss with my garrison. I’ve tried pretty much every other major MMO, but WoW is the only one that retains my interest for any length of time.
Can you quantify that in some way? I’m not really trying to be argumentative, I’d be interested in your viewpoint since you seems to have some things in mind.
I haven’t seen Draenor, but I think my experience with Pandaria was typical: I played WoW for the better part of four or five years, took a year off somewhere after Lich King, came back for Cataclysm, got bored again after a year or so of play but didn’t let my subscription lapse, bought Pandaria but never got all the way to the end-game content because… eh, I was just burnt out.
For me, I didn’t see any drop in quality with Pandaria – it seemed like they had improved most of the stuff from Cataclysm and added some new elements. The travel was tighter, the quest-hubs better organized, the graphics good or better. I just couldn’t take the idea of killing a score of badgers until ten of their spleens dropped… again. I guess I was disappointed in Pandaria, but I was disappointed at the lack of anything truly different, not because what they delivered was bad.
On the revenue stream:
I can’t/won’t click on the YouTube video at work, but does it discuss the rise of the Asian subscriber model at all? This thread cites $15/month, but that’s only US and Europe as I understand it… and I think that most (at least a plurality) of WoW’s current subscription base is from the East. If I understand correctly, they buy their time in-game by the minute and generally do not pay for expansions (that is paid for by their local cafe).
