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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsWorld of Warcraft dips to a mere 11.4 million subscribers
by Alex Ziebart 
May 9th 2011 at 7:00PM
During the call, CEO of Blizzard Entertainment Mike Morhaime pointed out that World of Warcraft had fallen again to pre-Cataclysm subscriber levels -- 11.4 million subscribers at the end of March, down from its peak of 12 million. Subscriber levels do not decline linearly, he pointed out, stating that they fluctuate based on how quickly players consume and complete content. Players are consuming Cataclysm's content faster than any expansion before it, so subscriber levels started to drop off more quickly than they have previously.
11.4 million subscribers still puts World of Warcraft quite far above and beyond any of its competition, and it should be noted that the numbers stated in the call came during a slow point in the expansion -- Cataclysm launched in early December, putting the end of March a good four months out. You can only expect players to consume the same content for so long, and four months is a pretty long time. If this were a single-player game and not an MMO, no developer could reasonably expect a player to consume the same content for four months. That's one-third of a year with no additions to the game, and we've only just received a content patch at the end of April. It's actually surprising to me personally that four months is faster than previous expansions.
The month of March may also have just been a bad month to poll, as competition such as RIFT launched that month. Even if the majority of the players that left World of Warcraft for RIFT eventually find their way back, the damage has been done for the month of March.
Though subscribers numbers have fallen back down to 11.4 million, overall profit has risen so far this year -- the details of which you can find in the official press release.
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 12)
Eldoron May 9th 2011 8:21PM
Wotlk was easy. You could do heroic dungeons with your eyes closed and the speakers turned off, still with no wipe. That defines easy to me.
sox.jeff May 10th 2011 12:16AM
Well said Snarky, I agree completely. To be honest, I think that they made the mistake of reading way too much into certain segments of the population. In the lead-up to Cata, GC referenced emails he was receiving from players and forum tone for Blizz's philosophical shift. Call me crazy, but it's not much of a logical leap to assume that it would be elite players from high-end guilds emailing him and gaining his ear, not Xxjcizzlex who logs in twice a week for his PuG raid.
As I said elsewhere, I'm completely fine with them devoting more content to these players. However, it should have also included content for the type players who liked raiding ICC with a 30% buff. Harder heroics, longer heroics, harder raids, less normals, and a boring new profession didn't seem like a smart idea to me at the time, and even less so once I started playing Cata (eventually forcing me to quit).
The lack of diverse difficulty/length content for their player-base is what's siphoning players from WoW, not content delivery. Heck, most data seems to indicate there were more players playing after 8 months of straight ICC than there are after 4 months of Cata, so I'm not sure how you can cite that argument.
Skarn May 10th 2011 1:18AM
"I really hope they can find a better balance. Playing with awesome people is super important to me, and seeing the awesome people wander off because they feel like they don't have a place in the game is just...saddening."
It's interesting that WoW's popularity is exactly what has given rise to the current conundrum. Previous MMOs like Everquest skewed towards the "hardcore, big time investment" model, but they didn't gather the following that Blizzard has. WoW started off very much like this and somehow it's playerbase got very large. Now they are attempting to balance multiple different playstyles and ideals. Don't kid yourself, there are more than two playstyles here. More than just "casual and hardcore."
Take me for example. I'm not really into the hard mode fights. Little bit TOO intense for my tastes. Yet, easily puggable instances tend to be too easy for me and end up quite boring. I'm in the middle. The current normal mode raids are actually very well tuned for my own playstyle. I don't want them nerfed because then my choice is between "easy and boring" or "hard and mind-numbing." Such is my opinion on the matter. :)
Other games come with more than one difficulty level. Starcraft II comes with 4 difficulties for single player mode. You could even consider online multiplayer a fifth and very different difficulty level. For current content in WoW, there is essentially only one difficulty level. Then when you beat that content, you unlock a harder mode. There's not a knob you can adjust before you play, like Starcraft or other games. The knob is only adjusted after you win or over time due to nerfs, gear increases and so on.
It's a very tricky situation to be in. I hope Blizzard can figure it out.
kaminari May 10th 2011 2:30AM
it's hard with the current gear level, when 4.2 drops BWD, BoT and ToFW will become extremely pugable because you'll be able to farm 359 ilvl gear with justice points and firelands gear will make everything easier
also raiding guilds will be going to firelands now, so raiders will be puging for a last upgrade from last tier or to help friends
the current content will be open to everyone, it will be interesting to see how pugable the firelands are with t11 widely available, my guess is it will be more tan the current raids, but to get it back to icc levels it will have to be the last tier and have the icc buff equivalent
cyanea85 May 10th 2011 9:51AM
Cata is such a weird expansion for me.
I love the raiding changes. Each boss feels like a real challenge and a real accomplishment once we down them. On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing entertaining to do outside of raiding in the game anymore, so I rarely log in for anything but.
nikdaheratik May 10th 2011 1:52PM
I think the problem isn't with the harder raids at the top. If they made them easier than there would be even less for end game raiders to do and even more drop subs. The problem is that they didn't have a single "handholding" starter raid like they did in LK (with Sarth and Naxx) and BC (with Kara). If you'll remember, the world firsters cleared Naxx the first week with half of their group wearing Sunwell gear. It took most casual guilds 3-4 months to clear that content completely.
And I think some of this is a result of the revamp where they didn't have enough devs to design new content and redo the vanilla zones. The only bright side is that they can build up the gear a bit and do some nerfs and the first tier raids in this expac might become easy enough to at least clear even if most of the big raiding guilds have moved on to firelands. They had guilds who were stuck in Tier 4-5 throughout BC and it still worked fairly well as a model.
thedoctor2031 May 9th 2011 7:25PM
I must admit the point that cataclysm has less content. Sure there are heroics but only 12 raid bosses(13 counting sinestra.) At the beginning of wrath we had 15 from naxxramas plus the other raids (not sure which ones were available EoE?). Also there were two separate tiers of achievement, 10 and 25 man giving most guilds 2 levels of progression. Now most guilds stick to one level while 25 mans may dip down occasionally into 10 man lessening content even more. And than with the single lockout of 10 and 25 man raids there is even less content you can do because people feel restricted to one or the other. Raids are harder in cataclysm but that hasn't really stopped most upper end guilds from already downing sinestra and after that it feels like there is no more you can do. Also Ulduar came out around 5 months after wrath was released and were around the same time line with only 2 new heroics. A lot of burnout makes sense to me.
Zankoku May 9th 2011 8:23PM
Available at LK release:
VoA (loot pinata) = 1 boss
OS = 1 boss, 3 minibosses
EoE = 1 boss
Naxx = 15 bosses
Available at Cata Release:
BH (loot pinata) = 1 boss
BWD
4W
BoT
So 17 bosses vs 13 bosses (not counting the loot pinatas, cuz... well yea...)
And the different tiers (10/25) really does not hold up too well, as there was nothing different between the two except the iLvl of the drops and scaling.
Couple in the fact that Naxx10 could and was cleared in quest blues and greens.... yea... LK had a faster raiding start.
Cata raids followed "progression" better (5reg > 5 Heroic > Raids Reg > Raids Heroic) with scaling. Cata raids could not be completed with quest blues and greens, do to scaling (granted 10 man was at times over-scaled)
Gnomercy May 9th 2011 7:27PM
If only that 5% were the cryers on the official forums sigh :P Tbh im suprised it wasn't much much higher the way people were banging on about rift.
Ashlar May 9th 2011 7:30PM
I think at least some of the decrease is related to the fact that, at release, heroics were too hard. Some of the more miserable experiences I have had in WOW were trying to pug heroics in the first few months after Cataclysms release. A combination of nerfs, gear inflation and player experience have made heroics more fun, so hopefully some of the people turned off will come back.
And when I say hard I don't just mean wipes - I like my dungeon experiences to be 30 minute increments, and Cataclysm at launch was more like 1.5-2 hours. Ugh.
thedoctor2031 May 9th 2011 7:33PM
I definitely agree that Cataclysm heroics are too long. That is one of the major things I liked about wrath, being able to log on and do a heroic in 25-40 minutes. But even the small cata heroics like vortex pinnacle take around 35-50 minutes and the longer ones can take over an hour. I feel that logging on at night I am either restricted to doing dailies and some PvP or doing one heroic with my friends.
Jestin May 9th 2011 7:48PM
"I like my dungeon experiences to be 30 minute increments"
And don't forget the 30-40 minute dps queue, so... there was (and is) that to consider.
DarkWalker May 9th 2011 11:00PM
@Jestin:
For me, I simply won't even consider returning until total time for running Heroics, as a tank (low/no queue), drops below 30 minutes.
Preferably, I would like the total time for running heroics as a DPSers (i.e., longest queues) to be lower than 30 minutes, the way it was in WotLK.
Alternatively, I would be content with solo content which was at least as hard as a Heroic, if not more so, and had similar rewards to the heroics. But I'm not sure Blizzard would ever go for it.
Skarn May 10th 2011 12:28AM
Probably just my personal opinion, but I'm not sure heroic dungeon run times can be below 30 minutes AND be hard. Things CAN be designed to be short and challenging, but that gets extremely difficult when you go beyond single player. Each person added increases the difficulty of that balancing act.
What is this 30 minute window balanced for? A 5-man guild group? Then PuGs are gonna take longer. Is it balanced for solo-queues? Then it's likely to be very easy. Blizzard is certainly going to keep trying to hit that perfect balance, but it's a hard target.
razion May 9th 2011 7:30PM
Just a slight nitpick in the title here: 11.4 million subscribers hardly seems deserving of "a mere". Last I checked, you could fill an entire state with that sort of subscriber base--that's no small number by any stretch of the imagination. O .o
thedoctor2031 May 9th 2011 7:34PM
I believe that was Sarcasm =P
razion May 9th 2011 7:39PM
It was? Wait... is that sarcasm? I'm sorry, I'm not very good at this...
machiavelliman May 9th 2011 7:33PM
The claim that consumers are "consuming" content much faster than at any other time is highly misleading by blizzard.
To an outsider, this would mean that players are just playing the game so much that they go through content so quickly that they are getting bored faster than before. This may be partially true, but there is a much more significant reason for the same effect.
Players aren't "consuming" content more quickly, they are "getting bored" with content more quickly. That is not the same thing.
Reasons:
-Harder heroics and pve content give less accessibility to players, causing the amount of "available" content to simply be less.
-Leveling experience was much shorter to cap. For most, this was a matter of perhaps a week. That's still an extra week sitting at level cap. For even more casual players, the difference could be 2-3 weeks.
-We've gotten used to expansions. The first expansion I experienced, BC, was so exciting! Wrath was still filled with wonder. By Cata, I think a lot of players are kinda numb to the newness of it and just think of it as another part of the content cycle.
-There are more alternatives. Of course, there is still not viable mmo competition, but console games in the last 2 years have been of much higher quality and much more immersive. That's not to mention the introduction of Starcraft 2.
Eldoron May 9th 2011 8:25PM
Not true. They are indeed consuming it faster. But not because they play more, it's because they've played that much so far. We have to face it, some million players in that 11 million play since vanilla. We just became "pro" in WoW.
DarkWalker May 9th 2011 11:00PM
AFAIK, WotLK's first tier of raids were beaten quite faster than Cataclysm's, besides being mostly old content, and still the player base didn't dip like this.
BTW, leveling the second character through the new and re-done content was among the most boring experiences I've ever had in WoW. Leveling became so linear, it's like having nothing but reruns in the TV for a whole week.