WoW subscriber numbers down to 10.3 million players
by Adam Holisky 
Nov 8th 2011 at 5:03PM
In the call, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said that the majority of the subscriber loss happened in the east. There was no mention of specific subscriber numbers in the United States. Blizzard also declined to provide a subscriber forecast.
It's not uncommon to find these numbers rise and fall with the time during an expansion's life cycle. It is entirely possible that the numbers will increase with the release of Mists of Pandaria.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 13)
Velleekwitay Nov 8th 2011 5:07PM
Well, what do you make of this?
Pyromelter Nov 8th 2011 5:31PM
They said they lost in the East... I have to wonder, was there another MMO or game that came out in China or Korea in the past year or two that has gained marketshare from WoW? It certainly isn't Aion or Rift, and I can't think of any MMO's that are based in english anyway that would have pulled marketshare.
Bart Nov 8th 2011 5:31PM
I feel like blizzard might actually be running out of good ideas. They need to stop saving Sargeras for later and let's get to him now!
loop_not_defined Nov 8th 2011 5:39PM
Well...if WoW had lost a straight 10% off of all regional subscriptions, you could still say that most of the losses occurred in the East.
It's a simple fact: Most of WoW's subscriptions are in the East.
(crap, I can't find the source for regional subscriptions...anybody able to help me out?)
Glaras Nov 8th 2011 5:57PM
I dunno. Maybe the reduction in discretionary income caused people to decide that there were other things considered more essential to their lives?
Too obvious?
SamLowry Nov 8th 2011 6:09PM
I thought they meant New York or Delaware.
Must've jumped ship to play Jersey Shore Online.
snarkygoldfish Nov 8th 2011 6:10PM
Glaras - that's actually a pretty interesting point. MMOs aren't recession-proof either, I'm guessing.
Though I will admit, $15 a month is one of the few little things I still allow myself on a grad school budget. D:
vocenoctum Nov 8th 2011 6:17PM
The thing is, I'm not really sure we have enough numbers to map a trend. I'm sure we all remember the milestone announcements of years past. "WoW hits 10mil" "WoW hits 12 mil!"
But in between those milestones, as people came and went, how low did it dip? How much variance was there?
vocenoctum Nov 8th 2011 6:34PM
Except of course Pyromelter posted this link;
http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png
which indeed shows the growth, steady until Cata's NutKick Supreme.
Jack Mynock Nov 8th 2011 6:35PM
Well, my theroy is this. Blizz kind of blew their wad for a lot people with Wrath. Which is to say that for many players Wrath felt like a culmination since it tied up the Warcraft 3 storyline. Plus, Wrath had a ton of content. Now, Cata, imo, has been a decent expansion (a great one if you've leveled a character from 1-60), but it's lack of endgame content has made it a poor follow up to Wrath. there jsut wasn't enough at endgame to keep some people interested now that Arthas is gone.
That 6-7 month gap between T11 and T12 didn't do Blizz any favors, and adding the Troll dungeons may have even hurt them in the long run, since 4.2 had no 5-man content. Those trolls are burning people out, especially the non-raiders.
Recession-wise, I'm not inclined to believe too many people that want to play WoW find the fifty cents a day hard to come up with. Though I can see where someone marginally unhappy might decide the money is no longer worth it in this poor economy, I find it more likely that the recession's effect on subs is the cost of high speed internet and not the small subscription fee.
Jonathan Nov 8th 2011 6:58PM
"Too obvious?"
A viable thought, but I'm not sure I'd agree. Anecdotally speaking, as someone who's felt the sting of the rotten economy, WoW is actually a pretty good source of on-the-cheap entertainment.
I was laid off in early '09. Leading up to that, I was a relatively active gamer, I read comic books regularly and I went out for drinks almost every weekend. When I got laid off, unemployment gave me effectively half the income I had previously. Considering I needed to pay for rent and food, I had to trim back substantially on leisure activities. My comic book budget got the axe and instead of buying a video game or two a month, I had to basically drop new games altogether. I ended up playing a lot more WoW because, well, fifteen bucks a month for WoW verus $60+ a month on console games and another $30-40 a month for comics makes for a big bargain in terms of entertainment and considering I couldn't really afford to frequently go out anymore and I still needed something to do on evenings and weekends (interviews don't generally go past bankers' hours), WoW filled the gap nicely.
I was out of work for nine months, but when I got back to working, I still kept up with the habits I developed, so I'm still saving a lot of money. Fiscally speaking, WoW's a pretty sound investment for a gamer.
There are other factors to consider, not the least of which is the fact that the PC market is down. A lot of people are going tablet and with WoW not being something that's viable on a tablet, that's probably cut into their userbase a bit. There's the aforementioned late expansion lull that always hits.
A lot of people are going to drop the game to save some money, but I think there's probably a lot of people like me who see the savings involved in it.
SamLowry Nov 8th 2011 7:06PM
Didn't help that once you were finally able to enter the Troll dungeons you discover that folks will drop group at the slightest hiccup and the group itself will dissolve after the first wipe, making it almost impossible to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
I gave up on them.
Chris W Nov 8th 2011 7:39PM
@Pyromelter
They released Cata to China in July, and after the NA/EU release they lost 900,000 NA/EU subs.
So they had 6 million Asia, 5.1 million NA/EU, when cata was released to China, so it seems cata was a loser xpac for the Chinese too. Losing subs instead of adding subs.
If they think MoP will save WoW when half of the votes at Blizzards youtube page for the trailer dislike it, I think they are mistaken.
The Dewd Nov 8th 2011 8:05PM
@ChrisW - The question is, then, how many of those people downvoting the trailer are actually current subscribers. There's tons of people on other sites that LOVE to tell you how bad WoW is - even though they haven't played for 3/6/12+ months.
That having been said, based on your numbers, I bet they knew this would happen once Cata hit that point in China.
Suzaku Nov 8th 2011 8:27PM
@vocenoctum:
Just FYI, this is their more accurate data specifically for WoW's subscription numbers:
http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/WoW.png
And the fact is, decreasing subscription numbers were innevitable. WoW's greatest periods of growth are long behind it and it is now nearly seven years old. And I think it probably is true that Wrath may have caused that final big boost of interest, since it featured Arthas, probably the most well-known Warcraft character (especially amongst newer players).
Of course, it's worth saying that 10.4 million is still a hell of a lot of people.
That most of the losses were in the East baffles me a bit, especially with Cataclysm launching (on Patch 4.2) at the end of July. I'd have thought that the launch would spike subscriptions, if anything. Of course, the Eastern MMO market is also extremely saturated, so I guess you can't expect WoW to hold their interest forever.
Parcus Nov 8th 2011 11:08PM
@Suzaku,
I agree with you, there are more important factors that determined the loss of WoW subscriptions than the old "cata is for the hardcore" argument.The ones I find most important are (besides WoW being old):
-The game is expensive for new players and not very new. 120 Dollars for a game is not cheap at all (vs the old 40 back in vanila, and 60 back in BC). And everyone knows buying Vanilla + BC can't be considered buying a true MMO, since the person will play with no one while he is leveling, same for when he hits 70 (or 80 with Wrath).
-Cata has very little end game content. Their new: release raids extremely slowly policy seems not to be very good, just like the 2 raids per tier didn't work so well. The questing experience from 80-85 felt very lacking and repetitive as well.
-Revamping old bosses. I did not play on Vanilla, but I seriously did not want to fight Nefarian or Ragnaros in Cata. I expected Blizzard could had done something better with raid lore than just: deathwing spits fire in lava, rag is back, yay! The only important and interesting plot to me so far for released raids is the Cho'gal's one. Firelands ignores everything you did in Hyjal unless you manage to get to the hard mode rag 4th phase (which is unlikely for the vast majority).
Revrant Nov 9th 2011 2:04AM
@Chris W
"If they think MoP will save WoW when half of the votes at Blizzards youtube page for the trailer dislike it, I think they are mistaken."
That's just a lot of buttanger over the Pandaren, you recall how the rage flowed forth like the fist of an angry god when they announced them. I think a return to focusing on the content will indeed revive the game some, that's pretty much what was wrong with Cata as others eloquently stated. You have heavily(as in universally) recycled weapon models in heroics, from vendors, from quests, to the point where they decided even Normal and Heroic gear would be recycled, that dragged down excitement for upgrades. Archaeology, for its few exciting rewards, turned out to be one of the heaviest grinds in the history of the game(Netherwing Archaeology, Archaeology Netherwing), so excitement for that ended.
The recycling of content definitely hurt, specifically those troll dungeons, that the armor models did not tickle the fancy of players hurt a bit more, though I imagine their intimidating length was the final nail in the coffin. That specifically hurt a lot, it was truly a return to form in regards to TBC, it just took a really long time to run things, sure it was difficult but Wrath was difficult at launch(I hear you naysayer, saying nay), and we still loved it. The obvious culprit regarding Cata is the 1-60 revamp, it appears Blizzard thought they could deliver the same quality and quantity without an increase in development staff, and their gambit did not pay off.
This lead to all manner of glaring problems, from lore annihilation(worgen, undead hunters, who's Deathwing?), to certain zones getting in reality very little done to improve them in any dramatic way(Mulgore, Arathi), to the end game content feeling smaller and less exciting because of the aforementioned time saving approaches.
I dunno, that's my general opinion, I'm excited for Mists.
Dragoniel Nov 9th 2011 6:47AM
Well, good sir... after a long and intensive contemplation on current situation, I have to admit, that I have came to conclusion: what I currently need is yet another (seventy fifth, I believe) run for Sethekk Halls heroic.
From current information available, I was able to deduct, that in coming 10 years or so rare mounts are about to become even rarer.
Huzzah!
Poltergeist Nov 9th 2011 12:44PM
I cancelled my sub for three reasons. None of them have anything to do with Pandas.
1) I don't like the new talent trees. The soon-to-be-old style is just something I don't want going away.
2) The lack of an 11th character slot. I currently have all ten slots on my main server occupied by one of each class, alliance side. All of them are over 70, six of them being 85. My only options to play the Monk would be to delete one of my characters, or play on a server without my gold, heirlooms, or friends. I refuse to delete any of my characters, I've had them all for years. I also don't believe in paying for microtransactions in addition to a monthly fee, so transferring a mule with gold and heirlooms is something I won't do on principle.
3)The Old Republic. After playing WoW since release, I just need something different. It helps tremendously that most of my friends are moving over with me.
If I ever do come back to the game, it won't be until they increase the server cap above 10 characters. I'm not holding my breath.
Sharlatan Nov 9th 2011 1:27PM
Is it any supprise? Its an old game, its graphics are apalling by modern standards. Bliz has neglected the majority of players for too long, pandering to raiders (which I enjoyed when I raided, but its still silly), a lack fo alternative progression paths, and so on.
Cata was awful, just not fun, Bliz listened to the vocal 1% of self proclaimed hardcores and destroyed the accessibility they created in wrath, there was no plot anchor like arthas of the burning legion, no one cares about deathwing.
10+mill is briliant for any game, but wow is in its decline, it will still dominate for a long long time, and will still be going in may years to come, but for me, as with many, the joy has gone, it just feels old. I'll resub for a month for pandaria, just to see it, but I doubt I'll stay.
So long and thanks for all the fish.