It had VERY LITTLE to do with CATA. As EVE also lost a lot of player activity (see their tracking tools) in 2011;

Very little to do with the quality of CATA, but everything to do with the changing "free to play" markets and of course COD ...: fast and furious fun ...

I get your point. I really do. But I disagree with your rhetoric. "Bomb" is not the correct term to use at all, in any measure of the word. It sold *millions* of copies in it's first month. Even in December of 2011, it was STILL in the top 10 list of best selling games for the month. (To be fair, so was WoW... but still.)

It's not as awesome by comparison to other Blizzard games. But I assure you, *any* and *every* other game publisher and/or developer would *love love love* to have a game ship 4 million in it's first month and then continue to sell at LAUNCH PRICE up to a year later and still make the charts. That's astonishing and wondrous.

@emberdione

I understand your thinking, and you have a point: initial sales figures for Cataclysm were spectacular. But paid MMOs (and MMO expansions) aren't just trying to sell you on the 40-60 bucks you paid for the box. They're trying to sell you on a subscription, and Cataclysm's retention numbers are utterly through the basement, the kind of die-off that would have utterly killed a new MMO.

Let's be honest with ourselves here: Cataclysm's initial sales didn't happen in a vacuum. The expansion rode the wave of BC and Wrath to get so many copies sold. The true measure of Cataclysm came when subscriptions began to drop -immediately- afterwards. That was a damning indictment: people were incredibly eager for Cataclysm, but once they got a chance to try it out, they left. In droves.

@Bossy, EVE hemorraged subs because of a few massively idiotic decisions on the part of the developers that completely devastated the player community. The "$60 Monocle" debacle was the most prominent, but certainly not the only one.

Cataclysm saw similar results. Cataclysm was launched in the west, and the game lost over half a million subs, six months later Cataclysm was launched in China, and lost 800k subs over there. That tells you something very prominent, when 800k subscribers who had been trapped farming ICC for almost two years quit the game rather than play Cataclysm.

Ome, you're both right and wrong. A 15% decline in active subs would not kill a new MMO, but in my opinion your original post made some valid points. Cataclysm has had some problems.

Also, there are other, even better, words than 'utter(ly)'.

@Jack Mynock

Point. I was speaking from an overall sense: another paid-sub MMO that lost 2 million subscribers in a single year would be dead, or if not dead then teetering on its last leg and screaming bloody murder.

But you're right, percentagewise it's not such a gloomy picture and I overstated things a bit.