World of Warcraft's subscriber base seems to be slowly dropping off, as revealed in today's Activision Blizzard investor call. The number of current World of Warcraft subscribers as reported by Blizzard President Mike Morhaime stands at 11.4 million, notably less than the 12 million subscriber milestone achieved by the game last October.
Morehaime says that Blizzard Entertainment's focus is on speeding up the development of new content for existing players, assumedly in an effort to retain them for longer. Blizzard has famously taken their time with development, often waiting until only a month or two before launch to announce a release date.
While the decrease in subscribers is significant, it is worth remembering that a large portion of Blizzard's subscriber-base stems from the Chinese market which has yet to receive the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion which likely contributed to last year's milestone. Also, 11.4 million subscribers isn't exactly something to scoff at. That's more than the population of a lot of countries.
Could be any number of reasons... From people are getting tired of WoW so they're not playing any more to they're finding the cost too high now (not just monetary cost either).
But 11 million people is still a HUGE player base. I think that if they lost like 2 million or so then it'd be time to worry, but given they only lost 600,000 it might not be that big of a deal. (It's all relative after all.) Plus I'd imagine some of those record numbers were made from people trying it for a month/week or whatever and not keeping going with it.
I also think it's a problem that WoW is changing at a very slow rate! They add new content and small packages of different gameplay but the game overall remains the same. Adding new items, dungeons, skills, talents and classes can be very fun for a while but the truth is it's not game changing! We've all played hundreds if not thousands of games in our lifes and we know that after a while of a game being the same even if you don't complete every objective there is you'll get tired of the game.. this also happens in WoW, I've played WoW many years and I'm so tired of the game that I would never come back! This combined with new MMORPGS with better graphics, systems more perfected based on the experiences seen on WoW allow tired players to forget about WoW and probably never come back. WoW reached the top when they got the Asian market, from now on it's always downhill, unless they do something drastic like reducing or removing the monthly fee..
They only dropped the price by $1? That's not enough for me to get back into it. I was one who stopped playing because of the economy, and I found all kinds of free MMOs. WOW is still one of the best, but its just not worth such a high monthly fee. I'd pay $15 a year or maybe even $15 every 6 months, but not every month.
This news doesn't surprise me at all, the game is 7 years old now and has not really reinvented it's self. They just keep adding more dungeons and better armor, people get tired of grinding armor sets after awhile. Not to mention a good portion of the WOW player base is aging and has new obligations in life. Wives don't like their husbands sitting on the computer all day. ow:
Well truthly I used to play wow a few years a go, it was a good game , got up to lvl 80 (pre cata) and then eventually got bored of it so i sold my account, and then about 8 months ago i decieded to start playing again on my druid which i think is about 75 , But i've not also cancelled that one and i just got bored tbh
ow: