Another quarter has come to pass and in that time the behemoth MMORPG, World of Warcraft, has lost even more subscribers. The game has been on a steady decline in subscriber count for awhile now and the latest numbers show that the count is down to 7.7 million, their lowest total since 2007. While that may still seem like a lot, it pales in comparison to the old numbers when the game had nearly 12 million subscribers.
The question for Blizzard is whether people are just getting tired of the genre, the Warcraft universe, or if their most recent expansion, Mists of Pandaria, could have pushed people away from the series. At the time of Mists of Pandaria’s release, the subscriber count was over 10 million and has now dropped substantially in such a short time. The expansion itself did not perform as well as was forecasted, as it brought in disappointing sales in comparison to the previous expansion, Cataclysm.
The silver lining for Blizzard is that their nearly nine year old game is still the top MMORPG by a good margin, which is not something that really anybody else can say in any genre of gaming.
Zactus
July 30, 2013 at 8:24 AMI don’t think it is an issue with the game. Sure people have always complained about every expansion that has come out out, but over all, it has always been a fun experience.
In my opinion, WoW is losing so many subscribers because $15 a month for the same experience is too much in the long run. There are dozens of free to play MMOs, and free games like LOL and TF2 that are showing people that you don’t need to pay $150/yr+ to enjoy online gaming.
AyoPuff
November 9, 2013 at 7:25 PMI am beginning to get sick of WoW. Been playing for about 3 1/2 years. I only have one level 90 as the game gets boring and repetitive around level 80. PLus it takes FOREVER for dungeons to queue so you spend most of your time trying to figure out where to quest and how to get there as they did away with the premarked flight map. PVP system in Wow is broken, and often times we have 0 healers but the alliance has 3 or more healers. The game is filled with trolls(literally as well as metaphorically) and i have to shell out money to be miserable and bored. Plus, they take way too long to do maintenance and why the hell is it EVERY tuesday during peak hours? Free mmo’s have less maintenance days. Anyway, I will continue to subscribe to WoW but only because I have so much time and energy and money sunk into it that it would be unwise to let it go. Either way, I am getting either a wii or a ps4 so wow will be my second choice.