According to Activision Blizzard, the parent company responsible for World of Warcraft, the world's most popular MMO title shed 800,000 subscribers during the April through June quarter this year.
Warlords Of Draenor Release Date Will Be Announced Next Week
Since June, the game has had about 6.8 million players, having lost almost half of its subscriber base since the 12 million users it held at its height in 2010.
Blizzard, however, is not worried. All this has happened before and will happen again. "And as expected, we did see a decline in subscribers, which mostly came out of the East. This pattern is right in line, percentage-wise, with the drops that we saw at Cataclysm's cycle in Q2 2012. That drop in 2012 was followed by an uptick in subscribers just ahead of Mists of Pandaria's launch. So we're hoping to see players return once we draw closer to the release of Warlords of Draenor later this year." said Michael Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc and president Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
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World of Warcraft is still the world's most popular MMO by a wide margin. The next 8 games combined, which include both Lineages, DDO and The Old Republic, make up roughly the same market share as WoW.
There are many reasons one can suspect for the shed of numbers. The WoW players, such as myself, are aging out. Those of us who got in on the ground floor back in 2004, when your choices were World of Warcraft or Everquest, are older now. We have jobs, kids, mortgages. We do not have the time to find 24 other people and go monster hunting anymore. A game as massive as Warcraft can be daunting to newer, younger players. They may see it as an old man's game and old men aren't going to be signing up anymore.
People tend to be fiercely loyal to the old ways, and the new game barely resembles the old version. The recently released patch notes for the upcoming Warlords of Draenor beta radically alters many of the game's mechanics, which has been known to turn people off from the expansion entirely.
The market has since seen a huge uptick in MMOs. Elder Scrolls Online dropped and has been well received. Wildstar has given players a non-EVE Online outlet for sci-fi worlds. And the rise in the F2P market has no doubt cut into Blizzard's user base. Even WoW has a partly F2P model, which allows Blizzard to not have to microtransact you to death. It seems an old style in this new age, but WoW may be the last one standing when all is said and done.
But the point remains, it is going to take a lot more than the loss of 800,000 users for Blizzard to start panicking. Concerned? Yes. Panic? Hardly. Blizzard has its hands in a lot of pies. Hearthstone has been mighty successful in the F2P market. Diablo III has worked out its kinks. At some point, Legacy of the Void will come out. They're going to crush the MOBA market with Heroes of the Storm, as well. Blizzard is going to be fine.
Warlords of Draenor has already sold 1.5 million pre-orders, and they have not even announced the release date yet. The expansion will help fix what is everyone's least favorite area, Draenor, introduced in first WoW expansion The Burning Crusade. A live streaming event next week will reveal the release date and more.
