How do you think blizzard feels that every expansion hits about 10million in its peak and then drops drastically to probably around 2million subs in-between expansions?
WOD and released live stats for months after the expansion launched which made bad headlines for company. they looked like this.
WOD shortly after release 10mil one month later 7mil one month later 5mil (suddenly headlines of wow dying) blizzard stops releasing stats as policy. how low do you think it droped? 3? 2? 1mil?
compare this to vanilla which launch 2004 1.5mil 2005 5mil 2006 7mil
do you guys think blizzard is really happy with the expansion model if it only keeps people sub'ed for 2-3months after the expansion comes out and then drastically drops to basically nothing? compared to the vanilla model that slowly lifted subs over time to a number almost as high as 1 expansion launch?
real question.. if wow subs really do drop to as low as they seem to and blizzard doesn't report on it on purpose now because of how embaresingly low it gets between expansions...
could Classic WoW have more subscribers than retail in the 2 years or so between expansions?
what happens if they see classic slowly grow numbers to like 2-3mil while the live game continues to peak at expansion launch for afue months then plummet under even classics numbers?
could this lead to a "classic style expansion" for live world of Warcraft?
pretty good considering they never had any less than 5 million people paying for subs for a videogame a decade and a half running by now
Michael Baker
It was a little bit of both. Peak subscriptions was around the end of wrath and start of Cata.
Cata was also the start of the drop down. Significant drop in quality.
Also, OP, I'm very curious where you got the 10 million number for WoD.
Jace Myers
>wod 10mil Only at the very beginning. They then lost 44% of their subscribers. Which means the last figure we have is around 5.6 Million subs.
Camden Baker
they don't have 5mil at all times they simply stopped publishing numbers once it got that low it probably got way lower idiot.
Brody Evans
10mil for WOD is on the WOD wiki page under sales.
David Reed
wow is not dying at all its just got a very shitty financial model where it gets 10million subs for 1month and then looses literally all of them.
how viable can that be... its basically that they are only earning money from sales of expansions not subs... makes sense why raid content is so crap now... no one literally plays it.
Jacob Walker
>makes sense why raid content is so crap now... no one literally plays it. And neither do you by the looks of it. Nu-wow is garbage but it's not the raids that are at fault, you didn't have a much better time doing void reaver and using a one button rotation all the way through on your fire mage user.
Brayden Nelson
>comparing expansions at their prime, to Legion which is on its way out
Every expansion ever had a heavy dip when the next expansion was in the pipe.
Zachary Scott
dude why would they put effort into raid content to make it unique and good when literally no one plays the game during the period between expansions? that's why raid content is now just hardmodes of easy mode content. that's why raid gear is just easy mode gear with new light effects on it.
just look at the fucking game man blizzard doesn't give a shit about the time between expansions and for good reason.. NO ONE PAYS FOR SUBS THEN
Juan Peterson
dude I'm not saying Legion was crap legion prob peaked at 8-11mil just like the others. but it probably only lasted afue months if not weeks.
Brandon Hughes
what?
there's loads of people playing it right now
Camden Long
It's still the biggest MMO on the market. You don't know shit retard, blizzard is literally trying to flaunt all their new shit all over, putting a lot more effort into pushing both pve and pvp tournaments on to twitch.
If anything, they're being desperate trying to keep the game alive and trying to hype up things that don't deserve it rather than just being lazy and letting it die.
Adrian Kelly
lol if you think wow as a esport is a serious indever and not totally desperate for twitch coverage because the subs are so low you are deeply deeply rooted by blizzard
not a single thing about wow makes it fun to watch.. they are desperate as fuck.
Nathaniel Russell
if you check on the census sites there is only about 2million people playing wow right now
Jayden Brown
I haven't used real money in forever with my garrison income.
Zachary Myers
ah yes very official
Ethan Phillips
How are people still falling for this meme game?
Hunter Bailey
>Probably Nobody deals in probablies you fucking idiot. Give hard proof or get out.
Jace Wilson
>MMOs are a shit genre overall >Some people want to play MMOs regardless Pretty straightforward honestly. Blizzard has a monopoly on a dead genre.
Hunter Martinez
Do you have comprehension issues or are you just moving goalposts all over just so you can cast them in a bad light? First you say that they just dont give a fuck and they're just letting it rot, now you're moving on to saying they're doing everything out of desperation but it's not fun.
You don't play the game or have any insight into anything regarding the game. Your uninformed opinion isn't worth shit.
I told you that they ARE doing these things because of the lower subcounts, but it is still not so low that they're falling behind the competition, which are all sub 1 mil games. It is not as big as it used to be, but it's still bigger than most games on the market. It'd probably be top 2 on steam if it was on there.
Nathan Jenkins
exactly most people subbing now are not even using REAL MONEY.... wow is hardly a subscription game any more its a expansion model with a trickle of actual gamers staying inbetween expansions.
what it takes 2-3months to fully clear a expansion up to the hardest modes which you don't even have to do because the gear and art of dungions looks exactly the same as the easier modes.
if you cant tell the game is literally being designed with this idea of subs droping drastically inbetween expansions in mind then your not looking at the game close enough and are just a die hard fan that's getting milked in average content. get a free trial and ERP instead and stop being one of the 1-2million of subs that are too stupid to unsub when it goes quite. convincing them self the game is still full of players because they have merged all the servers with shards to make the zones look big and full booo hooo... your game isn't a mmo its a fucking single player expansion game with the illusion of multiplayer.
Jayden Cook
It's almost like people enjoy it.
Matthew Rogers
FF14, ESO, GW2 and even TOR are all better games than WoW. Only retards still play WoW.
Joshua Cox
even if it had 1 million subs it would still be far and away the most successful mmorpg out there.
Nathaniel Murphy
>Gw2 >ESO >TOR >FF14
Oh man that was some really good shit there, why don't you throw in rift and wildstar while you're at it.
Lincoln Kelly
there are 1 million active characters on that one website idk how accurate it is but I'm gonna assume there is 2 million or less, but it's still a lot and they won't take it away considering retards will buy it again and they will charge for classic as well
William Smith
If they weren't dead I would. Those games were better too. Have fun with your post-expansion regret.
Joshua Gomez
>are all better games For reasons that do not apply to the MMO audience. Angry Bird may objectively be a bad game but it does (did?) a good job of appealing to its intended audience. Blizzard is the same.
Mason Martinez
>wod 10mil no fucking way, my server used to be high everytime and when wod hit it dropped to low very fast
Kevin Rivera
honestly FFXIV isn't THAT bad, it's different and less "hardcore" than wow even, but it's alright. GW2 and TOR are absolutely dead garbage games though and ESO is the shit cherry on the top with all the DLC tacked on to an already expensive game that is just watered down skyrim with mmo quests.
Alexander Barnes
exactly only 1million... dude illegal classic servers already have more players than wow does in its down time.
once classic is released I expect blizzard to totally change how they treat wow this model they have been using for expansions is fucking crazy and doesn't work.
imagine if they could get 10million subs for a entire year and not just once every 2-3 years. they would be early literally 3 times what they already earn. some things got to give..
classic will show them they need to go back to hardcore content that takes years to finish not months.
Benjamin Phillips
Yeah.. no. Didn't wildstar do that? How are they doing now?
Lucas Robinson
its on the WOD wiki page it hit 10mil after launch. blame china I guess I don't know.
Nathaniel Moore
>cata was a dip in quality
Angel Foster
>Dead game >Better
By your logic lawbreakers is the second coming of Christ.
Jose Bailey
>he still pays for WoW just to farm transmog and mounts
this is 90% of the players, absolutely just just
Evan Kelly
wildstar was not even close to vanilla style of gameplay and progression. just wait and see classic wow will slowly grow subs starting at 2mil and going up and up and up.. while retail will continue this retarded pattern of 10mil down to 1mil after a month. blizzard is no longer selling a mmo they are selling a 1-2month long experience that you finish and box up and forget for the next 2 years. how is that even considered a mmo.
Blake Hughes
>complaining about DLC >in a B2P game >when you play a P2P MMO >with DLC
Blake Cruz
How will "Classic" save WoW when the majority of the p.server community are poorfags from south america and eastern europe? Do they think that classic will be free to play?
Matthew Stewart
At first, I thought ff14 was alright, seemed like it had a decent content cycle. But then you realize, you've done everything the first week of the patch. The next 2-4 months are going to be boring as shit.
Jaxson Foster
ESO has a sub too bub.
Andrew Bailey
>He thinks banilla is gonna be the best thing ever No, you're right in a sense that for the first month or so? It'll have a FUCK ton of people playing. It'll be super popular twitch with big names streaming it and riding the popularity train like they do with everything. But hitting a board and reading a quest doesn't really hold attention. That's one thing you retards seem to forget. That everything now is just throw away culture. You play it for a bit then move on. Same with MMO's. Vanilla will be different in the sense that 90% of the people who are hyped about it, will drop it in a months time.
Leo Stewart
Blizzard makes most of their money with expansion sales, they don't give a fuck about subscriber numbers otherwise they wouldn't have fucking changed their entire business model on their biggest game.
What do you think looks better to stockholders, millions of copies of a $60 game being sold or Blizzard maintaining constant upkeep of their game for a measly $15/month.
Thomas Powell
this right here, people are going to realize they need a year just to level if they are real nostalgia fags unless some reason they are still neets
Jacob Long
yer and that's why vanilla was good because it was before they decided raiding was a waste of fucking time.
Christopher Martin
What are you talking about? Modern wow is literally all about raiding content
Oliver Peterson
If it gets real bad, blizzard will just implement a f2p system like tera did, and make even more money. If eve online went f2p, wow will also, it may take half a decade, but it will go f2p before the servers shut down.
Angel King
Why even play wow if you're not competing on raider io and logs?
Thomas Mitchell
you problem with this is this. classic was designed to keep your attention for years. its the expansions that are throw away culture.
classic slowly built the sub counts from 1.5 to 5 to 7 million over 3 years... why would it not be the same now. don't you get it... the very design of vanilla encouraged long year long multiple year long game play. you say we will finish the content in 3months you realise raiding in a 40man raid it takes 20weeks to get just 1 item drop for you on statistics. people will play classic for years UNLIKE expansions.
Jose Long
Doubt it'll save wow, but lots of people seem to be interested in trying it out again. I'd say most people will give it 2 months and Blizz will earn their money back, people will be happy and maybe we'll get TBC servers after.
John Sullivan
because it was a new game you retard
Josiah White
>No king rules forever, my son.
Ian Long
dude modern wow is about playing for 3months and quiting. just because it appears like you are raiding you are not. and if you keep playing for the 2 years in-between expansions realize you are 1/10th of the player base and only 1million of you are stupid enough to do that.
Luis Peterson
read up how vanilla content was diferent to expansion content. you might be suprized.
things literally took 100 if not 1000 times longer to do. it was made to be a hardcore game. expansions now you can see all the art and story and even armor sets in 3 months. and your done.
Jonathan Brown
its more likely they would just release a new game before making WoW f2p
Jeremiah Perez
>FF14 Only actual competitor with a worse combat system with the tradeoff being superior class design and no alts. >GW2 and TOR Actually dead games. TOR has been reduced to 4 servers, not counting other regions. Nobody cares about GW2. >ESO Actual shit.
Luis Richardson
Yes, it's about quitting after you've done the raid content because that's the sole focus of the game now. What are you going on about?
Joseph Ward
The mmorpg genre is dying. Blizzard is bleeding subscriptions but no one else is capitalizing on them.
Josiah King
it was a new game you retard, people weren't even high levels when all that shit was getting released
Brayden Robinson
Sorry but do you play the game? they doesnt even feel ashamed to keep recycling model of gear, they even said that we would have LESS gear on battle for the azeroth buy "Hey at least they will have their own model!!" they are stripping away Tier bonus, something that exist since vanilla, because they are either lazy or incompetent to be able to balance that out (as we saw on this expansion.). Blizzard is pretty good with WoW if you compare to other mmos, but the game gave and gives them so much money, that they could actually do better, they should do better.
Carson Ramirez
>its the expansions that are throw away culture. No?...No.. pretty sure it's the people. Look at what has to be tossed out of the oven yearly to keep peoples attention with vidya in general. Someone is always having to try something new, push the envelope to get even a little attention. MMO's are no different. People will get tired of it fast. Not because it's vanillas fault. But the consumers. >classic slowly built the sub counts from 1.5 to 5 to 7 million over 3 years Yet private servers have fuck small communities filled with people either dipping their toes or super tryhards attempting to get a feeling of what the game was like "back then" >you say we will finish the content in 3months I never said that. I said people will get bored of it in a month. Because people in general all have ADD. >people will play classic for years UNLIKE expansions. I have no doubt that vanilla will harbor an extremely small community that never leaves. Every game does. I can still find games in Space marine for god sake. But what you're implying is that vanilla is gonna be this amazing success that we've all been praying for. And that's just not the case.
Juan Sullivan
Back when classic came out you didn't have much else to play online with your mates. There was nothing there to "steal" users away so it quickly became a social phenomenon. Nowadays there are lots of games to choose from, very few people stick to just one game and play it every day.
Aaron Cruz
I doubt they will ever make wow FTP because they give out all the expansions for free now prior to the latest one. so if they made wow FTP they literaly would have no money from it at all. but yer if they stop releasing expansions and just let the game rot at one endgame forever and ever they might go FTP just to let people experience it for funzies but I highly doubt it. what they really should do is hire a fucking team that has a plan on how to keep players playing for 2 years not 1-2 months.
Jeremiah Cook
>how low do you think it droped? 3?
Guessing its a lot higher than WoD but lower than the other expansions.
Joshua Ramirez
I play both WoW and FFXIV. I dont think the combat system is bad, its different from WoW and i really enjoy it. What makes me mad about the game is the lack of gear, stats optimization, tier bonuses and things like that. Its just too damn casual on that front.
Kevin Cox
I'm really happy they're making classic. Finally all the toxic 12 year old twitch kiddies will leave the current expansion and retail's community will improve because of it.
Samuel Anderson
The extra second on the GCD is barely tolerable and interrupts game flow heavily, and the queue-based system makes it even slower. It's like they took WoW's combat system but then decided to try and be original and it just feels awful in comparison.
I agree with the lack of additional stats but modern WoW, at least back when I played it was about as braindead.
Sebastian Martin
dude the fucking xbox360 came out right after vanilla lunched wtf are you talking about there was heaps of games back in 2005-2006 your fucking crazy
James Nguyen
>toxic
Yeah, the kids are the problem, you goddamn pussy.
Cameron Wood
He meant there wasn't alot of competition in the MMO genre.
Sebastian Collins
there still isn't wtf are you trying to say
Owen Scott
They aren't stripping away the tier bonuses, they're just moving it into a different format because they don't want certain gear slots to be locked down to certain gear like they have been, especially in legion when some classes had to use a previous tiers set just because the set bonuses were great, making old4set/new2set equips common which locks down a lot of slots. They're still having tier set bonuses with these new sets, they're just putting the actual set bonuses in the neck so that gearing is more flexible.
Brody Powell
Halo 3 didnt come out until late 2007. And not everyone owned a 360.
Benjamin White
>tor >gw2 >ff14 >ff11 >eq1 >eq2 >runescape >tera >dragon nest >maplestory >city of heroes (rip) >wildstar (rip) >swg (rip) >and there are just the ones off the top of my head
Fuck off retard.
Kayden Johnson
>drops to basically nothing? >$15 x 1 million subs = $15 million dollars a month I think they're probably pretty happy with it keep in mind that the 10 million peak number all had to buy the expansion ($50), 10 million x $50 = $500 million so that alone is worth it it's still a huge cash cow
Jordan Evans
Thank you for your great arguments as usual, Mr President!
Brandon Evans
WoW is getting more casual by the day on the stats front, but at least on my blood dk i have to ignore higher ilvl gear without haste. (Makes me wish for reforge). On XIV you have two equipments with the highest ilvl avaliable, and a lot of times they share stats, The game is just telling you to fuckoff and use whatever the devs decided. On the combat, if you played lower lvls, the game is cancer, they literally add one button to your rotation every 10 lvls/dungeon as a sort of long tutorial. on the endgame the gcd is honestly fine, the Final Fantasy fights are more mechanic heavy than WoW, your speed stat will decrease the gcd a bit and you will have skills that are off the global cooldown. Its not fast as wow, but at the same time, you are not spamming the same two buttons all the time. You are spamming two combos all the time, wich means six buttons. Used to be better on heavensward, but the devs are making the game more casual. They dont want braindead people having too much less dps than a person who knows the rotation, they are that stupid.
Wyatt Peterson
No I meant PC games in general really. Sure you had wc3 custom games or CS source, but they were not nearly as big or community focused.
Benjamin Barnes
Thank god I am not poor like you. enjoy fortnite
Anthony Ward
On the ffxiv stats, forgot to add, only one weapon, if you are a dark knight on this raid tier, enjoy having a weapon without critical while the other tow tanks enjoy their weapon with optimal stats.
Jordan Robinson
>They are stripping down tier bonuses. We are talking about what they are doing, not their execuses.
Jackson Jenkins
>12 year old twitch kiddies >playing Classic what? it's the fucking 30 year old, fat, basement dwelling neckbeards who are going to play Classic, the same guys who played it on release
Robert Cox
How is that an excuse? It's being integrated into the gear itself. The tier bonus will be there, you will just be able to choose what item to put there and not have dead slots that can't be upgraded because you would break that tier. Tier shittery is staying.
Sebastian Butler
They aren't removing them from the game. You can be mad about it but it's really not changing anything effectively. It just solves an issue that the game has had for a long time.
Andrew Perez
Truth hurts but he's not wrong , GW2 and SWTOR gameplay/combat is miles ahead of wow. After the wow pruning of abilities the game is rendered to a 3 button spam.
Owen Cox
If the bonuses do not come from the tier gear, then its not a tier bonuses, how hard is that to understand? The neck gear is just the new flash mechanic. Just like artifacts were on the last one.
Dylan Gonzalez
the 10million peaks are not the number that buy the expansion that they never release its probably not even half rest are just casuals that come back each expansion to explore the previous expansion which is made free. the only stats they release about box sales is 3.3mil which they have hit afue times. and that's only first days sales so in reality they probably only sell 5million copys of the game if that so really they are only earning 250mil each expansion. factor in development cost that could be 100mil or more (blizzard has a huge team) and marketing that could be another 100mil and they are only earning about 15mil every year plus 50mil every 3 years. that's not very good .. then factor in they could always have been lying to us and these numbers could include free trials (they never specify) and the game could be doing really bad.
at best they could be earning around 40mil a year at worst they could be earning like 10-20mil a year. if you say that sounds good you don't understand how much effort wow costs to maintain.
its very possible wow is doing bad.
if they are lying to us about the player base of "active users" including free trials and people paying for subs with ingame gold then wow could be close to dead. hence classic servers.
William Morris
Good riddance then, because tier bonuses were a shit system and the only good part about it was that the tier gear had a lot of effort put into looking good. Having 6 or 8 slots locked down even though they were not the BiS outside of just adding to the set bonus was boring as shit.
Landon Jenkins
the crazy thing about these numbers is the creator of the Warcraft movie said they are earning a BILLION dollars a year from wow. which is clearly not true blizzard is lying a lot wow is probably close to dead.
Jeremiah Mitchell
>development cost that could be 100mil or more there's no fucking way they spend that much on a game that is already practically done from a developer's position (engine, mechanics, technical aspects are already completed before they even begin working on the expansion)
Gavin Wright
>How do you think blizzard feels kinda like pic related I think
Mason Murphy
I play Gw2 and it's more simplified than WoW. ToR was DoA.
Brandon Price
I think 100mil dev is possible consider the time it takes to make all the art all the world zones all the quests all the dungions. and no the game isn't "done" from a developers position they change the mechanics technical and even slightly change the engine every single time. not to mention the huge amount of bugs and things that would have to be fixed ... I think its very possible. world building is expensive.
Tyler Russell
There is no legitimate reason that tier sets need to exist anymore and the only value lost in their removal is purely nostalgic. Originally, tier set bonuses were only small milestones in gearing but the actual "tier set bonuses" that people don't want to see go are the ones that started existing circa. late wrath/early cata that provided more substantial thresholds in the gearing process.
Tier sets from vanilla through wrath were flat bonuses to skills or stats that did not change your rotation or gameplay in the slightest but were just minor milestones awarded as your geared. Beginning with cataclysm, you start to get the modern implementation of tier sets in which the effects were incredibly powerful and provided a significant milestones for the gearing process. Legion has been a mixed bag with tier sets bonuses, they were very strong in tier 19 and 20 but titanforging started becoming a problem in that it kept older tier sets relevant longer than intended, causing them to scale back the power for tier 21 and instead opt for an additional 15 item levels baseline to try prevent this kind of shit from happening.
At the same time, trinkets started filling this same role in providing significant DPS/Healing upgrades through having powerful and interesting effects. This became worse in MoP with items like Unerring vision for destro warlocks and again in WoD with the HFC trinkets for every class. In legion, this reached it's breaking point with trinkets like arcanocrystal, draught of souls, convergence of fates, bloodthirsty instinct, umbral warglaives, seastar, wriggling sinew, etc. and then the pantheon trinkets on top of that. You could argue that trinkets were meant to be a replacement for the large DPS boost that was lost with weapon drops but regardless, the gearing process these days is much less linear than it was in any other expansion.
wow cost 200mil for upkeep and development from 2004-2008 in that time they didn't release any new content beside one expansion. so yes 100mil for dev of one expansion is likely (If you include upkeep in the dev cost)
Alexander Perez
Are you fucking dumb, this game is still reusing assets from 2004. It's been 14 years now.
Luis Flores
once wow no longer makes enough money to make expansions viable they will make it FTP stop expansions and start selling more and more P2W stuff.
or if blizzard has any class they will just leave it to rot not "ruin it" just stop development and release classic servers lol..
seriously wow is fucking over its really obvious why would they create a entire new team to make classic servers its because the main team is failing so hard that illegal servers are getting higher sub counts than the main ones.
Landon Sullivan
They must be sad that they still make obscene amounts of money from it.
