World of Warcraft Loses 1.3 Million Players in First Quarter of 2013

hypnosec writes "World of Warcarft, the gaming industry's most popular franchise and one of Blizzard's cash cows, is bleeding subscribers with 1.3 million defecting from the game in the first quarter of 2013 alone. Blizzard revealed a subscriber decline of over 14%, the total now standing at 8.3 million in their earnings call press release (PDF)."

Comments

not where from, where to?

[noh8rz10]

the real question is, where are people going? bioshock infinite? chains & dragons? It remains to be seen...

Re:not where from, where to?

[Skarecrow77]

Actually I did stop playing wow to play d3. for like 3 or 4 weeks.

really though, it's just... it's just time. the game is a fantastic game, one of the best ever made, but it's been the same thing with new coats of paint for almost a decade now. you can only do this same dance so many times before you sit up, ask yourself "what else is there", and wander off.

I was in a world top 80 guild in vanilla. I personally was the highest DPS on the server for a good while. It was a 7-day-a-week job, but I was young and my GF (now wife) raided with me so it was doable. we both burnt out about the same time the rest of the guild did, it colapsed in on itself about the time we realized that the imminent expansion would completely negate everything we'd done. and it did. complete burnout. left the game for 6 months at least.

raided with a semi-serious raiding guild in TBC. I fought my way back up into a server-best guild again by the end of the next expansion (wrath is still the best thing they ever made imo), just in time for it to all repeat again.

didn't bother raiding cata. same song and dance again.

haven't even SEEN most of mop, i mostly just level alts now. dungeon finder circa level 15 to 55, and questing in northrend and cataclysm for nostalgic purposes, that's all the game is to me anymore, a time sink for nostalgic purposes. like putting weekend at bernies on the tv while you're cleaning the house.

Re:not where from, where to?

[flayzernax]

Unemployment + getting kicked out of basement. Or competition in a market full of other free games which are either ad supported or get revenue from microtransactions.

Facebook is the intelligence level of most WoW new players (not old ones), and there's gobs of addictive mind numbing brainwashing games on there to detract from wow. I blame this on their lowering the barrier to entry and learning curve of the game significantly (it still remained somewhat deeper in the latest expansion levels).

And people who would have been in to WoW back in classic when it was moderately challenging and fun have been so thoroughly alienated Blizzard will never sell another game to them again.

Re:not where from, where to?

[Eskarel]

It's just not fun anymore. I've played for years, but I just can't motivate myself to log in anymore, as soon as the year I signed up for for free D3 is done, I'm unsubbing.

I want to want to play it, it's given me years of fun and they've even put some neat things in, but between having to spend all my play time repeating the same damned set of dailies and the fact that they've essentially ditched dungeons in favor of scenarios(I get that wait times for non tanks/healers were out of control and that scenarios are cheaper to build, but scenarios are simply not fun), there's just nothing to motivate me.

To make the game accessible they've essentially ruined it for everyone, the gated content and reputations make the time investment too high for casuals and the content is too simple and repetitive for hardcore players.

Re:not where from, where to?

[rtb61]

Gamers change of time as they age however the idea is an MMOG is meant to pick up new gamers to replace the old gamers and thus maintain the same subscriber number overall. In this case it is clear WOW is not picking up enough new gamers to replace gamers who a living to do other things. Likely WOW is losing to those games that offer a better free to play or non subscriber fee gaming experience.

Re:not where from, where to?

[Opportunist]

That is a necessity if you want your MMO to survive.

MMOs, all of them, have a certain fluctuation. Some people may start to play it, like it a bit, eventually decide to move on. These people have to be replaced by new blood. Else you have a bleeding that doesn't stop, for people leave, the servers feel empty, more people leave, the game dies.

So you MUST be accessible to new players. This, though, is not the case if the new player would first of all have to raid through 5 years of content before he can play with the "big boys". Imagine people would have to start raiding in Molten Core today. Even if we ignored the impossibility to assemble 40 people to do it since everyone who is raiding with the "elite" doesn't give half a poop (unlike when it was new), how exciting do you think it is to start at the bottom? Even if you COULD find people to play, would you WANT to? Would you want to play an 8 year old game and dig your path up for the next 8 years just to be where everyone is today? And then you're 8 years behind AGAIN. Provided the game lasts that long...

Or would you go find a game where you're starting on even ground with everyone else, i.e. find a game that is just being released?

An MMO must give you the feeling that you're 6 months, tops, behind the top dogs when you start anew. You have to think that you can reach the top in some acceptable time and that you won't be everyone's "little brother" who is lagging behind forever.

Other MMOs made the mistake of ignoring this. The most famous example, IMO, being DAoC. In DAoC, with the Trials of Atlantis expansion, some incredibly powerful items were introduced. These required a lot of work to access and then needed a lot of time to "level" them to be useful, easily keeping the playerbase busy for half a year or even year. But after that, you had people with insanely powerful items that no new player could dream of getting (since they could neither find enough people to go hunt for them, nor have access to the "leveling grounds" for them anymore), essentially meaning that new players are kept out of the loop with no way to access those items and no chance to ever play with the "big boys" in some acceptable time.

And of course the drain of people leaving was not compensated by new people coming in.

MMOs must be accessible to new players. Blizzard analyzed that correctly and what you see there is their reaction to it. If that is a problem for you, I guess you won't be happy with any MMOs that have a chance to survive for long, since they all have to do that.

well

[slashmydots]

Time for World of Starcraft. I'd play it :-P

MUD begat UO begat EQ begat WOW begat ???

[CuteSteveJobs]

Nothing lasts forever. Blizzard have had a good run that other companies can only dream of. I'd love to spend months in it, but real life beckons and by that I don't mean Facebook.

Here's my take on it.

[idbeholda]

I used to be an avid WoW player. WOTLK was the best expansion they made, hands down. The mechanics were solid (if easily exploitable, at best), the gameplay was reasonably thought out (to an extent), and the environment was pretty engaging (and at least 5% of the population weren't complete morons). When I saw the preview for Cataclysm, with its "challenge" of a +5 level cap, new "features" (YOU CAN NOW FLY IN AZEROTH!), "professions" (let's dig around in the dirt for hours on end!), I stopped playing.

At that point, I realized that Blizzard was headed on a downward spiral pretty quickly, and nothing short of angrying up the blood of Ted Turner and sacrificing a chicken in a non-denominational ceremony would stop this quickly approaching trainwreck from happening. Several of my close friends asked me why I thought it was a bad idea. I told them that I knew it was a bad idea because it was *clearly* a BAD idea. I know them when I see them, and this was no exception. My current roommate convinced me to start playing again, and reluctantly I did. It turned out not to be as bad of a trainwreck as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty bad. Everything had been dumbed down, and repetitively grinding rep, dungeons and more dungeons became the focus of the game. We were also able to actually BUILD a character, and things looked promising enough that Blizzard might actually have the chance to redeem themselves.

Man, was I in for a surprise when MoP came out, which I'm pretty sure a mop is what they used as a template for this particular expansion. This legendary, mythical mop wasn't made of anything fancy, like polished, pressure treated oak, a handle made of Corinthian leather, a titanium reinforced head with gold lief, and appropriate mopping fabric material made from the finest imported silk that one would be proud to caress their nether-regions with after a hard day's work. That one just happened to be the high priced, maximum quality mop that was shown on the Home Shopping Network for just 8 easy payments of $99.95. Clearly, this was too rich for their blood. After rustling up the town drunkard, they gave him a 12 pack of Blatz, a jug of cheap wine, and a 6 pack of Natty Light, and set him to the task of finding a mop of this quality. But really, quality didn't matter, they really just needed a mop, and there weren't any good sales going on that particular year.

Several years later, the drunkard returned with a rake. "I couldn't *hic* remember what you were looking for, but didn't you say something about toilets? I think *hic* this is a plunger."

Swing and a miss, Blizzard. 3 for a valiant effort, though. After obtaining this artifact of non-descript antiquity, the development team went to work. Behind closed doors, they agreed that it was most likely a rake picked up out of a dumpster or maybe someone's toolshed that lived down the street. They weren't sure, but there was no turning back now. Best not to let the public know, they also agreed, lest The Almighty Wrath of Tom Selleck's Moustache rear its head again. One of the leads suggested that since it wasn't a mop, perhaps they could make the offcast drippings of churning a poop vat into a mediocre product that would suffice in temporarily plugging the gaping hole in a quickly sinking ship. But it would need to be concentrated.

What was released with Mists Of Pandaria was percolated fecal matter of the highest caliber. That wasn't even from the bowels of the unsuspecting public. This was from Blizzard's own septic tank, full of late night tacos, half-digested food from Grampy's Greasy Spoon Diner (home of the 1/2lb Grampyburger for 89 cents, cheese is 10 cents extra), and empty ketchup packets that had been chewed up by the family dog and evacuated onto a moderately expensive accent rug that had once decorated the lot of the local carwash for 15+ years.

This was progress. This was the trainwreck that everyone said would never happen. Sweet glory of Jesus this was specta

Entertainment vs. Chores

[MachineShedFred]

WoW has changed from being an entertaining game that you could play for a few hours a week and still be able to experience content, into daily / weekly chores that have to be done or else you can't do stuff.

It ceased to be something I wanted to do, and instead turned into a hamster wheel. Or, if you prefer, stopped being a covert hamster wheel with a sense of reward and turned into an overt hamster wheel with no reward whatsoever.

Just like previous MMOs I've played, that's when I hit the cancel button.