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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)."
the real question is, where are people going? bioshock infinite? chains & dragons? It remains to be seen...
Most of the people I know simply quit and didn't go anywhere else. Mostly, they play some single player games now and again.
We were all hardcore raiders getting some top 10 US marks, in some top 100 US guilds.
It comes a point where you are just tired of playing, and every other game is enough alike to keep us away.
So, in answer to your 'where to' question, I guess the answer would be: back to real life.
morcego
I used to know basically no gamers who didn't play WoW. Now I don't know that I still know any. I was one of the loud defenders of Blizzard's choice to enter into a business merger with Activision, and I have been forced to admit that I was wrong. Blizzard's handling of events since then has been spectacularly bad -- I left over the Real ID stuff, myself. (Yes, I know, lots of people say they "backed down". Only temporarily and from the most ridiculously stupid parts; many other aspects are still horrible now, and some of the bad ideas they postponed may come back.)
Thing is, in MMOs, network effects are king. If you want to play a game with your friends, the game your friends play wins. But once you start losing that "everyone I know plays X" spot, there's not really any particularly great technical advantages of WoW over a lot of other MMOs, and quite a few are in many ways better. Even apart from my personal grudge against Blizzard, I found other games to do a better job of things that mattered to me, and I really got sick of Blizzard's active hostility to various parts of their user base. It was a real eye-opener when, after Blizzard spent several years explaining that it could never be possible to tweak the rulesets between PvE and PvP servers, Trion turned around and did it in a week during the Rift beta.
So now I play whatever I happen to know other people who play. And none of the individual games have the population density WoW did, but I am not totally unhappy about that, because it means more choice and more selection.
Stuff that's still going:
DDO: Very different philosophy and design, pretty cool. Overall I'm pretty happy with how Turbine runs things. The microtransaction stuff isn't as intrusive as I thought it would be, and the game design has some really nice appeal.
Rift: As a game, this is basically what I always wished Blizzard would do, and then some. Developers have been pretty responsive to user feedback, and there's a lot less of a focus on tedious time sinks. Big weakness, from my point of view, is that there's been basically no visible community maintenance in ages, so not only are there people who engage in massive, long-term harassment and abuse, but now there are lots more people who are abusive because they're convinced they can get away with it. Still, if you just wanna play with a few friends and ignore public channels, the game itself is amazing. (Slashdotters may care more than others: The addon API is beautiful. One of the nicest development APIs I've used.)
TSW: Not hugely happy with Funcom, but the game is fascinating, and does a lot of things which are radically different from other MMOs, some in very interesting ways. Also pretty responsive to user feedback in a lot of ways.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
That's what I did. The company had a big deadline come up and they asked me to work some overtime. I didn't feel bad about agreeing, but didn't feel I had the time to devote to the hard-core raiding guild I was in, so I quit the game. After the deadlines were over, my manager told me to take a week off in comp time. Rather than pick up that old crack habit again, I decided to take a course of skydiving instead. Well very long story only long, I'm now at 110 jumps, just got my rig, have a couple hours of freefall time in a vertical wind tunnel, and oh yeah, lost 30 pounds. Somehow grinding the same fucking boss for some shiny thing that will be obsolete in a year no longer has the same appeal. This year I plan to travel to at least 2 new dropzones (Haven't decided which 2 yet,) jump from a hot air balloon, and get to the point where I can start thinking about wingsuit training. Turns out living an adventure is a lot more fun than pretending to live an adventure.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Steam Sales took me away from WoW bigtime. There are just so many single and co-op games out there to keep me busy, and they cost much less in the sales than a monthly sub to WoW does.
This is exactly the ecosystem of a game like WoW, though: There is only so much you can do, and then it repeats. The best they can do is move the bar periodically and 'reset' those who've finished. The old-timers are supposed to get bored and move on. The game depends on replacing those burned out players with new people, so the real question is: why has the new generation of game-players not chosen WoW?
WoW is old. It requires a lot of grinding. Today's gamers are playing for 5 minutes at a time on their phone while they're in line at the supermarket, and there's a huge wealth of highly addictive games that take only 5 minutes of continuous attention.