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?

[mhh91]

League of Legends.

Re:not where from, where to?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

They are going... OUTSIDE.

Re:not where from, where to?

[morcego]

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.

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?

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:not where from, where to?

[betterprimate]

Or they all died from rickets and cheese puff poisoning.

Re:not where from, where to?

[Svartormr]

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

They are going... OUTSIDE.

Cue Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, Movement 1, >:)

Re: not where from, where to?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or at least UPSTAIRS

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?

[RivenAleem]

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.

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.

Re:not where from, where to?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

sounds about right

[Anonymous Coward]

The nude patch for GW2 was finally released.

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.

That's a pretty large decline, yes.

[seebs]

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.

Re:It's beginning to feel dated

[AuMatar]

I don't think graphics really caused anyone to quit. I know a lot of people who used to play Wow, thats never in the top 10 reasons. Really, graphics were good enough a decade ago, improving them farther doesn't improve fun. The main reasons I hear, in no particular order are:

1)World PvP is dead
2)Too much grind
3)Too much catering to casuals
4)Not enough time
5)Just bored of it
6)Expansion X sucked
7)Class X sucks now
8)Too little focus on PvP
9)Too much focus on raiding
10)Too slow content
11)Too fast content

Nothing there has to do with the game, its more the gameplay.

Re:WOW = an utter waste of time.

[Black Parrot]

This crap is for week-minded fools who lack the will power
to abstain from time-wasting activities.

...he posted to Slashdot.

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.