World of Warcraft has hit its lowest subscriber total in ages.
As part of a quarterly financial statement, Blizzard announced that WoW hit a recent-years low of 5.6 million subscribers. In a follow-up financial call, the blue giant was jollier than you might expect, given that Diablo, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm upped their overall revenue despite WoW‘s woeful drop.
When we last got an official count from Blizzard back in May, WoW was at 7.1 million subscribers. It was a pretty steep drop from the game’s post-Warlords of Draenor high of 10 million, and our own Gergo speculated that character boosts (which let people get to level 90 sans grinding) and a lack of compelling endgame content might have been to blame.
Since then, Blizzard’s expanded Warlords of Draenor‘s endgame with some of their most challenging raid content yet, but perhaps it was a case of too little, too late. On top of that, casual players tend to return to the World of Chorecraft (hint: it’s real life) after hitting the level cap. Raiding, daily quests, and high end PvP? Not so much.
There is a silver lining here: Blizzard’s been trying to speed up their expansion cycle, and they’re set to announce a new one this week. Given that the MMO megaton has been known to go far longer than a year without a new expansion, that’s pretty huge. Perhaps, if Blizzard can reliably put their expansion factory into overdrive, players will stop cancelling subs between expansions, throwing the game into this torrid cycle of boom and bust.
We’ll see. For now, though, are you glad that Blizzard’s doling out expansions with more regularity? Or did Warlords of Draenor‘s brief run leave you feeling shortchanged?
To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.
Comments
27 responses to “World Of Warcraft Down Another 1.5 Million Subscribers”
In before doomsday prophecies
I always want to get back into it.. thinking I could just level slowly, doing the occasional quest hub then an instance.
But leveling is stupid now. You literally one shot mobs. I ended up having to solo same-level instances on my paladin for there to be ‘any’ challenge. ie Soloing Deadmines at level 15, Wailing Caverns at 20 etc.
Seems like a waste to have the MAJORITY of zones completely unplayable. But meh, maybe it’s what the majority wants. I’m sure Blizzard does some extremely thorough market research.
You should check out the Nostalrius private vanilla server, plays a lot better than the current leveling experience.
Nostalrius community is amazing!
Going back to vanilla its so much more social. But god that aussie ping is painful.
That and every toon around your level is head to toe heirloom. Grouping for dungeons is a waste of time. Hunters just run in and nuke everything.
Make F2P Vanilla servers – the one I currently frequent is over 7k pop. People want the old school, hard content again. WoW really went downhill for me after WotLK and I only half heartedly attempted Pandaria. I stopped my sub after that. Cataclysm pretty much ruined it for me anyway.
Nostalrius represent?
^ 😀
I started on nostralrius, I’m still playing WOD though just to get through the LFR HFC wings and level my characters. Over all my biggest gripe is that levelling is WAY too quick and easy. I just finished levelling a druid and I think I’ve only visted 3 zones in WoD because I just dungeon queued with the bonus xp flasks, even when i did do questing on other toons I missed whole areas and nothing was a challenge. I hate the garrison too, there’s no main city full of people like the old days and having some content locked behind needing to upgrade your garrison which is then locked behind having resources be timed isn’t fun for people who have only joined laterin the xpac.
Another gripe is that all the gear looks so generic now, they know people will transmog so they’ve literally just made a handful of new item skins and just use them over and over again. I miss the days of people’s gear being recognisable and unique.
I agree with the armor skins they are horrible, most of the leather gear looks like plate nowadays actually everything looks like plate lol but like you said they know people are going to solo old content and transmorg them anyways so who cares right.
transmog and ilevel destroy any excitement for new gear
As a long term player, launch to current, and an end game progression raider (top 100 oceanic, top 1000 US) I haven’t noticed any drop in player activity on my serer. If anything its as populated as ever.
Perhaps the drop in subscription could actually be a reflection in the amount of players who have “unsubbed” their accounts and instead are taking advantage of the wow token system. Burning off gold accumulated over the years and no longer pay hard earned real life cash for the game.
Perhaps it is both?
WoD in general has felt a bit short changed though, only two tiers of content? Every previous xpac has been 3 minimum.
Still better than the flop xpac that MoP was though. Other than SoO the entire MoP xpac was rubbish. That said, still vastly superior to vanilla. Which as good as it was at the time, the functionality embedded in the game today does provide a better experience.
Then again, perhaps you play WoW to spend 30mins walking from one side of the barrens to the other?
man, i wish my customer base was 5.6million
That is borderline non sequitur.
it’s almost like releasing ALL of the expansion’s content only SEVEN MONTHS after release (including only 3 raids), without even having announced the next expansion was a bad idea???
They didn’t learn a damn thing from the end of MoP, where the gap between Siege of Orgrimmar and Warlords of Draenor lasted 14 months. It’s impressive just how hard they fucked up.
To all those crying “It’s not as challenging” or “It was better back in Vanilla”, GO BACK AND PLAY VANILLA! I joined a Vanilla based private server a while back and my god, the artificial grind that was used to pad gameplay… It was insane! I couldn’t go into dungeons because you have no dungeon finder and getting a group together was impossible! Hunters used mana and had to craft ammo! It was nothing more that a bunch of crappy mechanics that added to the grind. All playing on a Vanilla server did was remind me how much I hated playing Vanilla WoW.
You could go in to dungeons you just needed to actually socialise and make friends to group with, on my server back then if you had a good reputation you’d have people pming for dungeons all the time. Also things like crafting ammo/poisons/reagents etc gave characters individuality instead of every class today being equal and having the same buffs multiple times
I am playing vanilla…
How many of those subscribers started buying their game time with Gold rather Real money?
Is it 5.6 m Subscribers or 5.6 m active accounts?
I believe those subs are still included, since a sub token purchased on the AH is one that was purchased in store.
In response to the second question, it’s apparently “subscribers”. Active accounts would be a little lower in number.
I preferred the time when they would release new Dungeons with a raid tier.They also should have made a neutral city rather than having everyone sit in their garrisons.
Also whenever they come up with a cool new mount or pet it goes onto the store for 25USD and all the mounts you get for rewards these days are just crappy re-skins.
This game was at its best in WOTLK.
pretty much this.
and they’ll rise again once the next shit fest expansions is announced and released and then drop again.
Sheep will always be sheep.
Vanilla243.
Aussie hosted pre tbc vanilla server.
check it out!
The last great storyline of Wow ended with the Lichking.
We need an expansion that has focus on someone that matters.
Sylvanas please or maybe evil Jaina. Lol