World of Warcraft Subscriptions Continue To Decline

[Zub]

people play on phones now :-)

[Sam DeathWalker]

They still at 11.1 million subs is anything even remotly close?

[Tonuss]

They still at 11.1 million subs is anything even remotly close?

Nope. And that's what makes WoW difficult to analyze and/or compare to other MMOs.

I'm sure that there's a whole lot of reasons for the drop in subs. The game is more than six years old, and people will come and go. Right now, more are going. These numbers are just before the release of Cataclysm in China and WoW in Brazil (not sure about the second). So the numbers may see a huge rebound for Q3. And hey, it's an MMORPG; there isn't much you can do in terms of variety, and I think Blizzard has done about as much as they can. I think Cata hasn't worked out as well as they'd hoped, and people seem to have grown bored with the expansion pretty quickly.

But as I have said before, WoW is an aberration. I think that people believe that some other MMO will come along someday and pull in 5 million+ subs and hang on to them for a few years and replace WoW as the king of the MMORPG hill. But I don't believe that will happen. I think that even Blizzard's next MMORPG will draw in two or three million and then settle in with 1.5 million or so, maybe less. At first it seemed as if WoW tapped into this new audience for MMOs and that from now on you had to have 5 million+ subs to be considered a success. But more and more I think that WoW is an outlier, and that we won't see anything like it for a very long time, if ever.

In the meantime, they lost almost a million subscribers and are still over eleven million, which would have been unthinkable when WoW launched. And they're even more profitable than they were when they had those 900,000 extra subscribers. And they're expecting to have a better Q3. Even if D3 doesn't ship in that quarter. I wouldn't shed any tears for Blizzard just yet.