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Earlier this year, World of Warcraft's subscriber count fell to its lowest point in years, which sounds bad at first but looking at the numbers properly showed that the MMO was still beating most with well over five million subscribers still in the game. However, don't expect to hear any more of those reports as Blizzard will no longer be reporting World of Warcraft subscriber numbers during its earnings reports.
Speaking during the Activision earnings call this week, it was said: “Note that this is the last quarter that we plan to provide the subscriber number as there are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance”.
This probably doesn't really mean much, World of Warcraft still has a healthy dedicated player base and the expansions always bring swarms of people back in, even if its only for a little while. There is already a new expansion coming out too, known as Legion, though it won't release until next year. The main thing to take away is that it looks like Blizzard doesn't think that subscriber numbers are the best way to measure the game's success any more.
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KitGuru Says: World of Warcraft has done incredibly well over the years and it continues to do so. However, reporting on subscriber numbers only seems to fuel wild speculation about the future of the game, with some going as far as to claim that it is dying, so it makes sense for Blizzard to want to put a stop to that.
I understand what you guys are saying.. but it does seem to be companies/games that aren’t doing too well (Xbone, WoW) that seem to be saying this..
Well they do make a lot on premium mounts and wow tokens. They cost more than a months subscription and they must sell thousands if not more .
Well, at least in the case of WoW, I’d say that since they’re still the king of the hill, by a wide margin, I think it’s fair to say that the subscriber numbers aren’t as great an indicator of their success as they might seem. Back when WoW was purely funded by the subscription fees, every subscriber counted, but now that microtransactions have become so popular in the game, that doesn’t hold as true as it did before. Today, one subscriber may be worth a dozen subscibers a month, due to such purchases. WoW may not be the giant it was, but it still is a giant. I think that declining subscriber numbers have a tendency to generate a lot of negative press and that could have a negative impact on their business in a number of ways, so for me it makes sense to exclude that information from future reports. 🙂
It’s weird to say of a ten year old insanely successive game that it is not doing well when it still has more active players than many year old AAA game 😀
Subscriber numbers don’t account for people who buy the tokens, which is a substantial portion of the people who are still “paying” for the game (blizz still makes money off it even if the person buying the token doesn’t spend any real money themselves).
http://caas.raptr.com/most-played-games-september-2015-metal-gear-solid-debuts-guild-wars-2-rises/
Other sites report similar results to this, wow is essentially in the top 5 most played games in the world month after month, just because it’s not # 1 any more doesn’t mean its no longer successful, top 5 for a game that was made 11 years ago (anniversary in a couple weeks :D) is unheard of for any game other than wow. It’s essentially the most popular game ever to exist, so yeah.
No I get that.. but it used to have over 10 million subscribers so by it’s own standards it’s not doing well. Guess it depends on how its judged.