Blizzcon nears, but World of Warcraft down another 100k subscribers
This is clearly not going to be a big hit for the hugely popular MMO series, but Blizzard have announced that their World of Warcraft subscription database is down to 5.5 million subscribers. This is 100k less than their previous quarter.
There are a lot of varying factors that can affect this and there are also quite a few expansion packs and game modes for World of Warcraft where players may feel not a lot is happening at the moment. On top of this news, Blizzard has also announced they will not be announcing their quarterly figures anymore.
It's not been revealed how they are planning on divulging new statistics going forward but they have said "there are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance" so this is suggesting they will try a different approach in future.
The latest expansion pack to add to their ever expanding collection is titled Legion; you can read more details here. It has been promised that a beta version of the game will be released later this year, more on that is expected to come in the near future and there will be a display for the expansion at BlizzCon this week.
What are your thoughts on Blizzard's latest figures? Does this make you worried for the future of WoW? Let me know in the comments below!
tobes325
Hi guys, The names Toby and I'm from the UK, I'm 26 years old and I've had a huge passion for the gaming world pretty much since birth. My first gaming console was the NES and I've got my parents to thank for that one, since then I have been gaming non stop, mainly on Nintendo consoles and handhelds but I've recently branched out into Sony's world and I'm playing a lot of Steam games. My favourite genre's are probably JRPG's, Platform, Action/Adventure and I love games with a good story, things like The Last Of Us, Ni No Kuni, the Professor Layton series. I'm a massive Zelda nut, always loved the franchise, the characters and the different art styles, not to mention the music. Apart from...more »
Source mmo-champion.com
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I'm kind of disappointed they won't be releasing more statistics on subscriptions, because I wanted to see how the Legion announcement and other changes would affect subscriptions.
A lot of people left early in WoD, for example. I would guess that many of them left due to a lack of stuff to do (replaced by garrison missions) and a lack of flying (I doubt they would have gone back on their no-flight decision, if it weren't considered a major reason for the loss of subscribers). And now that there's more stuff to do and flight is back, some people might return, but a lot of people will probably figure at this point they may as well wait until Legion. I personally returned after an eight month absence only because my wife was still playing - otherwise I would have waited for Legion as well (I would not have come back at all, however, if they hadn't brought back flight).
So, I kind of think the changes in 6.2 were all for the good, but were too little, too late, to save WoD. But I would have been really interested in seeing how things change with Legion.
