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World of Warcraft loses another million

Posted by: Christos Chatzisavvas August 3, 2012 in Activision/Bilzzard 4 Comments

Activizion-Blizzard announced that World of Warcraft subscriptions have dropped to 9.1 million worldwide, from the 10.2 million people it had a quarter before. But, considering 1.2 million of Diablo III’s 10 million copies sold came from the World of Warcraft Annual Pass deal, which granted you a digital copy of the game, it’s a win/win situation.

With Mists of Pandaria, the latest expansion for the game, being on track to release soon, Activision-Blizzard is definitely hoping to make the subscriber numbers rise again.

About Christos Chatzisavvas

Gaming lover, web developing graduate, founder and developer at Starblind Entertainment. Keep your eye out for news, reviews, previews and opinion articles, as well as game projects. Follow me on Twitter @CrashOkami.

nick

not exactly surprising.
MMOs are between a rock and a hard place at the moment there really popularity is really plummeting!
i think allot of people are starting to get bored with them, they really have not evolved or changed much for so long so people are starting to drift away from them.
really cant wait till my laptop arrives on monday, i really want to get stuck into the secret world!
doing pretty well at the moment, but thats only because its just released and its something new!
dunno how long it will last………
https://twitter.com/#!/Beta_Beast Martin Zamora

@Nick I agree with your comment about MMORPGs popularity declining since they haven’t evolved, but I think it’s because a few have been trying to emulate WoW’s winning formula instead of trying to be original. Guild Wars 2, seems to have enormous buzz surrounding its release. As for The Secret World, it’s a pretty great MMO. My favorite part of it were the quests, each had their own interesting set pieces and stories. I also enjoyed solving mysteries within the game by actually having to research things online in real life. Lastly, the voice acting was spot on in my opinion. Be sure to tell me what you think of it!

As for the article I’m a bit surprised, but I expect these numbers to rise back up after the release of Pandaria.
nick

its definitely hurt it, but its not the sole problem.
the whole copying WoW has certainly hurt the genre but not 100% of its decline is due to it.
i think the percentage excited for GW2 and TSW are the small minority, most are just sick of MMOs all together.
especially in this world where so many MMOs have gone F2P .
look at DC universe, its popularity went through the roof since it went F2P!
if WoW went F2P, which it never will antivision are far too greedy.
but IF it did, well, i wouldent be surprised to suddenly see interest in the genre increase allot!
not to say its the magical solution, but definitely restoring the uniqueness and a better value system will hopefully breathe back some life into the old girl.
but thats with everything, its like the decline of the core stealth game.
or even survival horror.
very slowly games have been moving away from the core hard gameplay and slowly moving to a faster paced more easy smooth gameplay system.
everything is trying to be COD, one of the biggest things that spoiled BFBC2 and BF3 for me.
but sadly as ive said a million times it seems uniqueness has become illegal in this industry!
its so frustrating how developers are in the mindset oh x game is breaking sales records so if we do that we will too!
it does not work like that, but good luck getting that through to them!
$ony and M$ trying to steal nintys crowd for instance, how many games has $ony put out that cater to the casual crowd?
and how many have sold well?
exactly!
just because x company releases x style game does not mean x company will be as successful as x game!
https://twitter.com/#!/Beta_Beast Martin Zamora

Good point with the free-to-play titles, I completely forgot about them even though I cited some in my own post haha.