The Shrine

Ars Technica Article: Blizzard lols at Warhammer, says WoW subscribers coming back

If you lose 1.5 million people and 750K of them come back, that's really not much of a cause to celebrate. You have a similar issue with Age of Conan. While nobody knows the exact numbers of any MMO subscription, the fact Blizzard stopped announcing new highs is a good sign that it's not going up. And I know Blizzard and every MMO company always acts like a magic pool of MMORPG players come out of thin air each time a new game is released, but most of them actually come from existing games. The market is quite close to a zero-sum game and AoC and WAR's 500K+ subscribers didn't come out from nowhere.

Don wrote:If you lose 1.5 million people and 750K of them come back, that's really not much of a cause to celebrate.

Actually I think it is. You're not going to STOP gamers from trying out new MMO's, and you're not going to win over those gamers that aren't beholden to a game and just jump into the next big thing, but the fact that half of them already ditched WAR and came back is quite impressive. It's much worse in WAR's case, that they couldn't keep that many people entertained for what, a month?

So for the most part you can't stop them from trying WAR, but it speaks to WoW's appeal if they spend the money, try it, and then in a month hop back to WoW again.

WAR doesn't have much of a presence in Europe, and obviously not Asia, so 1.5 million is about 60% of WoW's NA population base. Now obviously 1.5 million is surely way overexaggerate (assumes every person who plays WAR originally played WoW, and quit WoW) but suppose this is indeed the case, then losing 60% of your population and then having 30% return is still 'half of the guys who left for WAR came back to WoW'. You're also still down a net 30% of your playing base.

Of course since no numbers are ever quoted by MMORPG except during press releases, it's pretty hard to speculate what kind of number are we exactly talking about here. But even a loss of 200K people would be quite significant, even to a game like WoW. As far as I know Mark Jacobs has already responded to this officially (head guy in Mythic) which means it's not just your usual marketing stuff, so this issue is actually quite serious. Either WAR really is in trouble, or WoW really lost a ton of people, or they wouldn't be going after each other so viciously right now. Since it is actually impossible for WAR to be in trouble until the retention data comes out (most people are probably still on their free month at this point) I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. That's not saying WAR's number can't just suddenly drop a month or two from now, but right now it's too early for that to happen since not enough time has passed yet even if WAR totally bombed.

Age of Conan, OTOH, totally bombed. I thought everybody learned from Anarchy Online: Never, never, NEVER release an unfinished MMO!

Oh, wait, Funcom...same developer...

SineSwiper wrote:
Oh, wait, Funcom...same developer...

That's even worse! If anyone should have learned that it woulda been them... although didn't AO live long enough at least for an expansion?

I can't tell any difference between that thread compared to your usual doomsayer posts. I've heard a lot of bad things about AoC but it's not even any worse than the usual doom and gloom that you can find on any forums out there. It is exceedingly difficult to tell what's successful and what's not in the days where subscription numbers are highly guarded secrets. Ironically the only guys who might actually know what the subscription base looks like are probably the gold sellers since they obviously have a strong motivation to be advertising in a game that people still play.

WOW sucks.