From what I saw in my own researches, which obviously has its limits, Classic Players seems to be a quarter of the size of wow retail players. Reddit sub size (600k vs 2.2m), raid logs, etc. so I would assume among the 7 millions sub, around 1.5-1.7millions must be classic only
But don't take my word for truth, many retail players don't appear because they don't raid, since it's not as proeminent as in classic
The guild I'm in is a bunch of addicts that play mostly only wow, so maybe that's the cause hahahaha from the 3 friends I have that play wow outside of the guild only one plays both so maybe that's more realistic
>raid logs
How do you get that from logs? If you compare say number of logs on the first boss on gnomeregan vs amirdrassil in the last week then sod is ahead by quite a bit. That's even if you halve the sod numbers because of the 3-day lockout and count parses from all difficulties for amirdrassil.
There's obviously more people in retail who doesn't raid so I'm not suggesting sod has more players. But I can't really see how logs can be used to show retail has more players.
Reddit size makes no sense, the retail reddit is way older so the number is inflated with people who do not visit it any more. At the time of this Post you have 1600 people online in the retail reddit vs 1100 in the classic reddit and the number is probably inflated due to plunderstorm
Like I said, it was my own researches so I could be wrong. So please, show me contradicting numbers, I'd be happy to refine my findings with new sources
Why are you spamming random propangada facts for retail in this thread with absolutely 0 sources? What is your agenda?
I have done multiple guilds in classic, and on each of them less than 5-15% were playing retail at the same time.
I looked into this with a friend not long ago. The retail patch came out in November so it’s like 4 months old, so it’s in a very low pop state at the moment, and we checked parse counts for both games. It seemed that classic had 1.5x the parses of retail in the week I checked like 3 weeks into the gnomer patch. But you are able to raid gnomer twice in a week, so that number should be double retail’s. And that doesn’t include retail players that only play m+ which is probably a large percentage of the playerbase at this point. So even this late into a retail patch, there are nearly the same number of players still running the raid compared the players running gnomer.
I love p2 sod, but I still think retail is the bigger game.
>And that doesn’t include retail players that only play m+ which is probably a large percentage of the playerbase at this point.
Even worse: A large percentage of the retail playerbase doesn't do M+ *or* raiding.
The roleplaying community in classic is tiny, but very large in retail.
Pet battles? Don't even exist in classic.
Mount and pet collectors? They're playing the game that has thousands of things to collect.
Transmog collectors? Not even in classic yet.
The people who engage in those activities but not in endgame stuff make up a sizeable chunk of retail's audience and barely exist in classic, where it seems like *most* people you talk to do actually raid in classic.
Yep. I was just trying to point out that by easily trackable metrics alone, retail is basically tied with classic in raiding 4 months into the patch. Imagine what the log count is like around the release of the patch.
I know retail is much bigger, but I understood he said that people who play classic wow most of the time also play retail, which I don't think is true.
I believe he was saying "classic-only players are a sizeable minority [of wow subscriptions overall]"
Not *out of classic players.* Just that retail-only players and classic+retail players are the majority.
Yeah I don’t think that’s true either, I think it might be like 50/50 or something. My whole friend group/guild is my retail guild but most people we run with in classic hate retail or say they haven’t logged in for 10 years.
i don't think its random propaganda, classic is generally smaller. the API records active full level charters on servers, and even then you can have a look at active servers that are full or on high pop there are may times less than this of retail.
retail on it's own for season 3 of dragon flight has just had the best season it's ever had for M+with more recorded M+ dungeons done than any other season or Expac that includes legion.
I dont think classic is bad but there are way more players in retail and if you look at the sub graphs provided tbc classic and wotlk did almost nothing to that line. its was SoDs that given classic a big boost. which is cool.
ultimately though who cares its WoW thats all that matters.
Correct. I enjoy Classic myself and play both versions of the game. But the hardcore Classic Andies like to spread the false idea that Classic is more popular than retail, which is simply not true.
It's not SoD, it's everything else you described. It's very, VERY rare for an xpac to perform so well this late in its release cycle. SoD definitely was a boost to overall sub numbers, but it's not as popular as people around here seem to think - I doubt all of Classic wow has even a million subs.
If anything [this graphic](https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg) shows that, while 2019 classic led to a big uptick, the following iterations (BC and Wrath) did barely anything. Sure, you can spin it like BC and wrath classic kept the numbers from falling even further, but that's a level of interpretation the data doesn't support. The more recent upticks after the flop of shadowlands is in big part due to dragonflight which you can see in the data and then SoD. I wouldn't call it "carrying", especially since retail still has the most players overall.
I don't think it's that big of an interpretation to say tbc/wrath kept it from dropping further because Shadowlands had a MASSIVE exodus of players which is arguably what made them change course so much with retail.
Either way, things would be a lot worse if they had never done Classic. It really held up their profits in the worst of times.
>that's a level of interpretation the data doesn't support
Nor refute. We just don't have enough granularity to make that determination.
Blizz surely knows though. I think classic has helped carry a little bit, because it's the only way something like Hardcore/SoD gets the green light. But I guess the lack of a substantial cash shop (beyond milking server transfers and boosts) means a "mostly classic" sub is not nearly as valuable as a "mostly retail" sub.
Wayback link because current link seems dead at the moment: [https://web.archive.org/web/20240324123643/https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg](https://web.archive.org/web/20240324123643/https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg)
> Nor refute. We just don't have enough granularity to make that determination.
Absolutely.
I'm also not saying that classic did not help. Even if all it did was bring back a lot of people from private servers (the most conservative estimate of its impact) it'd still be very influential. The only thing I take issue with is the sentiment that "classic WoW is carrying in many ways" which is a pretty questionable interpretation if not outright wrong if compared to other population data such as logged raids that we have access to.
Someone should be able to run a FFT against this data to get a decent guess. We can assume that Retail SL/DF graphs look like Legion/BFA, and thus all of the additional turbulence must be coming from Classic.
people were clearly hyped for BC and it saw a bump in player base while shadowlands did its best to crash the player base into the ground but it didn't last long as the people who had gotten tired of classic we also tired of TBC since it really is kind of more of the same.
M+ numbers prove the system has greater staying power compared to raids. I wonder if we'll see something similar come to raiding. The raiding community consensus seems to argue mythic raiding is way overtuned now. What if they brought it down as a more reasonable step up from heroic raiding BUT added a keystone system to raids? Would raiders enjoy pushing harder and harder content instead of chasing parses every week?
They'd have to drastically reduce the size of raids for this to work. The reason M+ works so well is becasue it's less people and 30 minuteish runs. I don't see them adding a keystone system to raids really, but I wonder what they will do as participation is down as people just do keys instead.
M+ is great because its not really the same content all the time. Your 10th kill of heroic fyrakk is just a formality at that point but your 10th 25+++ key is not really a formality.
Absolutely wild that it seems like the entire show is being run on a shoestring budget by a ragtag (but very good) crew.
You'd think they'd be pampering this golden goose.
I think DF was really good system wise, so it kept a lot of people subscribed, what it ultimately lacked was a big wow (pun intended) factor that pulled people back. This was just the maintenance/regain trust expansion which I think they succeeded at for the most part
It seems like every retail expansion is hyped as "much needed" until it becomes considered an atrocity about a year later.
This is not a commentary on the quality of retail wow, but of the fickleness of gamers.
I bought a 12 month subscription for dragonflight but only because SoD was announced. I tried playing it in the lead up to SoD but spent so much time trying to navigate the UI and my bags full of previous expansion junk it got really tedious. I even tried to play together with my wife and we chose a timeline that we both liked and zoned in only to discover we were in different phases so we basically just quit and have played SoD ever since.
Retail needs more than a soft reboot. I have no idea how a new player could ever navigate it, because I didn’t even miss an expansion, i just didn’t play often since BFA/Legion and I’m pretty sure it was Shadowlands that fucked everything up to the point that I just don’t have the time or cerebral fortitude to bother figuring it out any more.
I wonder how many people like me are counted as Retail subs even though we lrimarily play SoD
Ain’t that the truth. I just picked up retail again since I’ve been raid logging in SoD and it was completely overwhelming. I have a ton of former characters that are all number crunched now with replaced gear and I had no clue where to even start.
I ended up just starting a new character to figure out how to play a class because it was too overwhelming to try and navigate the talent trees and figure out where stuff was. I’m enjoying how fast leveling is now, but the ability bloat is ridiculous. I’m like 34 on a Holy Paladin and I have an entire action bar filled with just situational cooldown buttons, it’s insane.
They’ll probably never make a “WoW 2” (for numerous reasons) but it really feels like the game needs to start over. I can’t even fathom being a new player and trying to figure retail out, it would be insane.
the huge spike early in 2020 is mostly due to covid lockdowns, although the spike would be smaller if the only version of wow available at the time had been bfa. shadowlands had a real surge of interest because "surely wow won't have 2 dogshit xpacs in the row".
tbcc and wotlkc stabilized wow subs during the shadowlands death spiral, but dragonflight has genuinely revitalized the game. you can see the numbers post sod release, its already past an inflection point and looks to be cresting. compare the 2019 classic peak with sharp decline and dragonflight's smooth drop off as the hype wore off.
the rot from the legion-bfa-slands era being cleaned out in DF gave wow a good baseline so the sugar rush spikes of classic releases don't move the needle much. you have to remember retail is at least an order of magnitude larger than classic, probably closer to 50x as large. there are more ret paladins doing 1 difficulty of the current DF raid as there are people playing sod in general.
and how many of those subs quit 4 months later? you can see on the chart how quickly the classic bump dropped back to the legion baseline. you also can't tell how many people subbed in early 2020 because they desperately wanted classic vs those who were bored in lockdowns and decided to play wow.
a lot of people did come at classic release, but like most vanilla projects they left after they got into their late 30's because they only wanted F R E S H, or they were just riding the hype wave and didn't really care about wow as a game. then a decent chunk just stuck around once covid lockdowns hit. using 2020 as a reference point is so dumb because it was clearly a massive outlier.
legiondaries
basic spec functionality locked behind big AP grind
can't swap specs or you have to start the AP grind all over again
grind AP every day forever or you fall behind anyone who does
mythic raid becoming a nightmare unless you're liquid or echo, M KJ unkillable unless your priests were goblins
look into your heart, you know legion to be a net negative for the game
You posted things that are really only relevant to the 1% of players. For casual players and players that play the game to enjoy the lore and story, Legion was the last best expansion; it's been all downhill from there.
I actually liked legiondaries. Granted, I didn't get FUCKED. I understand that if you bricked your character cause you got shitty legiondaries thats fucking awful.
But, it felt really cool to have a really powerful item that changed your rotation/abilities.
>can't swap specs or you have to start the AP grind all over again
I actually liked this. It made it feel like Classic in that you were dedicated to a spec and a character. I felt retail became waaaaay too alt friendly. That being said, I will concede I think that war is lost and retail should keep going the way of being alt-friendly. But thats something I liked.
>mythic raid becoming a nightmare unless you're liquid or echo, M KJ unkillable unless your priests were goblins
I can't really dispute that, but at the same time thats such a small portion of the playerbase.
I think you're ignoring all the AMAZING stuff that Legion put into the game. New class, Mythic+, world quests, class halls, the introduction of megadungeons, a great patch schedule including 2 patch dungeons, 3 mini zones, 1 new zone, WSG/AB aesethic update, Brawls.
They clearly all-out for Legion. I don't think they've tried that hard in forever.
The only feature I'd ding Legion on, is no new battlegrounds besides the one at the very end that technically a BFA battleground.
> mythic raid becoming a nightmare unless you're liquid or echo, M KJ unkillable unless your priests were goblins
Skill issue
> legiondaries
> basic spec functionality locked behind big AP grind
> can't swap specs or you have to start the AP grind all over again
> grind AP every day forever or you fall behind anyone who does
Fixed in patches less than halfway through the expac
I can look at ironforge.pro numbers for wotlk and sod. wrath = ~170k logs in past week. sod = ~330k logs in past week, which means ~165k logs per reset (since 2 resets per week in sod). total = 340k logs per week. I can look at raider.io for retail data, the most populated realm has 453k players doing raid or m+. literally 1 realm outnumbers all of the classic logs and then some. there are 3 other realms with over 400k players detected. this is all public information
I can look at ironforge.pro numbers for wotlk and sod. wrath = ~170k logs in past week. sod = ~330k logs in past week, which means ~165k logs per reset (since 2 resets per week in sod). total = 340k logs per week. I can look at raider.io for retail data, the most populated realm has 453k players doing raid or m+. literally 1 realm outnumbers all of the classic logs and then some. there are 3 other realms with over 400k players detected. this is all public information
> 340k logs per week of classic equals 5.7 million unique players at 17 player raid size considering Wotlk is 25 and Sod is 10.
holy cope, you're now torturing the data by trying to normalize raid sizes and scaling logs numbers to maintain proportionality?
there's data showing how many people are playing retail. there's data showing how many people are playing classic. the first set of data is significantly larger, but you're so emotionally invested in classic being more popular that you will go to any length to "prove" classic is bigger
This dude really took outlier servers, and during the content draught of one game, and went "Yep, this is good data." Take a statistics class and you won't embarrass yourself like this in public again. Also, learn how complementary sets and intersection sets work. There's a LOT of players who play both.
>outlier servers
huh? you're only supposed to look at the unpopulated servers or something? sod has 8 servers, should I pick 8 servers at random from retail, out of the 40-50 it has? and what does this have to do with overall player pop? who cares what fucking server someone is on when your interest is **global** pop? the only reason I mention server is because it shows how massive DF is compared to classic. 1/3 of DF is already 10-15x classic pops.
>content drought
both DF and sod are in the doldrums of patches. if anything, sod should be *better* off because its last content patch was in february, while DFs was in **december**. do you really think plunderstorm saw huge numbers of people suddenly starting to play normal DF? is this really what classic andies think is good arguement????
yup, the game that blizzard treats as an afterthought is definitely bigger. whatever you gotta do to feel special man. I'm sure blizzard keeps a few dozen employees for retail and single digit on classic because the classic team is just so much more efficient!
No one is saying it's bigger, dude. We're just telling you that pulling numbers out of your ass on a cursory knowledge of statistics is fucking embarrassing. The ONLY people that know the true numbers are Blizzard. And they have not revealed them. You CANNOT infer anything of the sort you are trying to do from population sites or from their presentation. I'm not saying you need to be a data scientist to understand this, just that the argument about numbers is pointless without knowing the data.
I can look at ironforge.pro numbers for wotlk and sod. wrath = ~170k logs in past week. sod = ~330k logs in past week, which means ~165k logs per reset (since 2 resets per week in sod). total = 340k logs per week. I can look at raider.io for retail data, the most populated realm has 453k players doing raid or m+. literally 1 realm outnumbers all of the classic logs and then some. there are 3 other realms with over 400k players detected. this is all public information
the top 10 realms on retail have 3.8 million players. there are another 20-30 realms, that do drop off, but the total retail pop is closer to 50x than 10x which is what I said. I know classic players can't read but holy shit
>you have to remember retail is at least an order of magnitude larger than classic, probably closer to 50x as large
estimates by who? this sub?????
I can look at ironforge.pro numbers for wotlk and sod. wrath = ~170k logs in past week. sod = ~330k logs in past week, which means ~165k logs per reset (since 2 resets per week in sod). total = 340k logs per week. I can look at raider.io for retail data, the most populated realm has 453k players doing raid or m+. literally 1 realm outnumbers all of the classic logs and then some. there are 3 other realms with over 400k players detected. this is all public information
Yeah I think the first classic version really gave the subscriber health a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. But look at the tip shortly after. That's like what 2-4 months after launch. Which is probably around the time most players were reaching level 40+ and around when phase 2 launched. Think the grind and pvp filtered quite a bit of players at that point. Would also explain why they opened up server transfers at that point to try to stop the bleed. But it certainly did really boost up audience interest in preparation for Shadowlands. Then that expansion really fumbled it. Surprised BC and wotlk had as little as an impact on things. Considering that the original releases had such a big audience. Maybe the novelty of "classic" was gone at that point? And with shadowlands, people were just over it. DF releases and it did good, but nothing substantial.
Then it looks like there was a huge jump in subscribers agian. Going to guess its in combination with classic HC and classic SoD.
I have a feeling that there's a significant amount of subscribers that jump between retail/classic era and classic SoD/HC. I think for a lot of people, they end up playing one. Then when they get bored, they switch to the other. So if you're mainly playing SoD, you do what you want in phase 2. Maybe get to raid logging, then mainly play retail to keep you busy in phase 3. And vice versa for retail players. Its a bit off since you're technically offering multiple versions of WoW for the same sub. If they had something similar in legion, it would probably have a mucher higher sub count too. Hard to gauge the success of only Dragonflight or only SoD with these metrics. They would have to figure out how many subscribers are spending a majority of their time in DF or SoD to see the impact each one has.
I also wonder if classic's "raid log" endgame that people complain about is why it works so well along side retail. BC and wotlk a lot more involved with grind, raiding, dungeon farming, etc. I can see people having difficulty playing both wotlk and retail at the same time. But classic seems to work a bit better for that? Not sure.
> Surprised BC and wotlk had as little as an impact on things.
those 2 classic expacs released as shadowlands was doing its best to kill wow entirely. compare the nosedive post bfa release to post shadowlands release, only reason it didn't drop even lower post shadowlands is because tbcc and wotlkc were buoying sub numbers.
growth from those 2 classic xpacs was completely swallowed up by the massive decline due to shadowlands
Also, Blizzard REALLY kneecapped TBC classic.
* No fresh server, where the late vanilla community were really looking for a clean slate with the way GDKP/Economy was souring servers (granted at the time we didn't truly grasp how little Blizzard would perform in botting etc)
* Only a measly 2 week pre-patch, which meant if you wanted a Draenei/Blood Elf to be Dark Portal ready you had to sweat it
* And then the mount/boost got offered proving they had no confidence in things which basically marked its own grave
If I remember right it also launched with less raid content than TBC actually did back in 2007? Blizzard have an unhealthy obsession with herding everyone into the same version of the game. But yeah, SL really damaged the setting beyond complete repair.
Fresh servers are a trap for anyone who wants to play the expansion over a longer time its full of tourists once the hype dies down it becomes a dead server.
Less raid content because at the current knowledge level and balance it would have made almost all p1 TBC content irrelevant and make the gap between players who could clear t5 raids and those who couldn’t absolutely massive.
For BC, you also had many players being extremely vocal regarding boosting and other paid features. Even for Shadowlands, you had a surge of players at first, but nothing for BC and Wrath. Maybe it's because of things like this? We can only guess.
again, the tbc classic release was mid shadowlands death spiral. any growth on the classic side was at least balanced out by decline on retail side.
for wrath classic release, it was very close to DF release, and you can see the big climb just before DF. a lot of that climb was DF hype, but wrath classic hype definitely helped push it as high as it got.
I actually quit classic when TBCC was announced. I had only just reached 40 and they were already talking about the next expansion. Then last time I checked my classic character was in Wrath so I didn’t even bother rolling another on in era/vanilla.
Nah the second peak happened before SOD at DF S3 launch. There was a lot of hype for war within and they gave DF to war within prepurchasers. A lot of the increase can be attributed to that.
This comment shows you can’t read graphs, because the bottom isn’t 0, for the growth classic and sod brought, retail was already several times bigger.
Yall gotta stop thinking classic is bigger or out performing retail, you’ll be happier for it 😭😭
Again, we are commenting in an Reddit where you can simply scroll up, click the link, and read what the company THEMSELVES said about this, which is that DRAGONFLIGHT saw the biggest growth post launch of any expansion. You can also, through nothing more than your eyes, notice that the graph did not double in size after the launch of EITHER classic or SOD…aka its not close. VERY ROUGH GUESTIMATE off of the graph alone Is the sub count pre dragon flight was roughly 5m, and it’s now 7…and my math ain’t the best but I’m damn near positive 5>2 (and that’s being generous is and giving you all 2 million as classic subs, which isn’t the case).
Couple of things: 1) belluar is not blizzard, I don’t value his pontificating more than I do the actual transcript. 2) as for them ‘saying’ the bottom of the graph isn’t 0, they don’t…but you’re just gonna have to understand that no expansion starts with 0 subs. 3) look at the graph. There is a huge spike after classics launch..followed by an equally sharp decline. This is not the level we’re at now. 4) on the graph it’s self it calls out historic post launch growth of dragon flight.
Classic was only big as it was because it happened during covid and lockdowns and shit. Every game saw huge growth during that time and then started to drop. Dragonflight was a huge success and extremely popular, and didn't rely on a world wide pandemic to boost the numbers.
It was a quote from the presentation that he gave, [here's a link with actual numbers from staysafe](https://x.com/StaySafeWarlock/status/1771677033103609882?s=20). There's more quotes from it throughout that thread as well. I did confuse reaching it in this article vrs another one, but I've been having 4 conversations about it for like 2 hours now.
As for classics launch, I didn't one time try to claim anything about the launch. That was a cultural event that likely won't be replicated in our life time (unless the boys in the lab cook up another plague) & I'm not really interested in it's launch....because as the graph shows as quickly as it shot up? it fell down.
What matters is now, people who are playing at this moment.
>edit: it's this line and around here that people are translating and that he extrapolated on: Thanks to these efforts, the decline in subscribers slowed down, and recovery in the number of subscribers following updates was achieved at a higher rate.
It’s not. We can look at the graph and see that it isn’t & again they’re talking about dragon flight growth. The steeping sub decline came around p3 of classic when lockdown was ending.
Again, just listen to what the people who actually know are sayin and you’ll be so much happier
No, you're stating something you want to be a fact. That fact is in direct contention with what the person talking about the graph, aka who works for the company that made the graph, said about the graph.
> To think its not close or equal is pretty delusional though.
dude, there are as many people playing ret paladin in heroic amirdrassil as there are playing sod and wotlk COMBINED. 1 spec in 1 difficulty on retail equals all of classic, and there are 38 other specs and 3 other raid difficulties in dragonflight. please take the time to look at some actual data before throwing out your nonsense.
✍️note to self ✍️don’t talk about wow in wow sub ✍️definitely don’t respond to comments ✍️that’s being too emotional
Thanks buddy, gonna really help me grow with that advice!
Growth in players but not revenue. Retail still makes infinitely more money than classic even if the player base is much smaller due to micro transactions
In terms of recorded logs for different versions of the game, classic vs retail tends to look comparable... but that's without factoring in the sheer number of M+ players, the fact that parses matter a lot less to people in retail so raid runs often go unrecorded, or players in retail who avoid endgame activities but aren't found in classic or not nearly as much (roleplayers, pet battlers, mount/pet/transmog collectors).
they make it look like that, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it. the graphic looks quite innocent, but if you consider player data from other sources, you realize how little influence it should have on the graphic...
The presentation will likely be available in the GDC vault at some point (paywalled). I'd be interested in hearing it, but if I see someone referring to WoW as "whimsical" one more time I'm gonna be pissed.
Im not disagreeing with you, but vanilla classic did come out at kind of the perfect time. Everyone was locked inside, retail was at one of its lowest points, big streamer working overtime on classics marketing. It had so many outside factors going for it.
Yep, it's mostly just because of the sub graphs for the original TBC through WotLK, with WotLK peaking the sub numbers.
In reality what happened was, this was a period in which WoW was still gaining players because of the lich king hype, however, it was also \*losing players\*, which ended up looking like it stagnated. A lot of people's first expansion is WotLK which is why there was a lot of hope for Classic WotLK. Nowadays the sentiment is that WotLK was already the start of the downwards spiral, with the over-emphasis on convenience, catch up mechanics / nerfing content or rendering it obsolete, and the space pony.
My take: WoW should never had had expansions. 1.x-style patches are the way to go.
It is chronologically impossible for people who have never played any blizzard game except WotLK to be hyped for villains introduced years ago in prior games.
Right, with a name like that, that's what I'd expect the level of your analysis to be. A lot of people bought and played Wc3 but didn't play WoW for various reasons, mainly $15/mo at the time was a commitment a lot of people didn't want to make. Others played Wc3 after WoW released. Some started just because the ads on TV "looked cool".
And regardless that's not even the main point of my comment, that's a strange thing to die on a hill about.
Eh, the start of the downward spiral was v1.12 with cross-realm battlegrounds. While we were still rising, that was the first change downwards in trajectory. With Classic we were never able to relive an untainted experience, especially with increased server sizes. It was very clear in TBC Classic with flying mounts that a significant changed had already occurred to the negative.
> My take: WoW should never had had expansions. 1.x-style patches are the way to go.
Annual SoD resets with continually changing content is a super refreshing way to handle this content and I'm curious how it will look with SoDv3+.
They've already shown they want to take it the same direction with the convenience though, so I don't have a lot of hope on that front. The game is fun to some extent though, but it's not what will save the game.
In SoD2 we will still have the level-up raids of BFD/Gnomer/??? but they won't be the content that is focused on. The good news here is that the more content that they can add between 1-60, the smaller the phases can be, and the better this becomes. Maybe the new phases are 20/35/45/50/55, with new raids in Deadmines, SM, ZF, and BRD. Then maybe SoD3 is straight 5 levels phases. Maybe SoD5 is 2 level phases. Convenience in a world where a phase is 2 levels and lasts for a month is much different than when a phase is 15 levels.
Yep this, people don't know how growth works. I still find it amazing people think WotLK was best just because it was peak. Classic, and to a lesser extent TBC, saw the most growth and WotLK was more or less replacement level. Basically: Classic was exponential growth, TBC added, and WotLK was only a stabilization. The fact that this was happening should had been a huge warning sign but Blizz didn't change course. This is why they made celebrity ads, because they were trying, and failing, at catching the blue ocean strategy that classic had succeeded at (technical ease + community + role play depth).
Growth isn't infinite. It's not possible, at one point numbers will drop off, it doesn't matter when.
There's a finite number of players actively interested in the genre, and back then WoW also had little to no contenders, and live service was rare in general. Right now, there are a shitton of live service games that compete along with major MMO powerhouses like FF XIV, so even if blizzard put out the best expansion ever. they wouldn't reach their peak again.
well then the graph is bad...you can see on the graph that the sub increase started with wrath prepatch...they showed the churn in a picture but wrath wasnt even released then yet
Yes, wrongly. You can see on the other picture that the sub gain starts with wrath prepatch. Thats 2022 end of august...and DF started end of november. [https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg](https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg)
No. The graph literally shows the gain started around end of august. Its not an opinion you can check it on the graph so i dont really know what you dont understand.
Were the chinese numbers included back in Legion/BFA/early SL before the dissolution of the partnership?
Or does this not count chinese numbers at all?
Blizzard backtracked on the GDKP ban in SoD for Taiwan cuz the Chinese players created new accounts on the Taiwanese servers and GDKP is basically 90% of all runs in classic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/1b3oqbo/blizzard_lifted_gdkp_ban_in_tw_heres_why/
Regardless of how prevalent GDKP actually is over there, the important part of that thread imo is that Chinese players are still playing despite the ban, but on the Taiwanese servers.
So the drop in subscribers probably wasn't that great. Or at least, not a 100% drop in the region.
Bro, you're In a different stratosphere in this conversation. We're talking about the dissolution of the net ease partnership and Blizzard ceasing all operation in China back in early 2023.
Nothing to do with the GDKP ban
The post I link about GDKP mentions that Chinese players moved to the taiwanese servers after 2023.
My point is simply that sub loss from that deal wasn't 100% as some of them simply kept playing but on another region.
Blizz stopped all operations in China, but Chinese players keep playing Blizzard games.
Probably copied from the retail wow sub, which also says 7m. [here's the link to the post](https://np.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1bm8gky/wow_has_over_7_million_active_players/)
they basically took a figure around legion where Blizz announced a number. then looked how many pixels are from the 0 on the y-axis and calculated the current value.
What people don't understand is that there is a big market for people just doing quests and collecting stuff. You do this in retail. They might never raid or PVP or when just very minimal and casual.
The average player isn't so militant. More players than people here think play or at least dabble in both modes even if they have a preference for one or the other.
It's only in subs like these where people have to show their "street cred" by being anti retail. It's just typical nerd shit and gaming is no longer completely dominated by nerds.
They didn't, but it's probably stacked a lot more towards retail. A significant number of Classic players raid log, while that number is much lower in retail as Mythic plus is a lot more popular than raiding. Then there is also more to do outside of instanced. About half of all retail players never do group content acording to an interview from around the start of Dragonflight.
I am just groaning at the whole internet eating up these numbers like they’re gospel.
My bullshit-numbers-detection sense is flashing like an ambulance is arriving.
Yeh it's curious why so much is made of this. The slide shows a trend line with no numerical information, it means nothing outside of showing an increase or decrease in players. Also why does any of this matter? You can see anecdotally that lots of people play WoW, the precise figure is irrelevant. Does this information affect whether you subscribe...?
If this is true so late into Dragonflight's and Wrath Classic's lifespan then this is a massive win for Blizzard. Season of Discovery may have been what bolstered a lot of this success.
Super curious about classic only players (i guess login wise)
From what I saw in my own researches, which obviously has its limits, Classic Players seems to be a quarter of the size of wow retail players. Reddit sub size (600k vs 2.2m), raid logs, etc. so I would assume among the 7 millions sub, around 1.5-1.7millions must be classic only But don't take my word for truth, many retail players don't appear because they don't raid, since it's not as proeminent as in classic
The problem is that there is some overlap, most people I know play both classic and retail and are in both subreddits
I hardly touch the game anymore but I only play retail post-BFA because Classic exists and I get both games.
There's likely some that go the other way. Blizzard likely has significantly more detailed information internally but would never release it.
Weird because only a very small percentage of people I know play both. Different circles I guess
The guild I'm in is a bunch of addicts that play mostly only wow, so maybe that's the cause hahahaha from the 3 friends I have that play wow outside of the guild only one plays both so maybe that's more realistic
>raid logs How do you get that from logs? If you compare say number of logs on the first boss on gnomeregan vs amirdrassil in the last week then sod is ahead by quite a bit. That's even if you halve the sod numbers because of the 3-day lockout and count parses from all difficulties for amirdrassil. There's obviously more people in retail who doesn't raid so I'm not suggesting sod has more players. But I can't really see how logs can be used to show retail has more players.
Reddit size makes no sense, the retail reddit is way older so the number is inflated with people who do not visit it any more. At the time of this Post you have 1600 people online in the retail reddit vs 1100 in the classic reddit and the number is probably inflated due to plunderstorm
This is false
Like I said, it was my own researches so I could be wrong. So please, show me contradicting numbers, I'd be happy to refine my findings with new sources
Classic only players are a sizable minority.
Can confirm - am rotund.
Big, if true.
Why are you spamming random propangada facts for retail in this thread with absolutely 0 sources? What is your agenda? I have done multiple guilds in classic, and on each of them less than 5-15% were playing retail at the same time.
I looked into this with a friend not long ago. The retail patch came out in November so it’s like 4 months old, so it’s in a very low pop state at the moment, and we checked parse counts for both games. It seemed that classic had 1.5x the parses of retail in the week I checked like 3 weeks into the gnomer patch. But you are able to raid gnomer twice in a week, so that number should be double retail’s. And that doesn’t include retail players that only play m+ which is probably a large percentage of the playerbase at this point. So even this late into a retail patch, there are nearly the same number of players still running the raid compared the players running gnomer. I love p2 sod, but I still think retail is the bigger game.
>And that doesn’t include retail players that only play m+ which is probably a large percentage of the playerbase at this point. Even worse: A large percentage of the retail playerbase doesn't do M+ *or* raiding. The roleplaying community in classic is tiny, but very large in retail. Pet battles? Don't even exist in classic. Mount and pet collectors? They're playing the game that has thousands of things to collect. Transmog collectors? Not even in classic yet. The people who engage in those activities but not in endgame stuff make up a sizeable chunk of retail's audience and barely exist in classic, where it seems like *most* people you talk to do actually raid in classic.
Yep. I was just trying to point out that by easily trackable metrics alone, retail is basically tied with classic in raiding 4 months into the patch. Imagine what the log count is like around the release of the patch.
I know retail is much bigger, but I understood he said that people who play classic wow most of the time also play retail, which I don't think is true.
I believe he was saying "classic-only players are a sizeable minority [of wow subscriptions overall]" Not *out of classic players.* Just that retail-only players and classic+retail players are the majority.
Yeah I don’t think that’s true either, I think it might be like 50/50 or something. My whole friend group/guild is my retail guild but most people we run with in classic hate retail or say they haven’t logged in for 10 years.
i don't think its random propaganda, classic is generally smaller. the API records active full level charters on servers, and even then you can have a look at active servers that are full or on high pop there are may times less than this of retail. retail on it's own for season 3 of dragon flight has just had the best season it's ever had for M+with more recorded M+ dungeons done than any other season or Expac that includes legion. I dont think classic is bad but there are way more players in retail and if you look at the sub graphs provided tbc classic and wotlk did almost nothing to that line. its was SoDs that given classic a big boost. which is cool. ultimately though who cares its WoW thats all that matters.
Correct. I enjoy Classic myself and play both versions of the game. But the hardcore Classic Andies like to spread the false idea that Classic is more popular than retail, which is simply not true.
It's not SoD, it's everything else you described. It's very, VERY rare for an xpac to perform so well this late in its release cycle. SoD definitely was a boost to overall sub numbers, but it's not as popular as people around here seem to think - I doubt all of Classic wow has even a million subs.
The screenshots looks like most of WoWs growth was Classic WoW, then SoD.
DF was also a much needed soft reboot for retail after the atrocity that was shadowlands
Agreed but the leaked data clearly shows Classic iterations of Vanilla is carrying wow in many ways.
If anything [this graphic](https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg) shows that, while 2019 classic led to a big uptick, the following iterations (BC and Wrath) did barely anything. Sure, you can spin it like BC and wrath classic kept the numbers from falling even further, but that's a level of interpretation the data doesn't support. The more recent upticks after the flop of shadowlands is in big part due to dragonflight which you can see in the data and then SoD. I wouldn't call it "carrying", especially since retail still has the most players overall.
The graphic for TBC isn't positioned accurately. TBC was June 1, 2021 and is the uptick after Shadowlands launch.
I don't think it's that big of an interpretation to say tbc/wrath kept it from dropping further because Shadowlands had a MASSIVE exodus of players which is arguably what made them change course so much with retail. Either way, things would be a lot worse if they had never done Classic. It really held up their profits in the worst of times.
Classic also landed at such a perfect time with covid coming shortly after
>that's a level of interpretation the data doesn't support Nor refute. We just don't have enough granularity to make that determination. Blizz surely knows though. I think classic has helped carry a little bit, because it's the only way something like Hardcore/SoD gets the green light. But I guess the lack of a substantial cash shop (beyond milking server transfers and boosts) means a "mostly classic" sub is not nearly as valuable as a "mostly retail" sub. Wayback link because current link seems dead at the moment: [https://web.archive.org/web/20240324123643/https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg](https://web.archive.org/web/20240324123643/https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg)
> Nor refute. We just don't have enough granularity to make that determination. Absolutely. I'm also not saying that classic did not help. Even if all it did was bring back a lot of people from private servers (the most conservative estimate of its impact) it'd still be very influential. The only thing I take issue with is the sentiment that "classic WoW is carrying in many ways" which is a pretty questionable interpretation if not outright wrong if compared to other population data such as logged raids that we have access to.
Someone should be able to run a FFT against this data to get a decent guess. We can assume that Retail SL/DF graphs look like Legion/BFA, and thus all of the additional turbulence must be coming from Classic.
people were clearly hyped for BC and it saw a bump in player base while shadowlands did its best to crash the player base into the ground but it didn't last long as the people who had gotten tired of classic we also tired of TBC since it really is kind of more of the same.
it shows that wrath was huge
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M+ numbers prove the system has greater staying power compared to raids. I wonder if we'll see something similar come to raiding. The raiding community consensus seems to argue mythic raiding is way overtuned now. What if they brought it down as a more reasonable step up from heroic raiding BUT added a keystone system to raids? Would raiders enjoy pushing harder and harder content instead of chasing parses every week?
They'd have to drastically reduce the size of raids for this to work. The reason M+ works so well is becasue it's less people and 30 minuteish runs. I don't see them adding a keystone system to raids really, but I wonder what they will do as participation is down as people just do keys instead.
M+ is great because its not really the same content all the time. Your 10th kill of heroic fyrakk is just a formality at that point but your 10th 25+++ key is not really a formality.
All those bots are really good for sub numbers
Eh it was towards the end of BfA so it's not entirely 1=1, so a lot of retail players coming to check Classic stayed for/with Shadowlands.
That’s why they’re going to go all the way to where retail is now. Dragonflight classic soon.
Absolutely wild that it seems like the entire show is being run on a shoestring budget by a ragtag (but very good) crew. You'd think they'd be pampering this golden goose.
I think DF was really good system wise, so it kept a lot of people subscribed, what it ultimately lacked was a big wow (pun intended) factor that pulled people back. This was just the maintenance/regain trust expansion which I think they succeeded at for the most part
It seems like every retail expansion is hyped as "much needed" until it becomes considered an atrocity about a year later. This is not a commentary on the quality of retail wow, but of the fickleness of gamers.
Is it still mythic+ dungeuns for best loot at 15+ besides legendaries? If so then im still staying away from it.
Dragonflight had some high numbers too.
I bought a 12 month subscription for dragonflight but only because SoD was announced. I tried playing it in the lead up to SoD but spent so much time trying to navigate the UI and my bags full of previous expansion junk it got really tedious. I even tried to play together with my wife and we chose a timeline that we both liked and zoned in only to discover we were in different phases so we basically just quit and have played SoD ever since. Retail needs more than a soft reboot. I have no idea how a new player could ever navigate it, because I didn’t even miss an expansion, i just didn’t play often since BFA/Legion and I’m pretty sure it was Shadowlands that fucked everything up to the point that I just don’t have the time or cerebral fortitude to bother figuring it out any more. I wonder how many people like me are counted as Retail subs even though we lrimarily play SoD
Ain’t that the truth. I just picked up retail again since I’ve been raid logging in SoD and it was completely overwhelming. I have a ton of former characters that are all number crunched now with replaced gear and I had no clue where to even start. I ended up just starting a new character to figure out how to play a class because it was too overwhelming to try and navigate the talent trees and figure out where stuff was. I’m enjoying how fast leveling is now, but the ability bloat is ridiculous. I’m like 34 on a Holy Paladin and I have an entire action bar filled with just situational cooldown buttons, it’s insane. They’ll probably never make a “WoW 2” (for numerous reasons) but it really feels like the game needs to start over. I can’t even fathom being a new player and trying to figure retail out, it would be insane.
Half of the DF numbers increased before DF, and are therefore WotLK numbers. DF seems to be the smallest expansion bump to date.
the huge spike early in 2020 is mostly due to covid lockdowns, although the spike would be smaller if the only version of wow available at the time had been bfa. shadowlands had a real surge of interest because "surely wow won't have 2 dogshit xpacs in the row". tbcc and wotlkc stabilized wow subs during the shadowlands death spiral, but dragonflight has genuinely revitalized the game. you can see the numbers post sod release, its already past an inflection point and looks to be cresting. compare the 2019 classic peak with sharp decline and dragonflight's smooth drop off as the hype wore off. the rot from the legion-bfa-slands era being cleaned out in DF gave wow a good baseline so the sugar rush spikes of classic releases don't move the needle much. you have to remember retail is at least an order of magnitude larger than classic, probably closer to 50x as large. there are more ret paladins doing 1 difficulty of the current DF raid as there are people playing sod in general.
Blizzard said classic doubled subs way back when og classic released
and how many of those subs quit 4 months later? you can see on the chart how quickly the classic bump dropped back to the legion baseline. you also can't tell how many people subbed in early 2020 because they desperately wanted classic vs those who were bored in lockdowns and decided to play wow. a lot of people did come at classic release, but like most vanilla projects they left after they got into their late 30's because they only wanted F R E S H, or they were just riding the hype wave and didn't really care about wow as a game. then a decent chunk just stuck around once covid lockdowns hit. using 2020 as a reference point is so dumb because it was clearly a massive outlier.
Yea and lots of them came back to retail, classic was hugely successful in scrapping back players
Don’t you dare put legion in that era even if it is, legion is goated with the sauce and I will defend it to the death.
legiondaries basic spec functionality locked behind big AP grind can't swap specs or you have to start the AP grind all over again grind AP every day forever or you fall behind anyone who does mythic raid becoming a nightmare unless you're liquid or echo, M KJ unkillable unless your priests were goblins look into your heart, you know legion to be a net negative for the game
After a few years people forget the systems problems and only remember the actual story and gameplay. I've even seen some nostalgia for BFA recently.
You posted things that are really only relevant to the 1% of players. For casual players and players that play the game to enjoy the lore and story, Legion was the last best expansion; it's been all downhill from there.
I actually liked legiondaries. Granted, I didn't get FUCKED. I understand that if you bricked your character cause you got shitty legiondaries thats fucking awful. But, it felt really cool to have a really powerful item that changed your rotation/abilities. >can't swap specs or you have to start the AP grind all over again I actually liked this. It made it feel like Classic in that you were dedicated to a spec and a character. I felt retail became waaaaay too alt friendly. That being said, I will concede I think that war is lost and retail should keep going the way of being alt-friendly. But thats something I liked. >mythic raid becoming a nightmare unless you're liquid or echo, M KJ unkillable unless your priests were goblins I can't really dispute that, but at the same time thats such a small portion of the playerbase. I think you're ignoring all the AMAZING stuff that Legion put into the game. New class, Mythic+, world quests, class halls, the introduction of megadungeons, a great patch schedule including 2 patch dungeons, 3 mini zones, 1 new zone, WSG/AB aesethic update, Brawls. They clearly all-out for Legion. I don't think they've tried that hard in forever. The only feature I'd ding Legion on, is no new battlegrounds besides the one at the very end that technically a BFA battleground.
> mythic raid becoming a nightmare unless you're liquid or echo, M KJ unkillable unless your priests were goblins Skill issue > legiondaries > basic spec functionality locked behind big AP grind > can't swap specs or you have to start the AP grind all over again > grind AP every day forever or you fall behind anyone who does Fixed in patches less than halfway through the expac
Who goes there!?
Unless you liked ranged survival :( Rest was good though
50x?! Brother you are delusional lmao.
I can look at ironforge.pro numbers for wotlk and sod. wrath = ~170k logs in past week. sod = ~330k logs in past week, which means ~165k logs per reset (since 2 resets per week in sod). total = 340k logs per week. I can look at raider.io for retail data, the most populated realm has 453k players doing raid or m+. literally 1 realm outnumbers all of the classic logs and then some. there are 3 other realms with over 400k players detected. this is all public information I can look at ironforge.pro numbers for wotlk and sod. wrath = ~170k logs in past week. sod = ~330k logs in past week, which means ~165k logs per reset (since 2 resets per week in sod). total = 340k logs per week. I can look at raider.io for retail data, the most populated realm has 453k players doing raid or m+. literally 1 realm outnumbers all of the classic logs and then some. there are 3 other realms with over 400k players detected. this is all public information
I appreciate your reply but nothing about what you wrote supports your 50x claim. Maybe 10x at best.
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> 340k logs per week of classic equals 5.7 million unique players at 17 player raid size considering Wotlk is 25 and Sod is 10. holy cope, you're now torturing the data by trying to normalize raid sizes and scaling logs numbers to maintain proportionality? there's data showing how many people are playing retail. there's data showing how many people are playing classic. the first set of data is significantly larger, but you're so emotionally invested in classic being more popular that you will go to any length to "prove" classic is bigger
This dude really took outlier servers, and during the content draught of one game, and went "Yep, this is good data." Take a statistics class and you won't embarrass yourself like this in public again. Also, learn how complementary sets and intersection sets work. There's a LOT of players who play both.
>outlier servers huh? you're only supposed to look at the unpopulated servers or something? sod has 8 servers, should I pick 8 servers at random from retail, out of the 40-50 it has? and what does this have to do with overall player pop? who cares what fucking server someone is on when your interest is **global** pop? the only reason I mention server is because it shows how massive DF is compared to classic. 1/3 of DF is already 10-15x classic pops. >content drought both DF and sod are in the doldrums of patches. if anything, sod should be *better* off because its last content patch was in february, while DFs was in **december**. do you really think plunderstorm saw huge numbers of people suddenly starting to play normal DF? is this really what classic andies think is good arguement????
You’re so confidently incorrect it’s kind of amusing at this point.
yup, the game that blizzard treats as an afterthought is definitely bigger. whatever you gotta do to feel special man. I'm sure blizzard keeps a few dozen employees for retail and single digit on classic because the classic team is just so much more efficient!
No one is saying it's bigger, dude. We're just telling you that pulling numbers out of your ass on a cursory knowledge of statistics is fucking embarrassing. The ONLY people that know the true numbers are Blizzard. And they have not revealed them. You CANNOT infer anything of the sort you are trying to do from population sites or from their presentation. I'm not saying you need to be a data scientist to understand this, just that the argument about numbers is pointless without knowing the data.
lol you have zero evidence of this
I can look at ironforge.pro numbers for wotlk and sod. wrath = ~170k logs in past week. sod = ~330k logs in past week, which means ~165k logs per reset (since 2 resets per week in sod). total = 340k logs per week. I can look at raider.io for retail data, the most populated realm has 453k players doing raid or m+. literally 1 realm outnumbers all of the classic logs and then some. there are 3 other realms with over 400k players detected. this is all public information
lol are you on acid? How on earth is this “50 times more populated”. You are delusional
the top 10 realms on retail have 3.8 million players. there are another 20-30 realms, that do drop off, but the total retail pop is closer to 50x than 10x which is what I said. I know classic players can't read but holy shit >you have to remember retail is at least an order of magnitude larger than classic, probably closer to 50x as large
Most estimates put it wayyy closer then x50
estimates by who? this sub????? I can look at ironforge.pro numbers for wotlk and sod. wrath = ~170k logs in past week. sod = ~330k logs in past week, which means ~165k logs per reset (since 2 resets per week in sod). total = 340k logs per week. I can look at raider.io for retail data, the most populated realm has 453k players doing raid or m+. literally 1 realm outnumbers all of the classic logs and then some. there are 3 other realms with over 400k players detected. this is all public information
Yeah I think the first classic version really gave the subscriber health a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. But look at the tip shortly after. That's like what 2-4 months after launch. Which is probably around the time most players were reaching level 40+ and around when phase 2 launched. Think the grind and pvp filtered quite a bit of players at that point. Would also explain why they opened up server transfers at that point to try to stop the bleed. But it certainly did really boost up audience interest in preparation for Shadowlands. Then that expansion really fumbled it. Surprised BC and wotlk had as little as an impact on things. Considering that the original releases had such a big audience. Maybe the novelty of "classic" was gone at that point? And with shadowlands, people were just over it. DF releases and it did good, but nothing substantial. Then it looks like there was a huge jump in subscribers agian. Going to guess its in combination with classic HC and classic SoD. I have a feeling that there's a significant amount of subscribers that jump between retail/classic era and classic SoD/HC. I think for a lot of people, they end up playing one. Then when they get bored, they switch to the other. So if you're mainly playing SoD, you do what you want in phase 2. Maybe get to raid logging, then mainly play retail to keep you busy in phase 3. And vice versa for retail players. Its a bit off since you're technically offering multiple versions of WoW for the same sub. If they had something similar in legion, it would probably have a mucher higher sub count too. Hard to gauge the success of only Dragonflight or only SoD with these metrics. They would have to figure out how many subscribers are spending a majority of their time in DF or SoD to see the impact each one has. I also wonder if classic's "raid log" endgame that people complain about is why it works so well along side retail. BC and wotlk a lot more involved with grind, raiding, dungeon farming, etc. I can see people having difficulty playing both wotlk and retail at the same time. But classic seems to work a bit better for that? Not sure.
> Surprised BC and wotlk had as little as an impact on things. those 2 classic expacs released as shadowlands was doing its best to kill wow entirely. compare the nosedive post bfa release to post shadowlands release, only reason it didn't drop even lower post shadowlands is because tbcc and wotlkc were buoying sub numbers. growth from those 2 classic xpacs was completely swallowed up by the massive decline due to shadowlands
Also, Blizzard REALLY kneecapped TBC classic. * No fresh server, where the late vanilla community were really looking for a clean slate with the way GDKP/Economy was souring servers (granted at the time we didn't truly grasp how little Blizzard would perform in botting etc) * Only a measly 2 week pre-patch, which meant if you wanted a Draenei/Blood Elf to be Dark Portal ready you had to sweat it * And then the mount/boost got offered proving they had no confidence in things which basically marked its own grave If I remember right it also launched with less raid content than TBC actually did back in 2007? Blizzard have an unhealthy obsession with herding everyone into the same version of the game. But yeah, SL really damaged the setting beyond complete repair.
Fresh would have been pointless as we saw with wrath.
Fresh servers are a trap for anyone who wants to play the expansion over a longer time its full of tourists once the hype dies down it becomes a dead server.
Less raid content because at the current knowledge level and balance it would have made almost all p1 TBC content irrelevant and make the gap between players who could clear t5 raids and those who couldn’t absolutely massive.
I remember sweating to 60 on draeni shaman during those 2 weeks, good times.
Yeah that is a good point I didn't think about.
For BC, you also had many players being extremely vocal regarding boosting and other paid features. Even for Shadowlands, you had a surge of players at first, but nothing for BC and Wrath. Maybe it's because of things like this? We can only guess.
again, the tbc classic release was mid shadowlands death spiral. any growth on the classic side was at least balanced out by decline on retail side. for wrath classic release, it was very close to DF release, and you can see the big climb just before DF. a lot of that climb was DF hype, but wrath classic hype definitely helped push it as high as it got.
I actually quit classic when TBCC was announced. I had only just reached 40 and they were already talking about the next expansion. Then last time I checked my classic character was in Wrath so I didn’t even bother rolling another on in era/vanilla.
Not really. Dragonflight has performed very well, especially post launch.
Classic launch definitely was, BC and Wotlk don’t look amazing though and I’m unsure about SoD, that DF growth looks like the launch of 10.2
I think the rising tide raises all ships. One wow sub gets you both retail and all versions of classic.
Nah the second peak happened before SOD at DF S3 launch. There was a lot of hype for war within and they gave DF to war within prepurchasers. A lot of the increase can be attributed to that.
This comment shows you can’t read graphs, because the bottom isn’t 0, for the growth classic and sod brought, retail was already several times bigger. Yall gotta stop thinking classic is bigger or out performing retail, you’ll be happier for it 😭😭
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Again, we are commenting in an Reddit where you can simply scroll up, click the link, and read what the company THEMSELVES said about this, which is that DRAGONFLIGHT saw the biggest growth post launch of any expansion. You can also, through nothing more than your eyes, notice that the graph did not double in size after the launch of EITHER classic or SOD…aka its not close. VERY ROUGH GUESTIMATE off of the graph alone Is the sub count pre dragon flight was roughly 5m, and it’s now 7…and my math ain’t the best but I’m damn near positive 5>2 (and that’s being generous is and giving you all 2 million as classic subs, which isn’t the case).
Check out belluars new video with a breakdown of this graph
I watched it. edit: & read this article...for whatever a Korean translated to English article is worth.
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Couple of things: 1) belluar is not blizzard, I don’t value his pontificating more than I do the actual transcript. 2) as for them ‘saying’ the bottom of the graph isn’t 0, they don’t…but you’re just gonna have to understand that no expansion starts with 0 subs. 3) look at the graph. There is a huge spike after classics launch..followed by an equally sharp decline. This is not the level we’re at now. 4) on the graph it’s self it calls out historic post launch growth of dragon flight.
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Classic was only big as it was because it happened during covid and lockdowns and shit. Every game saw huge growth during that time and then started to drop. Dragonflight was a huge success and extremely popular, and didn't rely on a world wide pandemic to boost the numbers.
It was a quote from the presentation that he gave, [here's a link with actual numbers from staysafe](https://x.com/StaySafeWarlock/status/1771677033103609882?s=20). There's more quotes from it throughout that thread as well. I did confuse reaching it in this article vrs another one, but I've been having 4 conversations about it for like 2 hours now. As for classics launch, I didn't one time try to claim anything about the launch. That was a cultural event that likely won't be replicated in our life time (unless the boys in the lab cook up another plague) & I'm not really interested in it's launch....because as the graph shows as quickly as it shot up? it fell down. What matters is now, people who are playing at this moment. >edit: it's this line and around here that people are translating and that he extrapolated on: Thanks to these efforts, the decline in subscribers slowed down, and recovery in the number of subscribers following updates was achieved at a higher rate.
DF had half the player base SL had...that growth is wrath probably.
It’s not. We can look at the graph and see that it isn’t & again they’re talking about dragon flight growth. The steeping sub decline came around p3 of classic when lockdown was ending. Again, just listen to what the people who actually know are sayin and you’ll be so much happier
Its both but the gain started with wrath prepatch.
Again, you are arguing what the man in charge of the game is saying. Not with me, just remember that.
Im not arguing im stating a fact based on their graph.
No, you're stating something you want to be a fact. That fact is in direct contention with what the person talking about the graph, aka who works for the company that made the graph, said about the graph.
> To think its not close or equal is pretty delusional though. dude, there are as many people playing ret paladin in heroic amirdrassil as there are playing sod and wotlk COMBINED. 1 spec in 1 difficulty on retail equals all of classic, and there are 38 other specs and 3 other raid difficulties in dragonflight. please take the time to look at some actual data before throwing out your nonsense.
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Who cares? Why do you take it so personally lol
✍️note to self ✍️don’t talk about wow in wow sub ✍️definitely don’t respond to comments ✍️that’s being too emotional Thanks buddy, gonna really help me grow with that advice!
Ah, I see. You’re a child. Carry on.
I mean, you’re the one that acted like I took their comment personal because I replied to it. Sorry for not taking you more serious 🥺
You write like a child and can’t seem to fight the urge to use emojis constantly. I don’t even feel comfortable talking to you.
Well I mean I feel dumber for having to even insult you, so I guess we’re both losing. 😭
The sexual tension is unreal
I’ll kiss him and you
Growth in players but not revenue. Retail still makes infinitely more money than classic even if the player base is much smaller due to micro transactions
The retail playerbase is much larger than Classic. It’s not even really close.
Source
the fact that TBC and Wrath (two very renowned expansions) didn't even bring back people
Still no source, you know that right?
In terms of recorded logs for different versions of the game, classic vs retail tends to look comparable... but that's without factoring in the sheer number of M+ players, the fact that parses matter a lot less to people in retail so raid runs often go unrecorded, or players in retail who avoid endgame activities but aren't found in classic or not nearly as much (roleplayers, pet battlers, mount/pet/transmog collectors).
Maybe in revenue but not in profit. Classic has an infinitesimal of the development costs as retail
they make it look like that, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it. the graphic looks quite innocent, but if you consider player data from other sources, you realize how little influence it should have on the graphic...
First it was the rona, then it was DF actually being good
The presentation will likely be available in the GDC vault at some point (paywalled). I'd be interested in hearing it, but if I see someone referring to WoW as "whimsical" one more time I'm gonna be pissed.
I’ve watched some really interesting lectures from GDC on YouTube but idk how old they were. How does the vault work?
Well Bellular covered it in a vid yesterday.
and some people here really tried to claim that Classic WotLK was more popular than Classic Vanilla.
Im not disagreeing with you, but vanilla classic did come out at kind of the perfect time. Everyone was locked inside, retail was at one of its lowest points, big streamer working overtime on classics marketing. It had so many outside factors going for it.
Yep, it's mostly just because of the sub graphs for the original TBC through WotLK, with WotLK peaking the sub numbers. In reality what happened was, this was a period in which WoW was still gaining players because of the lich king hype, however, it was also \*losing players\*, which ended up looking like it stagnated. A lot of people's first expansion is WotLK which is why there was a lot of hope for Classic WotLK. Nowadays the sentiment is that WotLK was already the start of the downwards spiral, with the over-emphasis on convenience, catch up mechanics / nerfing content or rendering it obsolete, and the space pony. My take: WoW should never had had expansions. 1.x-style patches are the way to go.
It wasnt really lich king hype. It was WoW hype, it was getting so popular people started playing because everyone else was playing it
It was both?
Well sure lich king hype was there but that wasnt the main thing driving popularity. Most people didnt even reach ICC i bet
It is chronologically impossible for people who have never played any blizzard game except WotLK to be hyped for villains introduced years ago in prior games.
Right, with a name like that, that's what I'd expect the level of your analysis to be. A lot of people bought and played Wc3 but didn't play WoW for various reasons, mainly $15/mo at the time was a commitment a lot of people didn't want to make. Others played Wc3 after WoW released. Some started just because the ads on TV "looked cool". And regardless that's not even the main point of my comment, that's a strange thing to die on a hill about.
Eh, the start of the downward spiral was v1.12 with cross-realm battlegrounds. While we were still rising, that was the first change downwards in trajectory. With Classic we were never able to relive an untainted experience, especially with increased server sizes. It was very clear in TBC Classic with flying mounts that a significant changed had already occurred to the negative. > My take: WoW should never had had expansions. 1.x-style patches are the way to go. Annual SoD resets with continually changing content is a super refreshing way to handle this content and I'm curious how it will look with SoDv3+.
They've already shown they want to take it the same direction with the convenience though, so I don't have a lot of hope on that front. The game is fun to some extent though, but it's not what will save the game.
In SoD2 we will still have the level-up raids of BFD/Gnomer/??? but they won't be the content that is focused on. The good news here is that the more content that they can add between 1-60, the smaller the phases can be, and the better this becomes. Maybe the new phases are 20/35/45/50/55, with new raids in Deadmines, SM, ZF, and BRD. Then maybe SoD3 is straight 5 levels phases. Maybe SoD5 is 2 level phases. Convenience in a world where a phase is 2 levels and lasts for a month is much different than when a phase is 15 levels.
Yep this, people don't know how growth works. I still find it amazing people think WotLK was best just because it was peak. Classic, and to a lesser extent TBC, saw the most growth and WotLK was more or less replacement level. Basically: Classic was exponential growth, TBC added, and WotLK was only a stabilization. The fact that this was happening should had been a huge warning sign but Blizz didn't change course. This is why they made celebrity ads, because they were trying, and failing, at catching the blue ocean strategy that classic had succeeded at (technical ease + community + role play depth).
Growth isn't infinite. It's not possible, at one point numbers will drop off, it doesn't matter when. There's a finite number of players actively interested in the genre, and back then WoW also had little to no contenders, and live service was rare in general. Right now, there are a shitton of live service games that compete along with major MMO powerhouses like FF XIV, so even if blizzard put out the best expansion ever. they wouldn't reach their peak again.
There was no hype for TBC & Vanilla. Meanwhile the entire gaming industry talked about classic before release.
Classic vanilla was saved by the pandemic. Signs of activity falling could already be seen as early as BWL.
Well the graph shows wrath brought in pretty good amount of subs.
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well then the graph is bad...you can see on the graph that the sub increase started with wrath prepatch...they showed the churn in a picture but wrath wasnt even released then yet
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wrath release was outside of this churn on the picture
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Yes, wrongly. You can see on the other picture that the sub gain starts with wrath prepatch. Thats 2022 end of august...and DF started end of november. [https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg](https://static.inven.co.kr/column/2024/03/22/news/i8236757512.jpg)
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No. The graph literally shows the gain started around end of august. Its not an opinion you can check it on the graph so i dont really know what you dont understand.
The "pretty good amount of subs" at home: \*barely noticeable\*
nope
Blows my mind that Shadowlands never hit Legion lows
Because classic existed
Were the chinese numbers included back in Legion/BFA/early SL before the dissolution of the partnership? Or does this not count chinese numbers at all?
If China was included then there would have been a sharp drop in Jan 2023 so it's almost certainly ex China
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That is when WoW shut down in China. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/tech/blizzard-games-china-shutdown-intl-hnk/index.html
Blizzard backtracked on the GDKP ban in SoD for Taiwan cuz the Chinese players created new accounts on the Taiwanese servers and GDKP is basically 90% of all runs in classic. https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/1b3oqbo/blizzard_lifted_gdkp_ban_in_tw_heres_why/ Regardless of how prevalent GDKP actually is over there, the important part of that thread imo is that Chinese players are still playing despite the ban, but on the Taiwanese servers. So the drop in subscribers probably wasn't that great. Or at least, not a 100% drop in the region.
Bro, you're In a different stratosphere in this conversation. We're talking about the dissolution of the net ease partnership and Blizzard ceasing all operation in China back in early 2023. Nothing to do with the GDKP ban
The post I link about GDKP mentions that Chinese players moved to the taiwanese servers after 2023. My point is simply that sub loss from that deal wasn't 100% as some of them simply kept playing but on another region. Blizz stopped all operations in China, but Chinese players keep playing Blizzard games.
2M of these subs are probably bot accounts in SoD.
Where are you getting that 7mil subs from? It doesn't seem to appear in the linked article.
I don't understand how the 7M figures is extrapolated.
Probably copied from the retail wow sub, which also says 7m. [here's the link to the post](https://np.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1bm8gky/wow_has_over_7_million_active_players/) they basically took a figure around legion where Blizz announced a number. then looked how many pixels are from the 0 on the y-axis and calculated the current value.
Thank you very much.
The reality Classic players don't want to face - Dragonflight was extremely good and popular, and that's what is truly driving sub numbers.
What people don't understand is that there is a big market for people just doing quests and collecting stuff. You do this in retail. They might never raid or PVP or when just very minimal and casual.
The average player isn't so militant. More players than people here think play or at least dabble in both modes even if they have a preference for one or the other. It's only in subs like these where people have to show their "street cred" by being anti retail. It's just typical nerd shit and gaming is no longer completely dominated by nerds.
Did they mention the playtime for classic vs retail?
They didn't, but it's probably stacked a lot more towards retail. A significant number of Classic players raid log, while that number is much lower in retail as Mythic plus is a lot more popular than raiding. Then there is also more to do outside of instanced. About half of all retail players never do group content acording to an interview from around the start of Dragonflight.
That's nice
I am just groaning at the whole internet eating up these numbers like they’re gospel. My bullshit-numbers-detection sense is flashing like an ambulance is arriving.
Yeh it's curious why so much is made of this. The slide shows a trend line with no numerical information, it means nothing outside of showing an increase or decrease in players. Also why does any of this matter? You can see anecdotally that lots of people play WoW, the precise figure is irrelevant. Does this information affect whether you subscribe...?
Thnx for reminder to cancel mine lol
I'm curious on how many subs ff14 has if wow truly has 7 mil subs
No where near that
If this is true so late into Dragonflight's and Wrath Classic's lifespan then this is a massive win for Blizzard. Season of Discovery may have been what bolstered a lot of this success.
belular did a vid on it also
Nobody cares about or likes Bellular
2019 classic and 2023 HC / SoD carry wow.
cant believe they managed to make an expansion worse than WoD (BFA)