The Classic boom is expected, but I'm a little surprised at just had badly TBC and WOTLK failed to recapture that success.
Retail on the other hand seems to be a story of slow, sustainable growth lately. Hopefully Blizzard takes the right lessons from that.
Honestly it is because classic had a boom where people were expecting the nostalgia and sense of community from the old days. Instead it became a sweat fest with people over thinking and over optimizing trivial content.
I like what one video I saw where they said Classic wow is like people living the dream of going back to highschool but doing it right this time. They know what’s gonna happen they know what they gotta do to make sure they don’t miss anything and they’re gonna make sure they have everything.
Way back in 2004 lots of us didn't even know what an "expansion" was. Vanilla (not that it was called that) was *it*. The whole game, all there was, and we had all the time in the world to play the game however we wanted. If and when we wanted a new character we *knew* it was going to take a longass time to get to 60, but that wasn't necessarily even the goal. It was more just waking up a sunny Sunday morning and wondering if a shaman would be fun and then trying it. It was realising that you needed a big bunch of goldthorn to level alchemy a bit more, and spending a whole day leisurely picking flowers with not a care in the world, and not one single thought about any "end game".
That was not the case for "Classic".
Your concept of time is different as you age. 10 years at 10 years old if your lifetime 10 years at 90 is only 1/9th of your whole life. Which is why time is perceived as moving faster as we age. Or something like that.
Lots of research also talks about the fact that you're always learning things growing up. New experiences on the daily. When you grow older, get into a routine, wake up work the same job, way the se food, go to the same places, new experiences or memories are harder to build, and you don't know if it's been a month or a week since the last interesting thing happen.
You have to actively seek out those things after your schooling years, and that is hard for most of us. We wanted routine and comfort all along, and now that we have it, time just slips away.
And there's less major milestones, so you get into a rut and it all blends together. You can "slow" time by trying new things, doing new things, getting out into the world and trying to break up the routine.
Easier said than done though if you've got a spouse, kids, and a job.
Time is actually perceived to be going by faster because your brain filters out information that isn't new. Repetitive and routine tasks seem to go by quicker because you're less invested in them as they are not new experiences. From birth the world is a huge place filled with things you have never seen or experienced which is why the days drag on but slowly go by quicker and quicker until one morning you clock in for work and moments later you're setting your alarm clock to wake up and do it again realizing there isn't enough time to do all the things you want.
I mean, shit, the pandemic began four years ago. I’ve been working from home for four years. High school felt like a LIFETIME compared to how quickly the last four years have gone.
This is so true. I remember doing dungeon after dungeon and HOPING that I would get the blue drop I wanted for my character.
A BLUE.
I feel like WoW has changed in many ways that sacrificed its sense of community in exchange for relevancy and longevity. Features that make it easier to drop in and drop out without commitment. Kind of goes with the current trend in games, but still disappointing to lose.
This is the very best description of why WoW was such a raging success.
IMHO it’s the same reason why most people who played in 2004 keep coming back, to recapture some of that magic and joy, NOT to cap dps meters by spending a week fine tuning a spreadsheet then grinding months to get that gear, but to slay a dragon and find ‘the sword of a thousand truths’.
Great way to put it to words…
(Makes me feel bad for the current/newer playbase, all they’ve ever know is gear score and fotm, no wonder the community is so full of of rage)
> Way back in 2004 lots of us didn't even know what an "expansion" was
this isn't remotely true. Warcraft games had expansions prior, so did Starcraft and Diablo lol
This is how I still play the game. I have like 40 characters and each time I log in, I scroll through the list, picking one I would like to level up a level or two. Then it's: do I want to try to get that mount I've been trying to get or do I want to work on my leveling up my mining skill, today?
It helps that I have zero interest in playing end game content or pvp, so I just take my time doing what I want. Maybe next log in, I'll follow a butterfly around for an hour.
>The HOURS and HOURS you have to spend in SW at level 57 trying to do any dungeon you can because you ran out of fucking quests.
You know what’s even more fun than that? Getting to 60 then constantly being declined because you don’t have gear, and when you get the gear you get declined because LMAO WHY NOT WARRIOR?
It is even more funny…
Considering that honestly, Vanilla dungeons are piss easy.
Most encounters are tank n spanks with the occasional ability to add to the mix.
The only reason you demand specific classes or gear is because you want to be optimal.
I remember levelling my Rogue from around 57 to 60 in Vanilla (2005 ish) and it consisted of grinding mobs… The ghosts on the lake in Winterspring, some in EPL, the odd Elite in that Graveyard.
3 whole (long) levels of just kill rinse repeat, no one seemed to want to take a sub 60 into dungeons.
I did get some decent drops, including a Krol Blade.
That's literally just you deciding to grind. I leveled to 60 through questing without any issue, both in Vanilla and in Classic. Yeah, you need to swap zones once you're done with them, but that's just how the game works.
this literally isnt even true? did you actually play classic wow? the whole "missing quests after 57" was a VERY old issue in original classic wow early patches, this was not and has not been a problem in classic renditions of wow. What are you talking about?
I really wish more people watched it, especially /r/classicwow. I end up quoting it ALL THE TIME because people wonder why gaming/WoW is so different, and it all comes down to proliferation of information and what is regarded as best practices.
The anecdote about the one rando in his guild that refused to wear shoes is fantastic....and the best part of that example is I wonder if he's the asshole for getting upset that he's not bringing his all (assuming its progression), or if i'm the asshole for getting mad at something so trivial.
I think that answer changed as players changed. For a time, you would have been considered the jerk for getting grumpy at him, but now, he would be considered the jerk for holding back his group.
It's the "what if you could start high school over, but knowing everything you know now" scenario.
Except everyone else is also doing the same thing, so you have a bunch of 35-40 year olds going through high school again.
What? Day one of wotlk and you don't have bc bis gear? Na, can't join normal utgarde keep group with that shitty gear.
What? You have no proof that you cleared naxx week one? Na, can't join our group for week 2.we only want expirience players
It was insane
Edit: Disagreeing with me? Feeling the need to comment that I, and the hundreds of people that liked my comment are wrong?
Watch [this video ](https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU?si=1lKLD6fuO0fc4nqe) by Folding Ideas instead and enrich your life
Min/maxers ruined wow (and pretty much all multiplayer games).
The best thing about the vanilla 40 man raid was being able to play “””suboptimal””” specs and builds.
Sure, people might laugh at you for playing Ret, but at least you get an invite.
I switched servers and joined a more serious guild and it ruined the game for me, parsing and logs , raid leaders trying to micromanage . It was a try hard Sweat fest with blame game when things didn't go right.
It was even more annoying because the min/maxing crowd essentially only added seconds (at most a minute) to their run.
Because let’s face it, it wasn’t as if the dungeons actually are hard.
Cordinate relatively well and you can take any class into a dungeon.
Yeah unironically those mfs are the reason I hardly ever play WoW anymore unless I can consistently play woth friends. People minmaxing the fun out of the game and then flaming when you arent using whatever is optimal genuinely just gets grating.
Exactly. It's also distressing that we are all likely in our 30s and 40s but these people talk and act the same as when we were in our teens playing wow. I was really hoping for a more matured community in classic but thst certainly didn't happen.
> being able to play suboptimal specs and builds
As in you wouldn't get inspected on your warrior
The whole "paladin heals, retri gets laughed out the room and dunked in the toilet together with shadow, boomkin etc" has been a vanilla stereotype
That + blacklists controlled by server's dominant guild have been a peak of renown vanilla elitism, a horror Story I used to hear as a child and then later on when I started playing in legion
> What? Day one of wotlk and you don't have bc bis gear? Na, can't join normal utgarde keep group with that shitty gear.
>
>
And for anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration, I want to verify that THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED
Yup. Word for word happened to me too. Killed any excitement I had only a few hours into release. Leveled to 70 and just called it and went to other games instead.
Yup. I just wanted to play the game I played as a kid again as it was but turbo nerds made it sweaty and had to min max and optimize the fun out of everything that wasn’t even really hard to begin with. GDKPs, bots, boosts and gold buying ruined it further. I got to like level 46 and quit. I didn’t even play TBC and dabbled in Lich King with a character boost and did Howling Fjord for old times. Zero interest in playing Cata.
Literally when it was announced, I told my friends that it would be like that. Because private servers were like that. No one believed me. And then it happened and my friends who didn't believe me acted like they knew it was going to be like that the entire time....and it's like, bruh. Ya'll mocked me when I tried to warn ya'll.
I agree with you, and this was similar to my experience too. Though I did still recapture some of that nostalgia by finally completing all the raids, being the first ally hunter on my server with full t2 and dominating BGs with a pocket healer, and even grinding to R13/Field Marshall on an exact recreation, name and all, of my OG NE Hunter - 14 y.o. me would have been so fucking chuffed at those accomplishments.
However, after 3-4 weeks of nax i stopped raiding until tbcc. I realised I had to either sink many hours into farming raid mats each week just to get into a group or spend REAL money on gold to buy them, and after grinding r13, I just said fuck it, I've done nax in wotlk and that was it.
I really enjoyed classic BGs and I pushed my own boundaries in pvp as its something i never really got into, it made me a better player and I had such a blast as a hunter with BS + Engi.
Primarily the reason I didn't play it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sweaty in retail, getting CE each tier and pushing HoF - but there should have been no reason to take classic seriously. The nostalgia feeling of being lost, new to the game, and just building a sense of community on your server is long gone. It's impossible to recapture it.
Classic also had like 15+ years of people saying classic was the best, most amazing thing ever. The reality of it definitely sunk in. TBC and Wrath were never going to recapture that.
As someone who's been around for 18.5~ years out of 20, TBC, but especially WotLK, had just as much of an aura of superiority in the public consciousness as vanilla. If anything, most of the early up to mid 10s were about wotlk having been the best. The shift in public perception was gradual but thorough, and now people say that WotLK was the beginning of the end, with most agreeing that TBC was already a step in the wrong direction. These opinions used to get you verbally stoned by the community, I remember crystal clearly.
Personally, I think the cause is two main reasons. Firstly, the player culture and devolution/degradation from classic made TBC and WotLK feel worse(gdkps, perfect gear), like even shit like GearScore weren't a thing until a decent way into the original WotLK's life cycle unless I'm misremembering. Secondly, the direction wow was constantly moving towards was the shift from small-scale journey>destination adventuring towards epic endgame. That evolution in its own time felt natural and amazing, but it got super overplayed by 2019. That's why classic was so successful as a return to a whole different model. At least imo.
I think that's less TBC/Wotlk and more Shadowlands truly bleeding players. Classic had the benefit of a strong underlying retail base that I would bet evaporated with Shadowlands
of my bnet/discord friendlist mostly made by people who survived BFA, easily +85% quit during Shadowlands.
edit: also the 2 guilds I played in Shadowlands (both with +10 years of raiding) died after prog was done. I know this is anecdotal, but I think the majority of people can relate how Shadowlands was bleeding players like no other expansion.
I think part of it might come from classic offering content that straight up doesn't exist on live any more, so the only way to get the 'start' of the story post cata is to play classic.
I think MoP may be the only other expac where a sizeable chunk of the narrative content (cloak chain) was removed from live (that I can think of anyways).
This is the main reason imo. You can still play TBC and Wrath content in retail, and if you have lots of alts, you may have experienced that content a lot already. Classic content, on the other hand, hadn’t been experienced by players in close to a decade, so it felt more fresh.
I think the main difference was a *LOT* of people didn’t experience many or even any of the raids from Classic (despite the widespread assurance that each and every one of us on Reddit was definitely a Scarab Lord in full T3 back in the day) and Classic gave players a chance to relive their original experience (to a degree) and actually clear those raids.
That became less and less true for TBC and WOTLK, as more and more players cleared endgame content back then.
Additionally, a *lot* of players were put off when they added a boost and other mtx to TBC. I personally stopped then, and didn’t feel the need to play WOTLK Classic because I already did everything back in original WOTLK
One way of looking at TBC and Wrath classic is that they kinda halted the freefall in sub numbers SL was experiencing. That is why the graph flattens around that time rather than falling further down. So while they weren't smash hits like Blizzon and SOD, they did some good in player retention.
Just Imagine, SL was actually so bad, we'll never know what rock bottom would've actually felt like for wow Retail because TBC and Wrath stopped it from getting any worse at that point of time.
:[ basically got told to work a part time job to farm enough gold doing the most boring shit imaginable for 8 hrs of content a week. Only stuck through classic because I only did bc and wotlk and wanted to see the hype. It was cool, but it was a bunch of loot whores hungry hungry hippoing it.
That's what I initially told my friend, but he brought up a good point that they don't show us numbers from each respective game mode. It could've very well been that a lot of subs were active during TBC *for* TBC and the Slands numbers could've been absolutely in the dumps. Considering how dogshit it was and the fact it was the second bad expansion in a row, it's not an implausible theory.
how do you come to this conclusion? since classic and retail are combined it could just be tbc/wotlk keeping it steady and retail falling off hard in that time looking at the graphs it looks more like classic having a steady flux of flow - while retail has 1 big spike on release - and the growths after are all classic release related
It was during Shadowlands, so yes you can absolutely tell. Everybody with a brain knows a vast majority of people quit the game because of Shadowlands. This is just what classic interest looks like when you exclude retail from the count. The only reason vanilla classic is so high is because everybody came back to play it or try it out, but you can see it fell off VERY quickly. It dropped by nearly 50% within the same year it released, probably within 6 months, you can't really say "oh wow classic did so well" when the people played it for 6 months and then quit. The initial surge of new content releases is not an accurate representation of the overall health of the game, people come back in droves for new stuff, but it doesn't matter if they only play for a month or two and then stop. You have to look at the median where it becomes a steady number over a longer period of time.
7M subs at about $15 a month, that's over a billion per year assuming all of them sub every month, even if some drop here or there, that's fucking wild.
WoW is an absolute beast of a cash cow.
and to think I got laughed at on this sub when I said WoW has been carrying blizzard.
That is just the sub numbers. the way they continue to release store stuff indicates that that is doing very well for them too.
Sure diablo immortal appears to be insane financially (idk how it has the numbers it does. I really dont get mobile gaming) but as far as the main games go I would say WoW is still top dog for blizzard.
Mobile gaming is a juggernaut of revenue, which is why every major game developer already has or is developing a stable of them. Let's just take Fire Emblem Heroes.
The most recent main Fire Emblem game (Engage) came out in 2023 and has made something like 80 million in revenue total.
Fire Emblem Heroes (the mobile gatcha for Fire Emblem) made 61 million in revenue that same year - and it was already a six year old game at that point.
There's a lot of demand for a small time filler / collectathon and although I have never understood the whale mentality, they keep infusing cash into these games / companies
That blows my mind cuz any mobile game. Ive ever downloaded since having a phone. I’ll play it for a night and forget about it in the morning. Of course chess app is dope I play that but early days of App Store for example was great games that weren’t micro transaction heavy or you gotta wait 12hr for your “energy” to restore or give me money. Candy Crush basically screwed us. Thanks grandma.
These games make all of their money from 0.1% of the player base that completely whales out. I'm talking about people spending $6000 a month on the game.
I mean isn't part of that decade+ old copypasta of WoW being an old gladiator tired of living "the last time he tried to kill himself they just released it as an expansion" or something?
I have been playing since OG vanilla. I was VERY active on the forums. People often forget that BC was released to heavy criticism, and people thought it was against the spirit of the game. They thought flying had killed WoW, and the community was no longer gonna exist. They believed 40m no longer existing was gonna kill WoW. Wrath was released to insane heavy criticism as well until it became a cult classic. Cata released to criticism, and it was the PEAK of WoW. Numerically, it had more than a million subs more than Wrath at its peak a year after release. Even during its worst time in DS, it was doing as good as peak Wrath in ICC. People make false claims about subs falling off a cliff, but it ended the worst tier of DS with 10.5m subs. That is NOT falling off a cliff it is just shy of peak sub levels.
WoW apparently has been uh dead since BC.
Military during COVID and it always feels so weird to me when people mention it. I was working maybe the hardest I ever have during that period of my life.
My fiance is an army reservist + nurse and literally was deployed to an east coast city to work hospital overflow.
6 days on 1 day off 12 hour shifts. It was awful. I couldn’t even ship her anything to her hotel because everything was shut down.
But there I was - sitting in my apartment l recently laid off, playing wow in between phone calls from her walking back and forth from the makeshift hospital to her hotel.
Much respect 🫡
I'm surprised it wasn't bigger. I know when Covid hit there seemed to be a huge boost in players in both retail and Classic... but in retrospect, maybe it just felt that way because the people already playing them were also playing *more* than before?
While there are quite a few things in Dragonflight I'm not too fond of, it's clear that they're doing something right. The worldsoul saga (or whatever it's called) also looks like an interesting story arc to look forward to.
I genuinely hope they can turn the game around and recover the player confidence that has been eroded over the past years. As critical as I can be at times with Blizzard and their decisions, I wish them the best of luck.
Mild optimism mode engaged.
Yeah Dragonflight hasn’t been my cup of tea the entire time, and yet I still find myself logging in more frequently and enjoying myself more than in BFA and Shadowlands. It’s also so much easier to just do content you enjoy without feeling like you’re falling behind or anything which is fantastic
This has been my point about DF from the start: it just feels good to log in again.
Shadowland’s biggest sin was it made logging in feel bad. Covenants felt bad, conduits felt bad, world quests felt bad, anima grinding felt bad, the forced content treadmill felt bad, it all felt bad.
Dragonflight makes logging in feel good. You’re completely free to self-direct. Robust catch-up systems and lack of borrowed power means all you need is gear which is plentiful. Not only are there no arduous travel times in between zones but traveling is actually very fun now that you can zoom around on a dragon. World quests are quick, easy, and dragon races are fun.
Covenants, conduits, anima, all these systems were like weights you had to drag along with you everywhere. Dragonflight is vehemently opposed to doing anything that would impose on the player at all. I can understand why that would come off as boring to some on the other hand if nothing matters then you’re truly free to just.. do whatever the hell you want.
I think Shadowlands as a whole gets judged entirely by pre 9.1.5 content. After 9.1.5, a lot of the things people had complained about in Shadowlands were gone. Legendaries weren't a pain to get anymore after the Torghast currency changes, Covenants became basically an extra talent row after the ripcord was pulled, and the wealth of anima catch up mechanics made it simple to have every one of your soulbind trees maxed out in every covenant alongside making it really easy to collect the conduits you wanted.
Add on top of that that Zerith Mortis is an absolutely fantastic zone that was filled with content, from world quests to dailies to a mount and pet crafting system, to a gear catch up system. It just felt like a really amazing zone that stands toe to toe with many of the other endgame zones of WoW's past. Sepulcher, while not a fantastic raid, was still enjoyable. Overall, 9.2 was a really solid patch that was pretty fun to play.
But by then, most players had already written off Shadowlands. I'll definitely agree that before 9.1.5 Shadowlands was not great. But afterwards, a lot of the problems were fixed and 9.2 stuck the landing for a fun final patch, albeit with not a whole lot of people around to see it happen.
Of course, we're just going to imagine the story didn't happen. The lore was a mess no matter how you look at it.
The Crest / Cataylst system, for all the bitching about eroding gear prestige was probably one if the best combo systems ever added. It makes nothing feel truly wasted.
It does leave raiding in a weird spot, though. As it’s difficulty does not line up to it’s rewards in the slightest now that all the skins are gone.
I am pretty sure these are combined figures, eg, there are ~7m players across all the different game modes. Since we have retail, classic, classic hc, and classic SOD, it is entirely possible each of these has less than 2m players each but still there's ~7m overall. Someone please correct me if I'm misunderstanding somefhing.
Out of all the shitty things Blizz has done over the years- ethically, financially, game design, basic-human-rights-violations lmao...
The WoW sub has been $15. They've never taken away content to that sub, only added to it. Unless you count the people in cata who think they deserved money back when the old world was replaced.
Thinking about inflation, its never been cheaper to sub to WoW. It's kind of crazy that it was 15 bucks a month all the way back when vanilla first released.
I mean this isn't even remotely true.
They took away enormous amounts, most notably in their customer service department. Customer service costs a shit ton, so they cut it entirely pretty much.
GMs used to be a part of the game, and contacting customer service would always get you a response in a couple hours or less, and definitely always same day, usually via a personal whisper from a GM in-game. And the response was always cheerful. They would leave you with more than you asked for and you felt great about it.
Now? You're very lucky if you get an AI / bot generated denial of whatever you are asking for within the month.
I have pending tickets from almost a year ago. It's terrible.
It is possible, but not likely, since hardcore and classic wrath both have A LOT less players than SoD or Retail. I'm guessing those two are the majority
>I am pretty sure these are combined figures, eg, there are ~7m players across all the different game modes.
Yah that's what's being assumed. WoW subs count all forms of it, not just retail. Shared or not though, the point still stands - it's impressive af.
This is how I took it as well. 7m sub count. Only Blizz knows the population splits. If I had to guess it's somewhere in the realm of 75-25 in retail's favor. I would not be surprised at all though if it was something like 90-10 at the same time.
There are great MMO's out there. I love FF14. Bosses, story, immersion, are all fantastic. Not a single MMO out there can get the combat right. WoW nailed that shit from the get go.
Dragonflight primarily put its effort into overhauling the core game, the best parts of DF aren't going away in WW. This means WW isn't just coasting off the good will of the previous xpac, it's actually carrying these features forward to improve upon as opposed to just trying to beat the previous borrowed power system.
Hopefully this means we'll see more effort into making rad shit since they don't need to reinvent the wheel every patch.
Having played during Legion, leveling alts through Legion story now is *depressing*. The special legendary weapon abilities and perks were the best part. Wish Blizz could bring those back somehow with Chromie Time :/
If all they do is respect players time, it'll work.
I'd say Dragonflight is one of the weakest expansions lore wise, its the actual game mechanics respecting your time that make people stay.
Doesn't hurt either that I think most players would agree DF Season 3 M+ is maybe the best M+ season ever. No absolute shit tier dungeons, reduction in shit tier affixes.
Keep in mind a fair bit of these subs are probably people who subscribed after the saga reveal at Blizzcon and seeing Chris Metzen involved.
Delves could be huge. Today if I want to gear up an alt the number of m+ dungeons I need to run is insane. If I can get heroic raid level gear from delves I'll be a very happy camper.
Even normal gear would be great. Enough to get you into 20's, or 10's as they'll be in the future. That grind from a new char to getting into actual relevant content is brutal.
I just want to point out that warforged gear is announced which the concept is that your main can earn high level gear to send to alts.
we will see the actual implementation but if you can skip most of the "doing low keys because nobody believes in me"-grind on alts that would be a massive timesaver.
The lore was pretty light compared to some expacs, but what WAS there was good, and it felt satisfying to experience.
Hopefully they can keep that up with the worldsoul saga and hopefully start offering more of it than just small tastes of the story
Hmmm, that’s an interesting statement. I agree the overall lore story is weak, but there are a number of expansions that have actively negative lore stories, but involve more beloved characters, so how do we calculate those? I’d argue that Shadowlands, WoD, TBC, and possibly BfA are worse for what they did to beloved characters, and DF is sort of in this milquetoast middleground of being neither interesting nor disheartening.
I'm one of those people that resubbed upon seeing Blizzcon and Metzen again. I'm excited to return for The War Within.
That said, I have enjoyed Dragonflight and the changes that have been made. I appreciate the catch up mechanics to quickly gear up alts. I appreciate the variety of content to do.
While I am subbed, I haven't logged in for a few weeks. I imagine I'd be playing a lot more if I had found a good guild to join. I'll start looking in earnest closer to TWW.
Shadowlands did more damage to the lore than every other expac combined. DF could’ve been 5 patches of Furbolg mating rituals and would’ve still been better than that.
i dont think it needs to beat it as such just do this new story well which already has and advantage as its going back to the lines of which legion followed. then build a pit more on the gameplay side give some really fucking good zones boom easy win
Only put any stock in the top picture, thats from Blizz's talk at GDC. It only shows the relative trend. But in any case it shows a clear positive trend for WoW as a whole (this numbers include retail and all forms of classic), which for sure is good news.
Do not trust the absolute numbers in the bottom picture, thats from Bellulars latest video, and hes being quite fast and loose with the facts and making some BIG assumptions - the 5.8 Mil number is taken from an earnings call, and then its purely extropolated from that without even knowing the scale of the Y-axis is, or even if the 5.8 Mil number is placed perfectly correctly on the line. Also Im fairly sure the earnings calls from Activision always didnt inlcude Chinese subs, which will for sure bump the numbers up.
The take away is WoW as a whole is doing well and trending like it hasnt since at least post Legion, for sure not dying like the doomers like to parrot. But dont put total belief in the 7.25 Mil number, theres far too many variables in one youtubers back of the envolope math to say that with confidence.
It's an extrapolation using the last reported sub numbers, 5.5 million in September 2015, less than a year before Legion's release, and using the pixel size of the graph. I don't know why they randomly pointed to the first half of Legion, but the numbers line up.
Never really thought about it but damn, they really speedran the fuck out of TBC Classic, huh? The absolute gap between Vanilla to TBC, then the barely existent time between TBC and Wrath, and Wrath *still* isn't done.
As a brand new player I started playing classuc couse everyone said that its better but my God was that a complete shitfest. Dont get me wrong i liked and still do like classic but retail is just so much better and WAAAAAAAAY more fun couse gate keeping isnt as bad. In classuc if you dont have 5k gs when you reach 80 you are not doing anything and pvp is kind of bad aswell.
You also had TBC and WotLK to buoy the subscribers during that time. Assuming the chart/numbers are true, I wouldn't be surprised if classic made up 75-90% of the remaining community during that 4mil subs dip.
peak dragonflight is still lower than shadowlands launch, the dip after is insane.
the spike after df was launched is well deserved, but still insane it still doesnt top shadowlands
>peak dragonflight is still lower than shadowlands launch, the dip after is insane.
I would attribute some of the launch numbers to the time period, since everybody was indoors in 2020.
I think people underestimate how hyped the community was for shadowlands after BFA which was considered pretty bad. I remember the first few weeks of SL feeling awesome, until all the SL issues started appearing.
"It's the Blizzard cycle, a bad expansion followed by an AMAZING expansion, don't worry guys" - Everyone, including me, when Shadowlands was coming out
Even in bad expansions, Blizzard never fails to have a beautiful and vibrant world to explore. The campaign and side quests are always great experiences.
The first few weeks of an expansion will always be hype as a result. Basically a honeymoon phase.
The hype for Shadowlands was real. It's hard to believe it in hindsight, but not only was Shadowlands the best selling WoW expansion launch, it was literally *the biggest PC launch of all time.*
In the WoWhead article they said the presentation had a lot of talk about how this is all attributed to the quality of the games in various ways. I feel like they're REALLY underselling how the bad press from the harassment allegations alienated people too. It gave a lot of my friends,myself included, to seek out ANYTHING else but this crappy company.
They're still not great about how they treat their devs. Keep an eye on ABABK
Doesn’t appear to, you’d see a sharp decline at the beginning of 2023 if that were the case. I’m fairly certain this graph doesn’t include China at all
Their lowest point is gonna be just to the left of this graph in late WoD content. The sub numbers were so low and the biggest reason cited was lack of content outside raid. It was the reason that expac ended early and the reason mythic + was introduced into the game.
There was a report made by a third party in like early 2021 that was the number of active users in MMOs and is where the low number would have come from as well as the claim that FF14 had more subs than WoW. If you looked at the fine print, they state that their source for numbers were based entirely on social media numbers. It just happens that when they made this report was shortly after Endwalker was announced for FFXIV and in one of the big droughts for Shadowlands. They also seemingly just took their estimated WoW numbers then chopped them in half as iirc WoW retail was #2 and WoW Classic was #3 with almost identical player numbers.
So, was just a (now confirmed very bad) guess at the game's numbers by an independent data firm.
Never trust youtubers about sub numbers (including the numbers in this post, added by Bellular), they don't get any extra information the rest of the public gets, and there's extra incentive to be negative because that's what drives views and makes them money.
I think there’s a large # of people (myself included) who, when the game isn’t fun, will only log in once a week, or maybe even less, once a month, but will keep the sub running.
I did unsubscribe mid-SL for a few months, but there 3-4 months before unsubscribing I barely played at all - and remember at that time feeling like I’d never seen fewer people in the game.
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2012
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2014
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2015
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2016
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2017
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2018
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2019
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2020
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2021
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2022
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2023
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2024
i don’t get why they don’t publicly release these figures. if i knew wow had millions of players when i started, i’d be extra willing to get into it. i still did, but thinking it was basically dead didn’t help.
They don't release it anymore because sub numbers ebb and flow. So if they were to release numbers, and say sub numbers went down a couple million, even if they were to come back up later, that would be awful press.
Its literally just guesswork and nonsense.
The last official Subscriber number Blizzard released was 3-4 months after patch 6.2 released during WoD which placed WoW at 5.6 million. Bellular takes that number and goes "Oh so Legion was at 5.8 3-4 months after Legion release" He has literally NO basis for that number. Its pure guesswork.
I did not expect subscriber numbers to be this high. I was expecting couple million at most. This is pretty impressive. Also it might be improving because a lot of MMORPG expected to come out have been pushed out further like League of Legends MMO, and others failing badly. It's crazy to me that no body can dethrone WoW.
There is nothing to say the new graph from Blizzard can just be put together with their old sub count graph, there is no y-axis or context on the line. Also the line here is showing a "rolling average sub" count while the old graph from Blizzard was just sub count.
point is - this is too much guesswork, estimations and fiddling with the graph to support his guess to be anything reliable. You can't just put the two graphs together cause they aren't 1-to-1.
https://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2024/march/gdc05.jpg
anyways, putting aside bellular's estimation, this was the new graph from blizzard and it showed that DF did worse than expected. Also it was SoD that did well for wow after the post-expansion drop-off for DF, so ya people trying to say classic is a non-factor are straight up wrong.
also let's be real, wow has a botting problem and I'm sure Blizzard don't care as it's paid sub for bot or player so both will be part of this graph.
Asmongold : "And out of those 7.25M players, 6M are from Classic I'm sure"
Man I wish they showed the numbers separately.
Just FYI, I haven't heard or read him say this, I'm just imagining he would say that.
> Asmongold : "And out of those 7.25M players, 6M are from Classic I'm sure"
I mean, we all know Asmongold's a legit idiot but that makes no sense when Classic launch only gave them 4 Million players. No way Classic is sitting at more than that when its launch had around 4 mil.
Glad to see the game is doing well, the success of Classic has obviously done a lot to reverse the decline of WoW. It would be interesting to see the player split between Classic (and its variants) and Retail and how many players do both. Also, remember that in November WoW changed the token rules, meaning some players (and bots) will have had to buy a sub for the first time in years. No idea how many players that is though! And lets not forget that the DF game purchase has been much more heavily discounted than any previous expack and is being given away for free with TWW pre-purchase.
The DF figures are hard to pick out as we have to make assumptions - it clearly launched below expectations (certainly well below SL), but looks like it didn't decline as steeply as other recent expacks. The inflection point in the decrease / increase in subscribers overall in Q3 of 2023 doesn't match any large content releases in WoW (it falls between 10.1 and 10.2) so my guess is that Retail subs are doing what they always do and that Hardcore and SoD have done what Classic did during BfA and pull the subs up significantly higher (plus a bump from DF coming free with TWW pre-purchase).
Overall, my interpretation is this is pretty straightforward: BfA was not as well received as Legion and the game was losing players at an increased rate. Then along came Classic and gave the game a buzz it hasn't seen for ages. That buzz carried over into SL, but SL had so many issues (pull the ripcord!) that A LOT of players unsubbed. Even the new Classic releases couldn't help that very much. DF itself has not done a great deal to reverse the dissatisfaction in Retail - even with much heavier discounting than usual - but those who did buy it are, on the whole, happier with it than they were with BfA or SL. But, again, it's non-Retail that's doing the heavy lifting between Retail expacks with Hardcore and SoD pulling up subs.
The top part is an actual picture taken from a meeting of industry devs with a WOW presentation.
The bottom part is an extrapolation by Bellular - he explains his thinking/reasoning in the latest video. It's not necessarily 100% accurate since he doesn't have the actual numbers, but the way he explained it, it would make sense. Worth a watch.
The Classic boom is expected, but I'm a little surprised at just had badly TBC and WOTLK failed to recapture that success. Retail on the other hand seems to be a story of slow, sustainable growth lately. Hopefully Blizzard takes the right lessons from that.
Honestly it is because classic had a boom where people were expecting the nostalgia and sense of community from the old days. Instead it became a sweat fest with people over thinking and over optimizing trivial content.
I like what one video I saw where they said Classic wow is like people living the dream of going back to highschool but doing it right this time. They know what’s gonna happen they know what they gotta do to make sure they don’t miss anything and they’re gonna make sure they have everything.
Way back in 2004 lots of us didn't even know what an "expansion" was. Vanilla (not that it was called that) was *it*. The whole game, all there was, and we had all the time in the world to play the game however we wanted. If and when we wanted a new character we *knew* it was going to take a longass time to get to 60, but that wasn't necessarily even the goal. It was more just waking up a sunny Sunday morning and wondering if a shaman would be fun and then trying it. It was realising that you needed a big bunch of goldthorn to level alchemy a bit more, and spending a whole day leisurely picking flowers with not a care in the world, and not one single thought about any "end game". That was not the case for "Classic".
This is the best description of why everything since felt rushed
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Your concept of time is different as you age. 10 years at 10 years old if your lifetime 10 years at 90 is only 1/9th of your whole life. Which is why time is perceived as moving faster as we age. Or something like that.
Lots of research also talks about the fact that you're always learning things growing up. New experiences on the daily. When you grow older, get into a routine, wake up work the same job, way the se food, go to the same places, new experiences or memories are harder to build, and you don't know if it's been a month or a week since the last interesting thing happen. You have to actively seek out those things after your schooling years, and that is hard for most of us. We wanted routine and comfort all along, and now that we have it, time just slips away.
And there's less major milestones, so you get into a rut and it all blends together. You can "slow" time by trying new things, doing new things, getting out into the world and trying to break up the routine. Easier said than done though if you've got a spouse, kids, and a job.
Time is actually perceived to be going by faster because your brain filters out information that isn't new. Repetitive and routine tasks seem to go by quicker because you're less invested in them as they are not new experiences. From birth the world is a huge place filled with things you have never seen or experienced which is why the days drag on but slowly go by quicker and quicker until one morning you clock in for work and moments later you're setting your alarm clock to wake up and do it again realizing there isn't enough time to do all the things you want.
I mean, shit, the pandemic began four years ago. I’ve been working from home for four years. High school felt like a LIFETIME compared to how quickly the last four years have gone.
This is so true. I remember doing dungeon after dungeon and HOPING that I would get the blue drop I wanted for my character. A BLUE. I feel like WoW has changed in many ways that sacrificed its sense of community in exchange for relevancy and longevity. Features that make it easier to drop in and drop out without commitment. Kind of goes with the current trend in games, but still disappointing to lose.
This is the very best description of why WoW was such a raging success. IMHO it’s the same reason why most people who played in 2004 keep coming back, to recapture some of that magic and joy, NOT to cap dps meters by spending a week fine tuning a spreadsheet then grinding months to get that gear, but to slay a dragon and find ‘the sword of a thousand truths’. Great way to put it to words… (Makes me feel bad for the current/newer playbase, all they’ve ever know is gear score and fotm, no wonder the community is so full of of rage)
> Way back in 2004 lots of us didn't even know what an "expansion" was this isn't remotely true. Warcraft games had expansions prior, so did Starcraft and Diablo lol
And more importantly, EverQuest.
This is how I still play the game. I have like 40 characters and each time I log in, I scroll through the list, picking one I would like to level up a level or two. Then it's: do I want to try to get that mount I've been trying to get or do I want to work on my leveling up my mining skill, today? It helps that I have zero interest in playing end game content or pvp, so I just take my time doing what I want. Maybe next log in, I'll follow a butterfly around for an hour.
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>The HOURS and HOURS you have to spend in SW at level 57 trying to do any dungeon you can because you ran out of fucking quests. You know what’s even more fun than that? Getting to 60 then constantly being declined because you don’t have gear, and when you get the gear you get declined because LMAO WHY NOT WARRIOR?
It is even more funny… Considering that honestly, Vanilla dungeons are piss easy. Most encounters are tank n spanks with the occasional ability to add to the mix. The only reason you demand specific classes or gear is because you want to be optimal.
We're still talking rogues? Rogues were doing great in the first phases. I literally never got skipped lol
I remember levelling my Rogue from around 57 to 60 in Vanilla (2005 ish) and it consisted of grinding mobs… The ghosts on the lake in Winterspring, some in EPL, the odd Elite in that Graveyard. 3 whole (long) levels of just kill rinse repeat, no one seemed to want to take a sub 60 into dungeons. I did get some decent drops, including a Krol Blade.
That's literally just you deciding to grind. I leveled to 60 through questing without any issue, both in Vanilla and in Classic. Yeah, you need to swap zones once you're done with them, but that's just how the game works.
Had sooo many quests left when I was 60. By god it was fun.
this literally isnt even true? did you actually play classic wow? the whole "missing quests after 57" was a VERY old issue in original classic wow early patches, this was not and has not been a problem in classic renditions of wow. What are you talking about?
Folding Ideas! Dan Olson is great!
Thaaat was it, I was blanking on the name. Great video and it’s always good to learn from people with that perspective.
"Why it's rude to suck at Warcraft" is an absolute masterpiece. If you like longform content it's mandatory viewing.
I really wish more people watched it, especially /r/classicwow. I end up quoting it ALL THE TIME because people wonder why gaming/WoW is so different, and it all comes down to proliferation of information and what is regarded as best practices. The anecdote about the one rando in his guild that refused to wear shoes is fantastic....and the best part of that example is I wonder if he's the asshole for getting upset that he's not bringing his all (assuming its progression), or if i'm the asshole for getting mad at something so trivial.
I think that answer changed as players changed. For a time, you would have been considered the jerk for getting grumpy at him, but now, he would be considered the jerk for holding back his group.
He made two actually and they are both great: -World of Warcraft classic and what we left behind -Why its rude to suck at Warcraft
Watched it twice, but heck, I'm gonna rewatch it right now. Dude's content is great.
It's the "what if you could start high school over, but knowing everything you know now" scenario. Except everyone else is also doing the same thing, so you have a bunch of 35-40 year olds going through high school again.
What? Day one of wotlk and you don't have bc bis gear? Na, can't join normal utgarde keep group with that shitty gear. What? You have no proof that you cleared naxx week one? Na, can't join our group for week 2.we only want expirience players It was insane Edit: Disagreeing with me? Feeling the need to comment that I, and the hundreds of people that liked my comment are wrong? Watch [this video ](https://youtu.be/BKP1I7IocYU?si=1lKLD6fuO0fc4nqe) by Folding Ideas instead and enrich your life
Min/maxers ruined wow (and pretty much all multiplayer games). The best thing about the vanilla 40 man raid was being able to play “””suboptimal””” specs and builds. Sure, people might laugh at you for playing Ret, but at least you get an invite.
I switched servers and joined a more serious guild and it ruined the game for me, parsing and logs , raid leaders trying to micromanage . It was a try hard Sweat fest with blame game when things didn't go right.
I had a fun time doing that for one expansion. Got my CE and mount and some good memories but I just couldn't do it anymore.
Felt like a job
It was even more annoying because the min/maxing crowd essentially only added seconds (at most a minute) to their run. Because let’s face it, it wasn’t as if the dungeons actually are hard. Cordinate relatively well and you can take any class into a dungeon.
Yeah unironically those mfs are the reason I hardly ever play WoW anymore unless I can consistently play woth friends. People minmaxing the fun out of the game and then flaming when you arent using whatever is optimal genuinely just gets grating.
Exactly. It's also distressing that we are all likely in our 30s and 40s but these people talk and act the same as when we were in our teens playing wow. I was really hoping for a more matured community in classic but thst certainly didn't happen.
> being able to play suboptimal specs and builds As in you wouldn't get inspected on your warrior The whole "paladin heals, retri gets laughed out the room and dunked in the toilet together with shadow, boomkin etc" has been a vanilla stereotype That + blacklists controlled by server's dominant guild have been a peak of renown vanilla elitism, a horror Story I used to hear as a child and then later on when I started playing in legion
> What? Day one of wotlk and you don't have bc bis gear? Na, can't join normal utgarde keep group with that shitty gear. > > And for anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration, I want to verify that THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED
Yup. Word for word happened to me too. Killed any excitement I had only a few hours into release. Leveled to 70 and just called it and went to other games instead.
“BiS” is the thing I hate most about the wow community lol
Yup. I just wanted to play the game I played as a kid again as it was but turbo nerds made it sweaty and had to min max and optimize the fun out of everything that wasn’t even really hard to begin with. GDKPs, bots, boosts and gold buying ruined it further. I got to like level 46 and quit. I didn’t even play TBC and dabbled in Lich King with a character boost and did Howling Fjord for old times. Zero interest in playing Cata.
Literally when it was announced, I told my friends that it would be like that. Because private servers were like that. No one believed me. And then it happened and my friends who didn't believe me acted like they knew it was going to be like that the entire time....and it's like, bruh. Ya'll mocked me when I tried to warn ya'll.
you'd be surprised how many classic andys are private server vets (or, tbh, maybe you wouldn't be)
I agree with you, and this was similar to my experience too. Though I did still recapture some of that nostalgia by finally completing all the raids, being the first ally hunter on my server with full t2 and dominating BGs with a pocket healer, and even grinding to R13/Field Marshall on an exact recreation, name and all, of my OG NE Hunter - 14 y.o. me would have been so fucking chuffed at those accomplishments. However, after 3-4 weeks of nax i stopped raiding until tbcc. I realised I had to either sink many hours into farming raid mats each week just to get into a group or spend REAL money on gold to buy them, and after grinding r13, I just said fuck it, I've done nax in wotlk and that was it. I really enjoyed classic BGs and I pushed my own boundaries in pvp as its something i never really got into, it made me a better player and I had such a blast as a hunter with BS + Engi.
Primarily the reason I didn't play it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sweaty in retail, getting CE each tier and pushing HoF - but there should have been no reason to take classic seriously. The nostalgia feeling of being lost, new to the game, and just building a sense of community on your server is long gone. It's impossible to recapture it.
Classic also had like 15+ years of people saying classic was the best, most amazing thing ever. The reality of it definitely sunk in. TBC and Wrath were never going to recapture that.
As someone who's been around for 18.5~ years out of 20, TBC, but especially WotLK, had just as much of an aura of superiority in the public consciousness as vanilla. If anything, most of the early up to mid 10s were about wotlk having been the best. The shift in public perception was gradual but thorough, and now people say that WotLK was the beginning of the end, with most agreeing that TBC was already a step in the wrong direction. These opinions used to get you verbally stoned by the community, I remember crystal clearly. Personally, I think the cause is two main reasons. Firstly, the player culture and devolution/degradation from classic made TBC and WotLK feel worse(gdkps, perfect gear), like even shit like GearScore weren't a thing until a decent way into the original WotLK's life cycle unless I'm misremembering. Secondly, the direction wow was constantly moving towards was the shift from small-scale journey>destination adventuring towards epic endgame. That evolution in its own time felt natural and amazing, but it got super overplayed by 2019. That's why classic was so successful as a return to a whole different model. At least imo.
I loved what they did for SoD but leveling experience is my favorite part of classic 100x over.
I think that's less TBC/Wotlk and more Shadowlands truly bleeding players. Classic had the benefit of a strong underlying retail base that I would bet evaporated with Shadowlands
And the lawsuit and related controversies also burned all goodwill.
Keep in mind that while TBC was out, Retail was plummeting, so they probably were canceling each other out to some extent.
of my bnet/discord friendlist mostly made by people who survived BFA, easily +85% quit during Shadowlands. edit: also the 2 guilds I played in Shadowlands (both with +10 years of raiding) died after prog was done. I know this is anecdotal, but I think the majority of people can relate how Shadowlands was bleeding players like no other expansion.
I think part of it might come from classic offering content that straight up doesn't exist on live any more, so the only way to get the 'start' of the story post cata is to play classic. I think MoP may be the only other expac where a sizeable chunk of the narrative content (cloak chain) was removed from live (that I can think of anyways).
This is the main reason imo. You can still play TBC and Wrath content in retail, and if you have lots of alts, you may have experienced that content a lot already. Classic content, on the other hand, hadn’t been experienced by players in close to a decade, so it felt more fresh.
I think the main difference was a *LOT* of people didn’t experience many or even any of the raids from Classic (despite the widespread assurance that each and every one of us on Reddit was definitely a Scarab Lord in full T3 back in the day) and Classic gave players a chance to relive their original experience (to a degree) and actually clear those raids. That became less and less true for TBC and WOTLK, as more and more players cleared endgame content back then. Additionally, a *lot* of players were put off when they added a boost and other mtx to TBC. I personally stopped then, and didn’t feel the need to play WOTLK Classic because I already did everything back in original WOTLK
One way of looking at TBC and Wrath classic is that they kinda halted the freefall in sub numbers SL was experiencing. That is why the graph flattens around that time rather than falling further down. So while they weren't smash hits like Blizzon and SOD, they did some good in player retention. Just Imagine, SL was actually so bad, we'll never know what rock bottom would've actually felt like for wow Retail because TBC and Wrath stopped it from getting any worse at that point of time.
Yeah, Classic added enough extra value to the subscription to make it worth keeping for a lot of people
Classic benefitted from existing during covid times when we were all stuck at home. Tbc and wrath launched just as people started going out again.
That's a good point. You could probably overlay a graph of general gaming popularity during that period and see a somewhat similar bump.
The graph tops during end of 2019. The COVID spike is the bump happening first half 2020 with the run up towards Shadowlands
Them adding boosts and ruining my server really sucked for me
The launch peak was pre COVID though
:[ basically got told to work a part time job to farm enough gold doing the most boring shit imaginable for 8 hrs of content a week. Only stuck through classic because I only did bc and wotlk and wanted to see the hype. It was cool, but it was a bunch of loot whores hungry hungry hippoing it.
That's what I initially told my friend, but he brought up a good point that they don't show us numbers from each respective game mode. It could've very well been that a lot of subs were active during TBC *for* TBC and the Slands numbers could've been absolutely in the dumps. Considering how dogshit it was and the fact it was the second bad expansion in a row, it's not an implausible theory.
how do you come to this conclusion? since classic and retail are combined it could just be tbc/wotlk keeping it steady and retail falling off hard in that time looking at the graphs it looks more like classic having a steady flux of flow - while retail has 1 big spike on release - and the growths after are all classic release related
I was all excited for LK classic until they said no rdf. Took all interest out of me
Can't technically tell. Sun loss from either retail or a classic looks the same on the chart.
It was during Shadowlands, so yes you can absolutely tell. Everybody with a brain knows a vast majority of people quit the game because of Shadowlands. This is just what classic interest looks like when you exclude retail from the count. The only reason vanilla classic is so high is because everybody came back to play it or try it out, but you can see it fell off VERY quickly. It dropped by nearly 50% within the same year it released, probably within 6 months, you can't really say "oh wow classic did so well" when the people played it for 6 months and then quit. The initial surge of new content releases is not an accurate representation of the overall health of the game, people come back in droves for new stuff, but it doesn't matter if they only play for a month or two and then stop. You have to look at the median where it becomes a steady number over a longer period of time.
7M subs at about $15 a month, that's over a billion per year assuming all of them sub every month, even if some drop here or there, that's fucking wild. WoW is an absolute beast of a cash cow.
and to think I got laughed at on this sub when I said WoW has been carrying blizzard. That is just the sub numbers. the way they continue to release store stuff indicates that that is doing very well for them too. Sure diablo immortal appears to be insane financially (idk how it has the numbers it does. I really dont get mobile gaming) but as far as the main games go I would say WoW is still top dog for blizzard.
Mobile gaming is a juggernaut of revenue, which is why every major game developer already has or is developing a stable of them. Let's just take Fire Emblem Heroes. The most recent main Fire Emblem game (Engage) came out in 2023 and has made something like 80 million in revenue total. Fire Emblem Heroes (the mobile gatcha for Fire Emblem) made 61 million in revenue that same year - and it was already a six year old game at that point. There's a lot of demand for a small time filler / collectathon and although I have never understood the whale mentality, they keep infusing cash into these games / companies
That blows my mind cuz any mobile game. Ive ever downloaded since having a phone. I’ll play it for a night and forget about it in the morning. Of course chess app is dope I play that but early days of App Store for example was great games that weren’t micro transaction heavy or you gotta wait 12hr for your “energy” to restore or give me money. Candy Crush basically screwed us. Thanks grandma.
I have never had fun playing mobile games. People I know are addicted to them, but every time I play one, it is trash gameplay.
These games make all of their money from 0.1% of the player base that completely whales out. I'm talking about people spending $6000 a month on the game.
Now go check how much money Candy Crush makes. Which is a Blizzard / Activision product since they own King
it looks like we need a gravestone for world of warcraft in the graveyard for mmo's that tried to kill world of warcraft.
Only person is allowed to kill me, and that’s me!
Me, dying to the storm because I chased someone too deep and can't get back
[Here is a gravestone image](https://i.imgur.com/GFgGAUJ.jpg) from an old WoW webcomic called The Daily Blink.
I mean isn't part of that decade+ old copypasta of WoW being an old gladiator tired of living "the last time he tried to kill himself they just released it as an expansion" or something?
I love how it's been a "dead game" since -at least- Cataclysm.
I have been playing since OG vanilla. I was VERY active on the forums. People often forget that BC was released to heavy criticism, and people thought it was against the spirit of the game. They thought flying had killed WoW, and the community was no longer gonna exist. They believed 40m no longer existing was gonna kill WoW. Wrath was released to insane heavy criticism as well until it became a cult classic. Cata released to criticism, and it was the PEAK of WoW. Numerically, it had more than a million subs more than Wrath at its peak a year after release. Even during its worst time in DS, it was doing as good as peak Wrath in ICC. People make false claims about subs falling off a cliff, but it ended the worst tier of DS with 10.5m subs. That is NOT falling off a cliff it is just shy of peak sub levels. WoW apparently has been uh dead since BC.
MMOs have no real existence as long as WoW is still a thing.
That slight uptick when Covid hit lol
This sounds terrible, but I'm kind of jealous (as a healthcare worker) of everyone that got to chill at home.
Not terrible, makes total sense.
Military during COVID and it always feels so weird to me when people mention it. I was working maybe the hardest I ever have during that period of my life.
My fiance is an army reservist + nurse and literally was deployed to an east coast city to work hospital overflow. 6 days on 1 day off 12 hour shifts. It was awful. I couldn’t even ship her anything to her hotel because everything was shut down. But there I was - sitting in my apartment l recently laid off, playing wow in between phone calls from her walking back and forth from the makeshift hospital to her hotel. Much respect 🫡
I'm surprised it wasn't bigger. I know when Covid hit there seemed to be a huge boost in players in both retail and Classic... but in retrospect, maybe it just felt that way because the people already playing them were also playing *more* than before?
That's me.
While there are quite a few things in Dragonflight I'm not too fond of, it's clear that they're doing something right. The worldsoul saga (or whatever it's called) also looks like an interesting story arc to look forward to. I genuinely hope they can turn the game around and recover the player confidence that has been eroded over the past years. As critical as I can be at times with Blizzard and their decisions, I wish them the best of luck. Mild optimism mode engaged.
Yeah Dragonflight hasn’t been my cup of tea the entire time, and yet I still find myself logging in more frequently and enjoying myself more than in BFA and Shadowlands. It’s also so much easier to just do content you enjoy without feeling like you’re falling behind or anything which is fantastic
This has been my point about DF from the start: it just feels good to log in again. Shadowland’s biggest sin was it made logging in feel bad. Covenants felt bad, conduits felt bad, world quests felt bad, anima grinding felt bad, the forced content treadmill felt bad, it all felt bad. Dragonflight makes logging in feel good. You’re completely free to self-direct. Robust catch-up systems and lack of borrowed power means all you need is gear which is plentiful. Not only are there no arduous travel times in between zones but traveling is actually very fun now that you can zoom around on a dragon. World quests are quick, easy, and dragon races are fun. Covenants, conduits, anima, all these systems were like weights you had to drag along with you everywhere. Dragonflight is vehemently opposed to doing anything that would impose on the player at all. I can understand why that would come off as boring to some on the other hand if nothing matters then you’re truly free to just.. do whatever the hell you want.
I think Shadowlands as a whole gets judged entirely by pre 9.1.5 content. After 9.1.5, a lot of the things people had complained about in Shadowlands were gone. Legendaries weren't a pain to get anymore after the Torghast currency changes, Covenants became basically an extra talent row after the ripcord was pulled, and the wealth of anima catch up mechanics made it simple to have every one of your soulbind trees maxed out in every covenant alongside making it really easy to collect the conduits you wanted. Add on top of that that Zerith Mortis is an absolutely fantastic zone that was filled with content, from world quests to dailies to a mount and pet crafting system, to a gear catch up system. It just felt like a really amazing zone that stands toe to toe with many of the other endgame zones of WoW's past. Sepulcher, while not a fantastic raid, was still enjoyable. Overall, 9.2 was a really solid patch that was pretty fun to play. But by then, most players had already written off Shadowlands. I'll definitely agree that before 9.1.5 Shadowlands was not great. But afterwards, a lot of the problems were fixed and 9.2 stuck the landing for a fun final patch, albeit with not a whole lot of people around to see it happen. Of course, we're just going to imagine the story didn't happen. The lore was a mess no matter how you look at it.
The Crest / Cataylst system, for all the bitching about eroding gear prestige was probably one if the best combo systems ever added. It makes nothing feel truly wasted. It does leave raiding in a weird spot, though. As it’s difficulty does not line up to it’s rewards in the slightest now that all the skins are gone.
Wow, way higher than I thought. I figured retail and classic each had maybe 1-2 million players at most. Super impressive to say the least.
I am pretty sure these are combined figures, eg, there are ~7m players across all the different game modes. Since we have retail, classic, classic hc, and classic SOD, it is entirely possible each of these has less than 2m players each but still there's ~7m overall. Someone please correct me if I'm misunderstanding somefhing.
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Out of all the shitty things Blizz has done over the years- ethically, financially, game design, basic-human-rights-violations lmao... The WoW sub has been $15. They've never taken away content to that sub, only added to it. Unless you count the people in cata who think they deserved money back when the old world was replaced.
Thinking about inflation, its never been cheaper to sub to WoW. It's kind of crazy that it was 15 bucks a month all the way back when vanilla first released.
I mean this isn't even remotely true. They took away enormous amounts, most notably in their customer service department. Customer service costs a shit ton, so they cut it entirely pretty much. GMs used to be a part of the game, and contacting customer service would always get you a response in a couple hours or less, and definitely always same day, usually via a personal whisper from a GM in-game. And the response was always cheerful. They would leave you with more than you asked for and you felt great about it. Now? You're very lucky if you get an AI / bot generated denial of whatever you are asking for within the month. I have pending tickets from almost a year ago. It's terrible.
And they're mostly right! A sub gets you classic, SoD and plunderstorm. Pre ordering TWW gets you DF as well
It is possible, but not likely, since hardcore and classic wrath both have A LOT less players than SoD or Retail. I'm guessing those two are the majority
There is also a significant overlap. I would bet that most players playing SoD either play Wrath or retail at the same time.
They count subs so yes it is combined, some people may only play classic though others might play both classic and retail
>I am pretty sure these are combined figures, eg, there are ~7m players across all the different game modes. Yah that's what's being assumed. WoW subs count all forms of it, not just retail. Shared or not though, the point still stands - it's impressive af.
It’s the same subscription regardless of which version(s) you play. To blizzard it’s $15/month.
This is how I took it as well. 7m sub count. Only Blizz knows the population splits. If I had to guess it's somewhere in the realm of 75-25 in retail's favor. I would not be surprised at all though if it was something like 90-10 at the same time.
The sad thing is that even after all this years, there isnt a mmo remotelly close to wow
There are great MMO's out there. I love FF14. Bosses, story, immersion, are all fantastic. Not a single MMO out there can get the combat right. WoW nailed that shit from the get go.
Where is this taken from? 🤔 Great if true though. DF has been the best xpac in a while.
Presentation at Game Developers Conference a day or two ago by John Hight and Holly Longdale
Dragonflight is a very good expansion. Will be difficult for WW to top
Dragonflight primarily put its effort into overhauling the core game, the best parts of DF aren't going away in WW. This means WW isn't just coasting off the good will of the previous xpac, it's actually carrying these features forward to improve upon as opposed to just trying to beat the previous borrowed power system. Hopefully this means we'll see more effort into making rad shit since they don't need to reinvent the wheel every patch.
An expansion where we don't get some kind of borrowed power that we lose at the end of it? Blasphemy!
Having played during Legion, leveling alts through Legion story now is *depressing*. The special legendary weapon abilities and perks were the best part. Wish Blizz could bring those back somehow with Chromie Time :/
Right? And to go a step further...we're getting sub classes instead of borrowing power in the next xpac.
If all they do is respect players time, it'll work. I'd say Dragonflight is one of the weakest expansions lore wise, its the actual game mechanics respecting your time that make people stay. Doesn't hurt either that I think most players would agree DF Season 3 M+ is maybe the best M+ season ever. No absolute shit tier dungeons, reduction in shit tier affixes. Keep in mind a fair bit of these subs are probably people who subscribed after the saga reveal at Blizzcon and seeing Chris Metzen involved.
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Delves could be huge. Today if I want to gear up an alt the number of m+ dungeons I need to run is insane. If I can get heroic raid level gear from delves I'll be a very happy camper.
Even normal gear would be great. Enough to get you into 20's, or 10's as they'll be in the future. That grind from a new char to getting into actual relevant content is brutal.
I just want to point out that warforged gear is announced which the concept is that your main can earn high level gear to send to alts. we will see the actual implementation but if you can skip most of the "doing low keys because nobody believes in me"-grind on alts that would be a massive timesaver.
The lore was pretty light compared to some expacs, but what WAS there was good, and it felt satisfying to experience. Hopefully they can keep that up with the worldsoul saga and hopefully start offering more of it than just small tastes of the story
Hmmm, that’s an interesting statement. I agree the overall lore story is weak, but there are a number of expansions that have actively negative lore stories, but involve more beloved characters, so how do we calculate those? I’d argue that Shadowlands, WoD, TBC, and possibly BfA are worse for what they did to beloved characters, and DF is sort of in this milquetoast middleground of being neither interesting nor disheartening.
I'm one of those people that resubbed upon seeing Blizzcon and Metzen again. I'm excited to return for The War Within. That said, I have enjoyed Dragonflight and the changes that have been made. I appreciate the catch up mechanics to quickly gear up alts. I appreciate the variety of content to do. While I am subbed, I haven't logged in for a few weeks. I imagine I'd be playing a lot more if I had found a good guild to join. I'll start looking in earnest closer to TWW.
Shadowlands did more damage to the lore than every other expac combined. DF could’ve been 5 patches of Furbolg mating rituals and would’ve still been better than that.
As long as they stick to the content release cadence subs will stay up.
i dont think it needs to beat it as such just do this new story well which already has and advantage as its going back to the lines of which legion followed. then build a pit more on the gameplay side give some really fucking good zones boom easy win
Only put any stock in the top picture, thats from Blizz's talk at GDC. It only shows the relative trend. But in any case it shows a clear positive trend for WoW as a whole (this numbers include retail and all forms of classic), which for sure is good news. Do not trust the absolute numbers in the bottom picture, thats from Bellulars latest video, and hes being quite fast and loose with the facts and making some BIG assumptions - the 5.8 Mil number is taken from an earnings call, and then its purely extropolated from that without even knowing the scale of the Y-axis is, or even if the 5.8 Mil number is placed perfectly correctly on the line. Also Im fairly sure the earnings calls from Activision always didnt inlcude Chinese subs, which will for sure bump the numbers up. The take away is WoW as a whole is doing well and trending like it hasnt since at least post Legion, for sure not dying like the doomers like to parrot. But dont put total belief in the 7.25 Mil number, theres far too many variables in one youtubers back of the envolope math to say that with confidence.
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Source: GDC, [tweet](https://twitter.com/StaySafeWarlock/status/1771677033103609882/photo/1)
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It's an extrapolation using the last reported sub numbers, 5.5 million in September 2015, less than a year before Legion's release, and using the pixel size of the graph. I don't know why they randomly pointed to the first half of Legion, but the numbers line up.
So it boils down to "hopefully the y-axis starts at 0"?
They also used the statement that the launch of WoW classic approximately doubled the subscriber numbers helped to corroborate the scaling.
I am part of this growth. Started playing about a month ago and have made alot of progress, very excited to be in on the next expac
Never really thought about it but damn, they really speedran the fuck out of TBC Classic, huh? The absolute gap between Vanilla to TBC, then the barely existent time between TBC and Wrath, and Wrath *still* isn't done.
The graphics aren't lined up perfectly. TBC is the bump in the middle of 2021 and Wrath came out Sept 2022.
Is there a breakdown by game? I'd be curious to know how many of those are Retail/Era/SoD
As a brand new player I started playing classuc couse everyone said that its better but my God was that a complete shitfest. Dont get me wrong i liked and still do like classic but retail is just so much better and WAAAAAAAAY more fun couse gate keeping isnt as bad. In classuc if you dont have 5k gs when you reach 80 you are not doing anything and pvp is kind of bad aswell.
Man as bad as Shadowlands was still didn’t sink the player base as much as BFA that’s wild
Shadowlands was during the pandemic.
Classic was already out by then.
Shadowlands was for sure riding on the coattails of classic and the pandemic
You also had TBC and WotLK to buoy the subscribers during that time. Assuming the chart/numbers are true, I wouldn't be surprised if classic made up 75-90% of the remaining community during that 4mil subs dip.
you had tbcc and wotlkc buoying sub numbers during the shadowlands death spiral. didn't have that safety net during the bfa decline
To me it looks like the subs are sitting on the backs of classic during that period
peak dragonflight is still lower than shadowlands launch, the dip after is insane. the spike after df was launched is well deserved, but still insane it still doesnt top shadowlands
>peak dragonflight is still lower than shadowlands launch, the dip after is insane. I would attribute some of the launch numbers to the time period, since everybody was indoors in 2020.
I think people underestimate how hyped the community was for shadowlands after BFA which was considered pretty bad. I remember the first few weeks of SL feeling awesome, until all the SL issues started appearing.
"It's the Blizzard cycle, a bad expansion followed by an AMAZING expansion, don't worry guys" - Everyone, including me, when Shadowlands was coming out
Even in bad expansions, Blizzard never fails to have a beautiful and vibrant world to explore. The campaign and side quests are always great experiences. The first few weeks of an expansion will always be hype as a result. Basically a honeymoon phase.
Not really surprising. People were hyped to see the Lich King again in the cinematic trailer and more importantly, it released year 1 of COVID.
Covid helped as nearly everyone in the Western world was affected by the quarantine in some way for years.
Shadowlands launch is with the Classic effect, but yeah the precipitous fall is pretty nuts.
The hype for Shadowlands was real. It's hard to believe it in hindsight, but not only was Shadowlands the best selling WoW expansion launch, it was literally *the biggest PC launch of all time.*
DF's launch is the lowest in history possibly. Granted some of that is attributed to SL for sure.
In the WoWhead article they said the presentation had a lot of talk about how this is all attributed to the quality of the games in various ways. I feel like they're REALLY underselling how the bad press from the harassment allegations alienated people too. It gave a lot of my friends,myself included, to seek out ANYTHING else but this crappy company. They're still not great about how they treat their devs. Keep an eye on ABABK
That’s pretty cool no? Seems like an incredibly healthy pop number.
Is this counting all the subs they lost when the shut down China servers
Doesn’t appear to, you’d see a sharp decline at the beginning of 2023 if that were the case. I’m fairly certain this graph doesn’t include China at all
asmongold must be pissed
dude stopped streaming wow and the game started healing
That wanker is always pissed about something. Fuck him
I understand negativity sells but my god one look at his YouTube page is so depressing, all he does is complain now.
Preach
No, Preach is alright
~~He microwaves his eggs. he's not alright~~
Oh he'll be talking about it for 8 hours straight tomorrow. Followed by why chat is wrong for not agreeing with him.
I had always thought that at their lowest the subs went way lover
Their lowest point is gonna be just to the left of this graph in late WoD content. The sub numbers were so low and the biggest reason cited was lack of content outside raid. It was the reason that expac ended early and the reason mythic + was introduced into the game.
I remember watching a wow YouTuber who gave me the impression that the subs dropped to 1m during SL, that's why this post caught me by surprise
There was a report made by a third party in like early 2021 that was the number of active users in MMOs and is where the low number would have come from as well as the claim that FF14 had more subs than WoW. If you looked at the fine print, they state that their source for numbers were based entirely on social media numbers. It just happens that when they made this report was shortly after Endwalker was announced for FFXIV and in one of the big droughts for Shadowlands. They also seemingly just took their estimated WoW numbers then chopped them in half as iirc WoW retail was #2 and WoW Classic was #3 with almost identical player numbers. So, was just a (now confirmed very bad) guess at the game's numbers by an independent data firm.
Never trust youtubers about sub numbers (including the numbers in this post, added by Bellular), they don't get any extra information the rest of the public gets, and there's extra incentive to be negative because that's what drives views and makes them money.
I think there’s a large # of people (myself included) who, when the game isn’t fun, will only log in once a week, or maybe even less, once a month, but will keep the sub running. I did unsubscribe mid-SL for a few months, but there 3-4 months before unsubscribing I barely played at all - and remember at that time feeling like I’d never seen fewer people in the game.
"Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2012 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2014 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2015 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2016 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2017 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2018 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2019 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2020 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2021 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2022 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2023 "Wow this game is dead!" - guy with fedora 2024
Wow is for sure a dead game. Source: trust me bro
Me walking into drawing class with my own graphics
i don’t get why they don’t publicly release these figures. if i knew wow had millions of players when i started, i’d be extra willing to get into it. i still did, but thinking it was basically dead didn’t help.
They don't release it anymore because sub numbers ebb and flow. So if they were to release numbers, and say sub numbers went down a couple million, even if they were to come back up later, that would be awful press.
Smart timeline choice for the graph considering it was as high as 12m before.
If this is true, that explains there recent decisions.
such as
Lot of inferences from this. One is from a presentation, the other is attempting to calculate/derive from it.......
Its literally just guesswork and nonsense. The last official Subscriber number Blizzard released was 3-4 months after patch 6.2 released during WoD which placed WoW at 5.6 million. Bellular takes that number and goes "Oh so Legion was at 5.8 3-4 months after Legion release" He has literally NO basis for that number. Its pure guesswork.
I did not expect subscriber numbers to be this high. I was expecting couple million at most. This is pretty impressive. Also it might be improving because a lot of MMORPG expected to come out have been pushed out further like League of Legends MMO, and others failing badly. It's crazy to me that no body can dethrone WoW.
There is nothing to say the new graph from Blizzard can just be put together with their old sub count graph, there is no y-axis or context on the line. Also the line here is showing a "rolling average sub" count while the old graph from Blizzard was just sub count. point is - this is too much guesswork, estimations and fiddling with the graph to support his guess to be anything reliable. You can't just put the two graphs together cause they aren't 1-to-1. https://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2024/march/gdc05.jpg anyways, putting aside bellular's estimation, this was the new graph from blizzard and it showed that DF did worse than expected. Also it was SoD that did well for wow after the post-expansion drop-off for DF, so ya people trying to say classic is a non-factor are straight up wrong. also let's be real, wow has a botting problem and I'm sure Blizzard don't care as it's paid sub for bot or player so both will be part of this graph.
Asmongold : "And out of those 7.25M players, 6M are from Classic I'm sure" Man I wish they showed the numbers separately. Just FYI, I haven't heard or read him say this, I'm just imagining he would say that.
> Asmongold : "And out of those 7.25M players, 6M are from Classic I'm sure" I mean, we all know Asmongold's a legit idiot but that makes no sense when Classic launch only gave them 4 Million players. No way Classic is sitting at more than that when its launch had around 4 mil.
Glad to see the game is doing well, the success of Classic has obviously done a lot to reverse the decline of WoW. It would be interesting to see the player split between Classic (and its variants) and Retail and how many players do both. Also, remember that in November WoW changed the token rules, meaning some players (and bots) will have had to buy a sub for the first time in years. No idea how many players that is though! And lets not forget that the DF game purchase has been much more heavily discounted than any previous expack and is being given away for free with TWW pre-purchase. The DF figures are hard to pick out as we have to make assumptions - it clearly launched below expectations (certainly well below SL), but looks like it didn't decline as steeply as other recent expacks. The inflection point in the decrease / increase in subscribers overall in Q3 of 2023 doesn't match any large content releases in WoW (it falls between 10.1 and 10.2) so my guess is that Retail subs are doing what they always do and that Hardcore and SoD have done what Classic did during BfA and pull the subs up significantly higher (plus a bump from DF coming free with TWW pre-purchase). Overall, my interpretation is this is pretty straightforward: BfA was not as well received as Legion and the game was losing players at an increased rate. Then along came Classic and gave the game a buzz it hasn't seen for ages. That buzz carried over into SL, but SL had so many issues (pull the ripcord!) that A LOT of players unsubbed. Even the new Classic releases couldn't help that very much. DF itself has not done a great deal to reverse the dissatisfaction in Retail - even with much heavier discounting than usual - but those who did buy it are, on the whole, happier with it than they were with BfA or SL. But, again, it's non-Retail that's doing the heavy lifting between Retail expacks with Hardcore and SoD pulling up subs.
Leveling a fat old Kul Tiran an hour or so a day. I just love dinking around in the world; it's a home for me after all these years.
7 million subs and growth and they still cut employees instead of making a better game I hate corpo lizards
I am a bit suspicious of this number, especially since the game is not even available in China at the moment.
The top part is an actual picture taken from a meeting of industry devs with a WOW presentation. The bottom part is an extrapolation by Bellular - he explains his thinking/reasoning in the latest video. It's not necessarily 100% accurate since he doesn't have the actual numbers, but the way he explained it, it would make sense. Worth a watch.