World of Warcraft Loses Over 500k Players

Over the last 6 months period, WoW has lost over 500k players. In Activision’s recent financial call, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime said that as of March of this year, World of Warcraft had reverted to “pre-Cataclysm levels in the West," which is a nice way of saying they lost a significant number of subscribers.

In October last year, Blizzard reported that World of Warcraft had exceeded 12 million subscribers. In yesterday’s financial call, Morhaime gave a figure of 11.4 million players – that’s 600,000 subscribers lost. The more surprising thing is that this happened within six months of expansion Cataclysm’s release.

What happened? Some rubbed it off as the effects of inflation. But here's a comment by Killiana1a on VGChartz about what's wrong with WoW.

1. Too high entry price.

If you are a new player to WoW, then you have to not only pay for WoW and Cata, but for The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King as well. This could put the entry level price just for the game discs over $100.

2. The WoW Community

The WoW community is atrocious, selfish, and tyrannical. Players will occasionally try kick players from groups for not tanking or healing like a player who does so for a high end, progression raiding guild. Raids can devolve into blamefests where after wiping on a boss, the raid leader will get on his podium and act like an inquisitor asking "Who is going to take the blame. Who messed up!"

In a group endeavor, rarely is one person at fault. Almost always you have two or more members of the group messing up.

So what do you think the direction of WoW will be? Will it still be the sovereign king of MMO for long? Or will it start to decline? Has players grown tired of WoW? Who knows, only time will tell.

(On a side note, this is my 100th blog post!)

Source : VGChartz