Expansion popularity

Community General Discussion
41

That’s a rather petulant take though.

I mean, the API provides the equivalent of walking up to the WoW house, knocking on the door and having Mr. Blizzard open up, and then go:
“Hey there Mr. Blizzard, could you tell me roughly how many people are inside the WoW house?”
“No. Go away.”
“Okay, bye!”
…And then proceeding to go over to the nearest window and look inside and start counting.

I mean, that’s what the APIs allow for – a window to look though, giving us a means to count.
Maybe the data we collect is off by a bit here and there because something’s hiding in the corner, but for the purposes we’re using it, it’s accurate enough.

Like, if we conclude through the API that 500.000 people have played The War Within (outside of China), then even with a margin of error of 50%(!) that would still only amount to a maximum of 750.000 people. So we’re still in the same ballpark.

And that’s really as accurate as we need it to be. Is the game played by thousands, a million, or many millions?

42

Not sure if I agree with you or not.

TWW is more on the right track in terms of story and atmosphere but, and unfortunately, it just seems to be a cut/paste in terms of content with exception to Delves. This is what makes it feel meh for me.

43

Wod and SL was trash me. Where me quitted and less play it

Mop and DF was my fave. I think TWW is fine, dunno why people hated TWW.

44

WOD was bad and SL had the downside it suffered from Covid. All in all WOD was the worse expansion since its lack of content almost killed the game.

45

Just analyzing the sub data won’t tell us much about the content, will it? Context matters. World-events (e.g. pandemic), economy , other game releases, …etc. it all has, or can have, impact on sub counts.

Personally I think that BFA and Legion are a bit underrated.

46

True, but what i mean is we could take data for DF, that IS available.
Than in the formula
GENERAL AMOUNT OF SUBSCRIBERS-AMOUNT OF NON-CHINESE RETAIL PLAYERS=AMOUNT OF NON-CHINESE CLASSIC PLAYERS+CHINESE RETAIL AND CLASSIC PLAYERS
we would have the two on the left side of the equation. and won’t have the two on the right side of the equation.

But it gets more interesting, if we roll back to where there was only retail and no alternative versions. Because then we have only one unknown, the chinese player base, and it can be calculated as everything on the left side is known.

Pretty neat, thanks for the info.

I always thought, API only give information about users, who actually use addons or wow-related sites. Did not know it gave you the whole retail non-chinese pop. Thanks!

The graph comes from blizzard presentation, i gave the link, where you can read on it.
Obviously, the average is an estimation here, but the peak and the low point are quite observable on blizzard’s graphs

Well, not according to sub numbers

I mean, the results seem to be really interesting.

Just as an interesting exercise. For example, i find fascinating, that shadowlands is not bottom of the list. I guess, i was wrong

xD hahaha xD
But on a more serious note, yes, everyone has their own lore, music, aesthetic, gameplay and class/spec preferences, which are improbable to coincide, so obviously worst/best expansion is a funny way to think about this issue.
It can be more popular or less popular as shown by sub numbers, but not worse or better

47

That was never an unknown at the time.
Back in Wrath of the Lich King in 2009, Blizzard had a dispute with the operator of World of Warcraft in China at the time, the company called The9. As a consequence of that dispute Blizzard switched operator to the company NetEase, who also operate the game today. But during that switch the game became unplayable in China and the playerbase for World of Warcraft dropped by 50%. At the time it was at 12 million, so it dropped to 6 million. For reference:
World of Warcraft loses 6 million users - Gamesbrief - Gamesbrief

So based on that little event, it became known that the size of the Chinese market was equal to the rest of the world (and explained why Blizzard had such vested interest in China), i.e. 50%.

Hence why I said earlier that if you are to guess, then saying the Chinese numbers are about equal to the numbers outside China is a conservatively reasonable guess.

The numbers are definitely not higher, because when WoW’s subscribers initially began to drop, CEO Mike Morhaime reported on Activision Blizzard’s Quarterly Results that the loss in subscribers was attributed to the east, i.e. China.

So if The War Within has 500.000 players outside China, then it’s hard to imagine there’s vastly more than that in China, when Blizzard have struggled to maintain market share over the years. So at most there’s a similar amount, if not less.

48

thanks a lot for the links, i really appreciate it.
my understanding was, that eastern asian player prevailed due to also players from taiwan, japan etc. But apparently China alone is enough
Pretty neat

Would it be an accurate statement in your view, that the game is becoming less resembling east asian mmos with time, though?

49

Sure. Asian MMORPGs seem to generally stick with the same classical design they’ve always had. The new ones are just prettier.
World of Jade Dynasty is the big title coming out in China in a few days, and it looks as one would expect from China:

Retail WoW seems to evolve from a classical MMORPG to become more of an ARPG and less MMO. Diablo-like I would say.

50

Thanks for Sharing!

51

None of the sites have the real number of retail players because most do not allow access in private settings so all this “500.000” players mean’s nothing.

Warcraftlogs is flawed because not all runs are logged same as rio and dataforazeroth people can hide there stats if they see fit.

Please do not take the word of a streamer as fact.