I mean, first we dont know how many players cater this genre,then we dont know each game sub numbers or any other metrics.
Regarding activision you have some insight from quarterly financial results, but it is very partial.
Yea , i know, we dont need to know that numbers, that metrics…however WoW made a big mistake, when it was on the rise, they preached about their sub numbers…for years…so they truly fixed the metric for us playerbase…
All the other games are measured in MAUs so they do the same for WoW. I guess it didn’t make a lot of sense having a separate metric for one game that they couldn’t compare in the same way.
Since Legion it feels like we’ve had ‘make you play metrics’, I don’t like those. I prefer, game is fun, I want to log in.
they stopped reporting it when their sub count plummeted, and the last thing they said was something like “it’s not an accurate metric for the healthiness of the game”
Dont get me wrong, i agree with you.
However MMORPG games are all about building your character and your story, i would like to do it in an healthy game, not a dying one.
So i care about metrics
There are definitely cycles, we see it every time.
New expansions we see an explosion of players, many don’t want to do more than experience the new stuff then go play something else. Then a new patch domes out, players return again, experience what they want to and go again.
We also have a steady regular playerbase, that tends to play regardless, I would say that trails off when patches go on for a long period of time, traditionally we tend to get those at the end of expansions but Covid happened.
I wasn’t talking about the cyclical new expansion spike but the bigger trend where since wotlk there’s been a constant loss of average subs.
for most there’s a need to affirm the MMO they’re playing is still popular, or they feel their efforts are wasted like grinding a single player game. but the real metric is how player count affects your actual gameplay experience in terms of finding groups or guilds or content in general.
in my experience this is more about the structure of the game ie. sharding or incentive to seek out interaction with others, and not about the actual number of players currently online.
all in all blizz really cares about their image of a “big company”, hence they avoid talking to players or doing anything that might make them seem small or desperate. they’d rather appear arrogant
" Public Relations , or ‘PR’, is all about the way organisations communicate with the public, promote themselves, and build a positive reputation and public image. … PR professionals try to influence the media to represent their organisation positively and communicate key messages."
PR, as always with business. It’s obvious the sub count wasn’t what it was in WoTLK - when they used to shout from the hill tops about the sub count, and after that, WoTLK sub numbers are a high benchmark on everyone’s minds. Blizzard doesn’t want the public to know the new embarrassing negative benchmark which is a good few meters down from the former glory of WoTLK sub numbers.
I’m not so sure that is true, after the cycle loss at the start of SL, numbers went back to normal. It was just the loss was reported in click baity ways as if Blizz took a big hit.
To be honest I often don’t believe Acti-blizz on a lot of their reporting since they will say stuff like ‘highest pre-sale expac ever’ to get a ‘most sold’ headline and all that and differentiate it between ‘pre-order’ and ‘what sold day one’ they always change the wording to make it look good themselves where flat numbers like monthly subs would be better for me to look at.
We don’t know how many people play most online games either.
It’s imo partially due to two main reasons :
1/ Not sharing it means they are not instantly blamed whenever there’s a drop. Most games follow the pattern of tons of players whenever content is released and then you have a steep drop in the first few weeks and then a slow drop until the next release.
That’s what happened with Classic for instance, with most queues being a thing only for the first few weeks of the game.
Constant growth is not realistic & thus covering up in case there’s a drop is not such a bad idea
2/ The player count is no longer equivalent to the profits generated. The current business model of WoW means that simply looking at sub count is not enough to get an idea of the financial health of the game, especially with the WoW token which is 50% more profitable for the company or the shop.
A declining playerbase does not equate lower profits anymore, which means that showing the active playerbase to the public could send conflicting messages to the shareholders & public.
All things considered it kinda makes sense that most games don’t share this kind of data, as they have more to loose at doing this.
Totally agreed that companies dont want to nowadays.
But any site, association, online blogz etc, can have a decent realistic metric? Why?
I think in many business’ cases stuff like this is simply to not give everything to competition.
In Blizzard’s case, I don’t think it’s that (sort of) but more that given their aggressive statementing over subs since WOTLK, continuation to do so now will be taken as an objective indication that the game is falling in popularity (even if it’s not dead or unplayable) and that’s something they probably don’t want to admit.
I mean i’m not in the “WoW is dead/dying” camp, because WoW is playable, there are easily enough players to make what I want to do (and most of everyone else) possible, where it requires players. However only a fool would claim WoW is as popular as it once was, of course it isn’t.
World of Warcraft was once the name of game even non-gamers probably knew about, now it’s probably recognised but in a much lesser sense and less often.
Perhaps blizzard don’t want to acknowledge that? Who knows. In my eyes it’s natural, for an MMO to have 16 years or more before it goes into “maintenance” is a bloody good run imo, even if it’s vastly less popular than it was.
I myself don’t need to know the metrics to discern whether the game is playable enough, I can kinda work that out through play. Having access to a figure won’t change that honestly, because the figure won’t tell me (of those players) which ones are active, into X content, into Y content or even logging in regular, so it’s not necessarily a failsafe way to determine whether the game is “playable” or not.
I mean sure if the game has 1000 subs then obviously issues. But what I mean is say a game has 300,000 subs. Of those, 100,000 could easily be “i won’t touch M+ type content” players, and another 100,000 could easily be “i log only on weekends” or whatever. So if i’m a player into M+ stuff and want to know whether this game will do it for me, these figures alone won’t necessarily tell me that without them being analysed in detail.
And honestly, i think it’d be apparent if a game had sub 10,000 subs, because for a start you wouldn’t have multiple servers. There’d be no reason to pay for it when you don’t even need them to manage the players, and even a company as secretive as blizzard, I do not think, are prepared to maintain a lot of servers to try and create an illusion of busyness because it hurts their bottom line too much in doing so (and the spread of players will be obvious to the playerbase and make them moan → see TBCC and Classic WoW)
The numbers are trending downwards and that is bad news. If Blizz would officially communicate those negative numbers, some unsatisfied but still active players like you would be more likely to join the bandwagon and also quit. By keeping the issue quiet, Blizz is retaining more subscriptions.
It’s also to keep investors happy.
I mean Blizz as a whole has a realistic metric : MAU and profits generated. That’s all shareholders care about and since that’s the industry standard that’s what they get. We’re not the target audience for these metrics, they are
For instance we could look at smaller, yet very well liked studio which don’t show their metrics either, like Digital Extreme for Warframe. Game is F2P, we have the steam data but we have no idea how many people use their own launcher & thus bypass steam.
They don’t really have anything to hide as their steam average player count has mostly been constant for the past 5 years, yet the complete data is not publicly available.
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