You can’t really prove that. That’s the problem. And do you forget BFA had the highest first day sales and by far higher twitch views with 600k?
Estimates with no source how they were made. Which means it’s fiction
Didn’t he leave blizzard 9 years ago ? What does his opinOn count. He isn’t a insider anymore ?
The notion that the game is “dying” always struck me as ridiculous.
The game gets less popular as it gets older? Sure, makes sense, happens to all games.
The game is dying because tens of millions of people aren’t playing it? Eh? Where’s the logic in that?!
Even the notion of what a hypothetical “death” constitutes strikes me as…peculiar.
Like all of their other games, Blizzard will most likely keep supporting WoW with functional servers even if there’s only a thousand people left playing. I mean, I can still play Diablo II on battlenet and that game is older and more dead than WoW!
I remember back in the days after WoW had been released alongside numerous other MMORPGs, there you actually had some games that “died”. They got shut down. I remember Matrix Online closing down, and it did so in a true Matrix fashion with people getting unplugged in-game. That was very cool. And that game “died”, because you can’t play it anymore!
But WoW is beyond that point, and Blizzard as a company are - and always have been - very passionate about supporting all their games no matter how old they are, or how small their communities are.
Why people speak of WoW “dying” is beyond me. 
He did leave Blizzard 9 years ago, yes, but he still has a lot of friends there, and he is extremely frustrated with what Blizzard has done to World of Warcraft.
Anyhow, the estimates are made using machine learning and data from Google Analytics and Blizzard themselves. Of course it can never be entirely accurate, but there’s very good reason to believe that it is reasonably accurate
No, it happens to all games that aren’t live services.
Every time Blizzard releases a patch, they are essentially making a little sequel. Remember this.
No, it happens to all games.
Yes, but the interest is still going to diminish over time, that’s natural.
The first playing the game is inevitably more thrilling than the 35th time playing a new patch.
It’s not like WoW can maintain the same player excitement for 15 years so long as it keeps releasing more content. People are going to lose interest regardless, either because WoW doesn’t appeal anymore, or because other things become appealing instead. It’s normal.
At least at this point I don’t mind looking through the LFG channel to find a group for something. I even look forward to it. If I’m not mistaken it should be possible to implement addons that can mimic the retail LFG tool anyway.
But I’m way more interested in talent trees and spell ranks (down ranking for example). The rest is kinda (re-)experiencing the game. Like a flash back to see how things have changed since then.
Which , because I don’t see it .
Oh my freaking god… Not every game releases with a big splash and marketing hype and then drops off over time…
I can think of hundreds of game series or even single games that live on to this day or have grown since their release more than 10 years ago.
They exist both big and small, and I think of several off them just off the top of my head:
Minecraft
League of Legends
Final Fantasy 14
EVE
Path of Exile
I mean ffs friggin’ CHESS! That’s not even a live service game and it’s hundreds of years old and people still play it in droves, and there are certainly more who do now than beck then because everybody can afford a set and there are way more people!
That’s fair enough but there are 7 billion people on this bloody planet. If you keep doing what you did to entice people the first time around for the 37th time, there will be people who are pulled it the 37th time, even as the guy who played 36 rounds gets tired of it.
It’s called statistical sampling and estimation, in this case using a linear fit. Take a statistics course.
I always use the case of WoW being banned in China as a good way to evaluate the accuracy of these graphs.
Back in WotLK the Chinese authorities banned WoW for a a short period, resulting in WoW’s subscriber base dropping by ~6 million until Blizzard made the necessary changes and the game went live again.
You can read about it here:
https://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/07/world-of-warcraft-loses-6-million-users/
https://www.wired.com/2009/08/world-of-warcraft-china/
So an accurate depiction of WoW’s subscribers over the years should include a sharp dip during WotLK. But few graphs include this, so few graphs are accurate.
Jito will do. There’s no need for formalities.
No, but they all drop off eventually. We’d still be playing Pong and Space Invaders if that wasn’t the case.
All games, like all other things, follow a natural product life-cycle. It looks like this:
https://imgur.com/a/CCpN0tZ
Where something is on that graph depends on its life-cycle. A newspaper has a life-cycle of 24 hours, a video game can have a life-cycle that lasts many years. It depends. But everything follows this model.
Then it’s possible to extend a product’s life-cycle, like WoW does with patches and expansions. It looks like this then:
https://imgur.com/a/yMFtwmx
But the result is still a decline toward the end.
Sure. And Blizzard focused a lot on market extension and market penetration in the early days of WoW as well, hence why the subscribers grew so rapidly.
WoW in Brazil. WoW in China. WoW in Malaysia. WoW in Portuguese. WoW in Italian. WoW in Russian. And so on. These are all marketing strategies to grow the customer base, but at a certain point the opportunities to expand into new markets or penetrate existing ones starts to diminish, because the cost/benefit isn’t there. Releasing WoW in Cambodia and translating it to Khmer simply isn’t going to pay off – most people there can’t afford WoW, let alone have a PC with internet!
Blizzard have established WoW in all the markets where it is/was likely to be worthwhile having a presence. So now they focus on customer retention, keeping you and me around. That’s normal. It’s all by-the-books.
But you provided none statistics, or anything resembling it. You just said it’s made with google.
I’m curious…
How do new players, in already established markets, fit into this? Is the number so small that it gets neglected?
I said it’s made with Google analytics.
Go google analytics for World of Warcraft.
It’s market penetration, but how aggressive it is depends.
For example, in the early days Blizzard established themselves on the EU market (market expansion → NA to EU) by having English, French, and German supported language servers and support.
Then they saw an opportunity get more customers in the EU by offering WoW in even more languages. So they released WoW in Russian, in Italian, in Portuguese, in Spanish, and so on.
The result of that was that they got even more subscribers, because now a lot of EU people who weren’t well-versed in English, French, or German could suddenly play the game in their own language!
That’s market penetration - squeezing out more customers in an existing market - and Blizzard are very good at it.
Today Blizzard aren’t doing market penetration much anymore, and haven’t for a long time, because the opportunities are exhausted. You can play WoW in all EU countries and in a wide range of languages.
So these days their primary market strategy is focused on customer retention. That means keeping the subscribers they have, and getting those back they used to have. That began all the way back with Recruit-A-Friend, Scroll-Of-Resurrection, and more recent: “Want to play WoW again? Here’s 5 days of free game-time!”-offers, and even Classic WoW.
That’s all customer retention.
Any new players that subscribe to the game are not really any that Blizzard have invested any money into trying to get. They’re a free round. Blizzard aren’t allocating any of their resources toward people who have never played WoW before. It’s all devoted to customer retention these days - people who have played the game before.
I’m not even sure you’re correct about that, but it’s a matter of availability anyway. Doesn’t matter. What matters is what you say next.
Yeah so what’s interesting about the graph is that it doesn’t specify when stage 4 occurs, or if it even occurs at all. There is absolutely no scale or indication on the time.
Some products or services never seem to reach their decline, or at least haven’t reached it for thousands of years. If you’re building wooden tables - sure there was an introduction and a growth but those were before our time, and we’re now firmly in phase 3, but when’s stage 4 gonna happen? Who knows?!
Same thing even applies to a consistent brand. If Coca Cola suddenly started going into Phase 4, do you think the executives would be bloody stupid enough to just sit there and go “It was inevitable…” and just quit?!
Instead of treating stage 4 as an inevitability like it’s some kind of existential psuedo-intellectual debate about how all things that have a beginning having an end or something, let’s instead look at why the decline occured and what can be done to fix it.
So you’re saying Blizzard have done product extensions - and then you say that it’ll still decline towards the end. What end? Have they stopped doing product extensions? Might the trouble because their product extensions do not work because they’re bad?
According to Blizzard themselves World of Warcraft has had over 100 million players. If it retains <5% (I’d guess way less but let’s be generous and assume 5%) of that then there’s a huge market cap still. There is no reason to give up and walk away from this, and if there was, you’d think Blizzard would’ve figured that out by now.
No, if there was, and we could predict how long a product would be successful for, then we’d be billionaires!
Maybe Warren Buffet comes close. They do call him the Oracle of Omaha after all. 
Of course not. But one reason why Warren Buffet became so rich was that he predicted that Coca-Cola would be a sound investment in the late 80’s - and he was right! It has continued to be popular and the product life-cycle of Coke seems never-ending. Humans will drink that fizzy soda for another 1000 years it seems! But eventually - in the year 5679 perhaps - it will come to an end. All products do.
Take horse carriages. Man, if you had lived from the medieval days and all the way up until the 1800’s you would think those horse carriages would be around until the end of days, because man had used them for thousands of years as the primary form of transport!
But then boom! A guy called Henry Ford comes along and makes a black car called the Model T. And how many horse carriages do you see in traffic today?
Every product has a life-cycle. WoW’s life-cycle is crazy long for a video game. But if you look at the subscriber graph you linked and pair it with the model of a product’s life-cycle, then it’s easy to see that the two overlap almost perfectly. WoW is a textbook case of a product’s life cycle - it has just lasted for far longer than anyone ever thought it would.
No, Blizzard keeps releasing new patches and expansions and does discounts and offers and advertisements. And no one but Blizzard knows what and how much they’ll do in the future. That’s a business decision.
As far as WoW is concerned, then it’ll go the way of all other games. Its player population will continue to decline at a slower and slower rate until it maintains a small, dedicated fanbase. And eventually it’ll fade into obscurity. It can be 10 or 20 years, who knows.
I’m not privy to Blizzard’s business strategies ahead of time.
But I can conclude that Blizzard recently released Hearthstone in Japan for example - in Japanese. And subscequently Hearthstone hit 100 million players.
Blizzard have never released WoW in Japan, so they probably don’t view the market as being a worthwhile investment when it comes to that particular game.
But again, I’m no business analyst. I can only say what they have done and what they are doing - not what they should do.
I don’t know, I knew of WoW since ages but I’m a relatively new player, only started playing a little over a year, and I love it, I’m not planning on quitting anytime soon. I have times of hiatus where I don’t play for a month or two but that’s mostly because of real life than the game being bad or anything like that.
And it’s surreal that people never consider there are new players, like often people just come to me as if I know a lot of stuff, like a dungeon, but I’m a complete noob I just like to run around in my zombie doing silly quests and collecting pets.
The increase in subs has not increased Activision Blizzard’s revenue, so this will mean more items in the game store, more 6 month sub promotions etc. The increase in subs was not that big of an increase to up their profits and revenue. So yes in theory the game is not in a good state.
Source ? 
Shares of Activision Blizzard Inc. (NASDAQ:ATVI) moved 1.78% lower to $48.46 in after-hours trading Thursday, even though the company beat consensus estimates on second-quarter earnings per share by 21 cents.
Earnings per share were 43 cents, or nearly 19% lower compared to the prior-year quarter.
Net revenues declined 15% to approximately $1.4 billion
source:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/activision-blizzard-posts-2nd-quarter-173838761.html
You mean that official Q2 where they lost 29 mil active users? There is no official Blizzard statement that says WoW has increased their subscribers. You talk sh#t.
I feel you are from the second category.
Because this is how we revenge on the game. Just think: we put a lot of effort,time and money in this game, so that Blizz can come after and f#ck and sh#t on us how they want (ex: Water Strider and many more). Another example: i go with guild and wipe 100 times to clear for the first time a HC raid and after comes a noob, with a few tokens and buys boost for everything… and so on.
They din’t said nothing about WoW subs. Don’t be a idiot and belive what other say on forums, do a check. They said that they made more money as predicted, but that was as a total (all games owned by Activision-Blizzard). And don’t forget that Activision-Blizzard owns King games also ( Candy Crush ). And Candy Crush + the new CoD was their “unexpected” extra money. WoW had a decline of profit in the last quarter.
I can also “counter-attack” you while saying that there are people who can embrace the good aspects of a game or even life and there are people who always miserable and want to look at whats negative. And there is no pleasing these people anyways.
If you are Mr.Grumpy. I can make a surprise bday party and you will insult me cause for bringing a chocolate cake, cause you hate chocolate cake. If I offer a free lift to work,home what ever then you will insult me for driving too fast/slow what ever.
Pretty much one of the most popular philosophical questions:
“Is the glass half-full or half-empty”?
P.s Hence this " Normal people that can see and understand the reality that surrounds them."
Aight according to your logic. Only if its bad and miserable then its “real”. The more negative it is the more “real” it is eh? 