The fantasy MMORPG World of Warcraft had nearly 3 million fewer players in the first quarter of 2015 compared to the last quarter of 2014.
At Activision-Blizzard, the “Earning Call” was coming up, where numbers need to be presented to the shareholders. The figures for World of Warcraft were, as almost everyone expected, not rosy . By the end of 2014, they stood well with 10 million players, as they hadn’t in a long time, which was announced in February.
In January, February, March 2015, it went significantly down. They fell to 7.1 million “Subscribers”. Here, not only subscribers, as we understand them, are counted, but also players from Asia who logged in by the hour in an internet café, played WoW, and paid for it in the last 30 days .
Declining player numbers, but not too significant financial losses
Activision says that these losses were partially offset financially by raising prices in certain regions or increased uptake of “paid services” (this could refer to the purchasable max-level) .
However, Activision Blizzard really has no reason to be upset. The big winners in their portfolio are Destiny and Hearthstone. Together, both games would have achieved 50 million players and a revenue of 1 billion US dollars so far. Since Hearthstone recently celebrated the 30 million player milestone , Destiny would now have to have 20 million accounts. For both games, one doesn’t have to have paid in the last months to appear in this statistic, but merely be an account holder, so a comparison to WoW here is unfair.
For the beta of Heroes of the Storm, it is said that 11 million players registered.
Mein MMO says: Even though it seems tempting, this is no reason to once again declare the end of World of Warcraft. A decline was to be expected. The fact that it is so drastic could also be foreseen. However, WoW has never lost players as quickly after an expansion as this time. With 7.1 million, they are almost back to the low point they reached in summer 2014.
With the gold-for-playtime coin, they likely want to counteract this and have already found an answer. However, they need to step up the content supply. The expansion “Warlords of Draenor” shows weaknesses in keeping players occupied beyond the raids.
