Are mobile games to blame for the decreasing number of gamers wanting to play the MMORPG World of Warcraft?
It’s an up and down situation with WoW. Recently, Blizzard announced that there are now “only” around 7.1 million “subscribers” actively playing the MMORPG. This means the MMO has lost three million players in just three months since the last player count report. Losing three million players in three months is a lot. What is causing the once-popular MMORPG to lose more and more players?
Is the trend moving away from complex MMORPGs?
An article on Marketplace.org names two reasons for this: firstly, the age of the game, and secondly, the shift towards mobile games. WoW is now eleven years old, and you can tell it shows. Many mechanics are outdated, and the graphics are no longer up to date. Of course, many still play the MMO, more than many other online games. However, it is noticeable that the number of paying players is steadily decreasing. Looking at the market, no other representative of the genre can claim such success as WoW – not even more modern games. Sure, Free2Play leads to many registrations, but the numbers of active players are often kept quiet.
However, another trend is emerging: Games with shorter playtimes, such as MOBAs or mobile games, are gaining more players. According to Riot Games, the MOBA League of Legends has around 90 million active players, the casual game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (also playable on smartphones and tablets) can boast around 30 million players. These are numbers that World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs can only dream of. More and more companies are noticing this trend. It’s no wonder that NC Soft, Konami, and Nintendo want to enter the casual and mobile game market more intensively. Enormous growth rates are expected in the coming years.
Does this now mean the end of World of Warcraft and MMORPGs in general? Certainly not in the foreseeable future. Some developers are already trying to establish MMORPGs on the mobile market – so far with moderate success. The genre has become established, but as is often the case, there are ups and downs. Single-player RPGs, for example, experienced a tremendous low in the mid-1990s, and the genre was proclaimed dead until Baldur’s Gate revived it in 1998. Perhaps the genre will never return to the glory days of its early stages, but that would also be normal, as when the genre was new, everyone was interested. Today, there are other new genres or hybrid forms that attract a lot of attention. A good example is Destiny – a first-person shooter that increasingly relies on MMO mechanics and is thus very successful.
Even their days will be numbered before something new comes to the market. Thus, video games continue to evolve – perhaps not in directions that fans of certain genres want, but that is just the way of things.
