"We knew that this year was going to be a year where we faced new competitors; this isn't the first time, though, that we've had strong competitors enter the MMO market. What we have seen in the past is we tend to see our players leave for some period of time, try out the new MMOs, and then a good percentage of them historically have come back to World of Warcraft. So far, I haven't seen anything to indicate this will be different."I have to disagree. Blizzard has never faced competitors as strong as it will over the next two years. Previous competition has consisted of things like Warhammer Online and Aion, which simply weren't in the same class as WoW. If you compared the fundamentals of Warhammer to the fundamentals of WoW, WAR simply came up short, and as a WoW player you'd be hard pressed to say "well, this game is suckier than WoW but has nice PvP, so I think I'll ditch WoW forever and stay with this." WAR did PvP well, but that was it. Aion was pretty, but grindy and not well rounded. Lord of the Rings Online was beautiful, but slow and low magic. All these games offered something different from WoW, but they couldn't really compete with WoW on it's own merits.
That's changing. I think Rift has demonstrated that it can stand toe-to-toe with WoW on features, gameplay, and quality, and surpasses it on graphics (subjective of course) and developer interaction/content additions. The things that WoW has are an installed playerbase with years of investment in their characters. That's a very strong tool of retention, but WoW players are running out of things to do with those characters much faster than Blizzard is creating content for them. As time goes on more and more WoW players are going to realize that rather than level yet another alt, they could level a new character in an entirely new game and get a new experience. Many of those players will return to WoW for the next expansion, but some of them won't. Over time, WoW will continue to lose players this way and gradually fade into obsolescence.
Rift alone won't have that much of an impact, but WoW isn't facing just Rift. Both Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2 are coming. Both are high profile, big budget titles by proven developers. Both are generating a lot of hype and interest from MMO players, including bored WoW players. Of course, people said the same things about WAR and we know how that turned out, but I don't think we're going to see WAR-style over promising and under delivering in this generation of AAA titles.
Is WoW doomed, is it going to be "killed" by these games? No, of course not. Even if the slip in subscriber numbers right after the release of a major expansion is a sign of things to come WoW is going to be around for years. Due to the slow churn of players I'd be surprised to see WoW drop below 10 million subs for a few years yet, and it's decline might take a decade. However, I think we've seen the beginning of the end of WoW's total market dominance. Unless they pull off something utterly fantastic with their next expansion and get it out sooner than 19 months from now I think many WoW players have passed the breaking point and are going to move on to newer (and greener) pastures. Just how much boredom does Blizzard think people will pay for?
Isn't that analysis somewhat tainted by which game you personally prefer?
ReplyDeleteThought experiment: If Rift announced they lost 5% of their peak subscribers (and I personally think they lost more than that by now), how would your analysis of that news look?
> The things that WoW has are an installed playerbase with
ReplyDelete> years of investment in their characters
Then again, gear will be replaced within 6 month or less.
You can't really do all the achievements because old raid
achievements become impossible as you don't do that content
anymore and new achievements are added at an insane rate.
WoW is very bad for "gotta catch em all" achievers.
Most of the investment in your character is made obsolete
with every patch. I think that weekens the value of the
investment in your character.
> Of course, people said the same things about WAR and we
> know how that turned out, but I don't think we're going to
> see WAR-style over promising and under delivering in this
> generation of AAA titles.
WAR was PvP and WoW was never a serious PvP game. I'm quite
sure that a serious PvE game would be a much bigger threat
to WoW then a PvP game like WAR or Aion.
Morhaime completely ignores the fact that as WoW is now considered by many to be a poor experience there is less chance that players who decide to look elsewhere will ever return. WoW is a dying game, there's no doubt about that, and I'd imagine Titan can't come soon enough for Blizzard but in the meantime they'll continue rolling out the PR nonsense.
ReplyDelete@Tobold, Which game I prefer really has nothing to do with it. I'm simply pointing out that WoW has much stiffer competition than it's ever had before (and why I think that competition is stiff) and that Mr. Morhaime's claims that nothing is going to change because they've seen this all before seems a little blase.
ReplyDeleteMost new release MMOs have a surge, then a decline, then either increase over time or continue to decline. It's currently too soon to say where Rift is going. I'm quite certain they do have fewer subscribers today than they did two weeks after release. The real question is whether they have fewer subscribers six months from now than they do now. If they do, then I'd say Rift is in decline and the devs need to do something.
WoW lost 600k subscribers AFTER an expansion. The 12m number was pre-expansion, the 11.4m number was post expansion. That's not what we'd expect to see.
What's biased about that?
(Repost, blogger ate my comment!)
ReplyDeleteTobold, Which game I prefer really has nothing to do with it. I'm simply pointing out that WoW has much stiffer competition than it's ever had before (and why I think that competition is stiff) and that Mr. Morhaime's claims that nothing is going to change because they've seen this all before seems a little blase.
Most new release MMOs have a surge, then a decline, then either increase over time or continue to decline. It's currently too soon to say where Rift is going. I'm quite certain they do have fewer subscribers today than they did two weeks after release. The real question is whether they have fewer subscribers six months from now than they do now. If they do, then I'd say Rift is in decline and the devs need to do something.
WoW lost 600k subscribers AFTER an expansion. The 12m number was pre-expansion, the 11.4m number was post expansion. That's not what we'd expect to see.
What's biased about that?
Morhaime's comment was in the Q1 report for one and only one reason: to immunize the company against shareholder lawsuits. The "release more content faster" was there only because they could point to 4.1 as actually having done that.
ReplyDeleteI think they have to know internally that they're up the creek without a paddle. NA/EU numbers are probably down even more than 600K, with the total number being buoyed by low-value accounts overseas.
neowolf2, that's a good point. China only recently gained access to the Wrath expansion, and new content in China has previously led to a surge in Blizzard's total subscription numbers. So one could reasonably expect numbers are up in China but down even more in the U.S.
ReplyDeleteOf course, another possibility is that a lot of Chinese players moved on after the long downtime of WoW in China, and Blizzard's numbers reflect losses there as much as anywhere else. Since they don't differentiate between NA/Euro customers who pay a monthly fee and Chinese players who pay an hourly fee, it's hard to tell.
Although . . if a customer only pays by the hour, how do you know when they're no longer a subscriber?