WoW SUB Numbers FINALLY Revealed! - Preach Reacts to Bellular Video
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- Опубліковано 11 жов 2024
- Original Video here: • Report: WoW's Actual S...
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LOL so good Preach, "Swen from Larian who was probably there talking mad shit" I had just took a sip of my coffee and almost spit it out laughing at that statement.
Legends say that there are still some lost, unfortunate souls grinding Torghast for their legendaries. Blizz really succeeded in making that place feel like the tower of the dammed. Cant wait til Shadowlands Classic
Chad people with sub but no paying for df
Still one of the more straightforward legendary acquisition systems
@@dscarmo I'm one of those people. Shadowlands taught me that this team no longer understands what makes a good game. I don't want to pay to be punished anymore. I understand that they're finally stripping timers from the M10-equivalent content. I might come back for that. I'll believe it when I see it.
@@berniemargolis4288Well to be fair its not necessarily that they don't understand I think its more to do with arrogance. Sometimes things just dont work and often they realize it on their own and we never even get to see it and sometimes we do get to see it and they get the negative feedback to steer things in the right direction. Thats the issue in this case. We warned them about the issues in shadowlands well before release and they made a conscious decision to ignore it like they knew better.
Then later they talked like the way the development cycle works meant they couldn't react to feedback, everything was already wrapped up and set in stone. Thats a whole other problem. If you can't react to feedback in real time and make corrections the game is always going to be shit.
All that being said its also quite clear they're hiring a lot of people for the wrong reasons. Just gotta take a look at how utterly talentless the D4 team is. It really feels like the only hires that are on point is the art teams.
@@EmpyreanDreamer You're not wrong, but the numbers that they just published indicate that the emphasis on dungeon hard modes and high end raids that they've placed on the game since Cataclysm weren't well-received. Players were screaming about it 15 years ago as they were unsubbing. Instead of listening, they continued to double down. "You don't like raiding? We'll add even more raid difficulties! You don't like hard dungeons? We'll make them scale infinitely harder!" After 15 years, it's no longer a matter of just not being agile enough to keep up with feedback. It's sheer arrogance, just like you said. It took 15 years for these kids to grow up and understand what the rest of us were screaming about before they finally decided to consider the idea that maybe they had overtuned their game to the point where it's only fun for players who want to make video gaming into their career.
Thanks for the shout out, Preach! I'm sure Bellular appreciates it. :D
i dunno if its already been said but the part he thinks is the Wotlk Bump isnt the Wotlk release, Wotlk released at the end of September and Dragonflight released at the end of November, The bump you see right before the Dragonflight peak bump is probably Wotlk, then the different incline is Dragonflight. Im pretty sure the bump hes mistaking for Wotlk is Jailer raid patch.
27:50 did we have long content droughts in Shadowlands: YES. From Launch to 9.1 it was about 8 months. And 9.1 added Korthia, Tazavesh and Sanctum. And while Korthia was technically new, it was also very much a Maw annex basically.
" afterlife setting wasn't accessible" - correct. They need to quit trying to make the mythical tangible. I don't want to see behind that curtain. This is exactly how I felt when they started to bring Elune in as a character. I don't want that mystery solved!
I don't know if I buy that. That cat was out of the bag in Warcraft 3 when basically Satan invaded the world with an army of demons. The problem isn't that they showed us behind the curtain, the problem is that what was behind the curtain was a steaming turd that devalued everything else in the narrative that happened before.
It really would have improved a lot if you had to die before you could have crossed into the Shadowlands. Even jumping off ICC would have been symbolic enough to improve the player experience.
Yes, this is a rookie writing mistake. You have to leave mystery and ambiguity for some of your lore. The more you try to explain the more you turn the mythical into the mundane.
Just look at how much more interesting the ancients seemed when we meet them as grey blob people in shadowbringers instead of the kingdom heart rejects they were shown to be in endwalker.
how do you feel about the fact that that's the plan for the next 3 expansions?
It's not that high fantasy settings are bad, traditionally that's where they excel - People like the Emerald Dream, Firelands and Molten Front, Horrific Visions, both Karazhans, and all of Legion really.It was trying to subvert everything that came before, that was the problem. The Shadowlands we got was not the Shadowlands described in bits of lore years prior, nor was it consistent the way death/afterlives were presented for the ENTIRETY of the franchise before that.
For example - Read some of the DK legion class hall stuff, like the table missions (bleh), it describes what sounds like Maldraxxus and/or the Maw, but never names them, never names anyone important, never mentions anima, never mentions the tie in to the emerald dream, etc etc. It was so far removed from the lore that it didn't even build on the scraps of actual shadowlands lore that existed.
I played Classic a lot and really enjoyed it. If the game didn't get so sweaty and if gold buying wasn't a thing I'd still be dropping in on it every now and then.
Blizzard need to crack down on gold selling and addons to reduce both of those.
The take on what classic has become is so true. The playerbase ruined it for themselves by trying to be "the best" at a casual game. It happened again in the space of a couple months during the resurgence of Classic Era. There was a sudden influx of Wotlk players and all of a sudden you had to have every consumable under the sun and gdkps almost completely took over the raiding scene, partly to fund the consumes craze with the massively inflated prices due to goldbuying and trading in wotlk gold and the degens coming in just wanting to have things instead of actually playing.
I'm playing Nyctermoon, my entire team = AI bots, and i'm happier lol. That's f'ing SAD but it's true. People ruined mmo's with their sweaty, tryhard bs.
YOU PRAISED THEM FLIPPING THE CONDUIT TREES
Not that surprising. They've done a lot of good since 9.2 and them making more versions of the game that caters to different types of players is just a smart thing to do. Also, the sub value has actually increased for some players, and to add, hasn't changed in price since forever.
I'm really interested for what the future holds now that they're experimenting with stuff like SoD and Plunderstorm. Feels like they're shaking up the formula we're all used to.
their monetization model is dated and they're basically suckling everything they can out of their existing fans who are happy with the game whether it's good or bad. The barrier to entry for new players is huge and the gameplay / art style are completely archaic. WoW will die to next generation of games simply because Blizzard refused to adapt to modern gaming. Eventually the millennials will dry up
@@utmastuhoh yeah they should drop the sub and put in a battlepass, plus sell all the cool looking armor in cash shop and make the game full pay2win haha,look at all the mmos that try those "modern" monetization, they die while WoW and FF14 do great with sub, so nah nothing dated about it. If your game is good people will pay for sub and kids wont start playing WoW no matter what they do. They say WoW will die for 10+ years now, as long as new mmos are mostly trash WoW and FF14 will be the top mmos and i dont see that changing in a long time.
People give the side eye to WoD.
It just lacked content.
If they did a WoD classic then it should be a WoD: Warforged that has all the content they cut from the expansion that would have been great.
The concept behind WoD is really fucking good. Possibly the best high concept for an expansion they've ever had. It's literally just a mix of slightly iffy design ideas and lack of committment to the ideas they did do. Class Order Halls were Garrisons with better commitment to the idea, and people loved it.
On that subject, they put out a lot of content in WoW compared to the only other live service game I'm familiar with. So much in fact, that they could totally put out class specific content, albeit less of it. Class specific content always gets super good reception. People love it. Its WoW at its best. It is absolutely baffling to me that they more or less haven't done any since legion. If I was running WoW I'd be trying to make as much class specific content as possible. You can even reuse it. Priests and Paladins can share a lot of it. It doesn't all have to be 100% bespoke. And shouldn't be. Multiple classes converging on one area but having slightly different window dressing around it is actually better than all of them being different. Thats what the Legendary Weapons did. And for the most part it was better than having them all be disconnected.
@@Manabitlive I mean at worst for a WoD Warforged they could have one of the clans or peoples of Draenor represent a certain class specific role. Tank, melee dps, ranged dps, casters and healers.
Torghast could have been a fun ingame mode for cosmetics and fun with friends, remember when mike was testing it and it looked like it, you could push unlimited, then they made is controlled limited exp that you have to dpam mandatory...
Insteead it was a required borefest that a lot of classes had serious trouble with and could only do it with a group.
"The players didn't feel heard" -The Company that Wasn't Listening
Completely agree on the take regarding Classic. Even during SoD, it took forever to get into the BFD raid, and then I was kicked midway through, shit you not, for "Having 1.5% lower DPS than average". That's when I switched to Dragonflight, found myself a chill guild that prioritizes fun over stats, and suddenly we're doing Heroic raiding and planning to do Mythic in TWW because we all just have fun together despite the occasional wipes.
Overwatch was huge when Legion came out.
It certainly took away a decent amount of the WoW playerbase.
Heck, I didn't even know Legion released until 2 or so months after cause I was so deep in Overwatch and it's still to this day my least played expansion because of it.
Totally fair, I would play the launch state of Overwatch forever. FORGET Overwatch 2
one thing for sure on retail i was amazed to see many ppl doing the old SL meta-achievement
like i was into the most random zone from SL and i always see a lvl 70 player around working at it
even m+ you still get key going (except for 27+ keys where it's becoming rarer but this is normal )
i'm even seeing a good 1/3 of my community starting to play WOTLK again to prep for cata
About the legion statistic I can only speak for myself but I was actually ready to play Legion and leveled up and started to gear in dungeons. However, due to Cata, Mist and then finally WoD I noticed that most of my old guildies, friends (inside game + outside the game) had just quit WoW and moved on to other things. I also played Nostalrius during WoD but none of my guildies there weren't interested in retail. All in all it just felt like a lonely experience and despite Nostalrius being shutdown, I guess I still had it in my mind at that time
You know what? Somebody is going to respond to you with "just make new friends in retail" and while that's a valid thing to say, nothing compares to having your closest group of friends playing. Your closest online gaming buddies or real life ones as well. It never feels the same playing WoW without your ideal gaming roster. I'm sure I could make new friends like that, but it's a ton of effort to find the right guild or people who you enjoy being around.
I made a lot of random new friends in Legion, definitely think you should have just tried to brave through it. However, I couldnt say the same about braving through losing the old friends for BfA and onwards. (Even in dragonflight, honestly)
Legion WAS just that enjoyable that I pugged to play the game when other friends werent on, and I would find new people that I would go on to play with for hundreds of hours. Even tried to play in BfA+ with them, but we just couldnt enjoy the game.
Also, start of Legion was rough mechanically, so I admit if you were alone. figuring out the game, AND all the bugs and RNGfest that it was, I probably would have quit too, but I really didnt start playing the game until right before nighthold.
@@deathwrow9652 I did tough it out in legion. Started with my buddies but they left and I just loved legion so much that I dealt with all of it. I'm hoping the world soul saga brings some of that hype back. Game is in a great place compared to where it used to be. DF is great, but I hate the voice acting for most of the non-main characters and npcs. The theme wasn't for me anyways. So hopefully world soul saga brings that excitement back. Seems like TWW will be underwhelming and midnight will be the hype expansion with player housing and all that crazy stuff. Plus the story of midnight should be pretty cool. Hopefully TWW is badass though
Classic Blizzard, not including a Y-axis and concrete numbers, and pouring all the data into one pot that you're then supposed to guess from. Cute graph, but this says next to nothing about the individual performance of any single expansion if it's put together with Classic and its four variants. If there was something to actually brag about, they'd give concrete numbers, not do this Hollywood accounting BS.
The gameplay got shat on by artifacts being gone, everything on the GCD, classes no longer complete that were only good because of the artifact and generally keeping only the bad parts of legion. I know that's where I wrote off the game as my main game and so did most of my friends.
as a fury warrior, i dropped BFA the moment I seen GCD changes and thought ded game. and from there just left a negative view on the game despite returning for shadowlands castle nathria and dragoflight first raid. i'm definitely not returning for next expansion.
15:35 literally had no issues with legendaries in legion because I got my first one quickly and it was BiS for my DPS specs so had very fond memories of legion.
The GCD thing feels so clunky and bad to play. It's not a coincidence that most top tier PVP players are routinely using macros when in the past that would have been frowned upon by any skilled player.
exactly, they seemingly redesigned classes with the artifact in mind in legion
there were so many procs and effects that enhanced the gameplay of every class in the end of legion because of the artifact
then they just mindlessly ripped it out of the game with bfa, i quit pretty quickly because of that
The jailer has been plotting to destroy the IP since Warcraft 2
(Edit) The issue with BC classic was that we all jumped in early, remembered everybody is now competing for limited quest resources, ducked out thinking "I'll come back in a month or so", then never came back
@28:00 - @28:51 pretty much sums up my feelings about the development of the game since Cata when they decided talent tress had to go. It became clear (to me at least) throughout MoP and WoD that the development team couldn't care less about what the player base wanted, their "vision" was sacrosanct. It's somewhat cathartic to see that my evaluation was correct, but it sucks that the game had to be pushed to the very brink before they finally pulled their heads out.
Bellular's number of 7.25 million was independently verified by Jez Corden at Windows Central. That's as close to an actual total sub number we've had since WoD (about a decade ago).
Both nostalgic for wrath and raiding ICC25 every saturday evening all this year, really excited for cata!
Preach: Was there long content gaps?
9.0 to 9.1 was the longest time between patches in the history of wow. Now this wasn't helped by the fact that people were still trying to figure out how working from home during COVID lockdowns was going to be, but it is what it is. It's my opinion that Shadowlands would be looked on SO MUCH MORE FONDLY if the content cadence was like DF's is now.
9.1 was miserable so they might not have done any better
Preach says "wow needs some big thing to get people back like housing" for me that was Hero Talents from the War Within, and then they announced that instead of a cosmetic flair for your character it was just another talent tree.
Phase 1 TBC was mind numbing so many guilds imploded because people stopped playing all you had was Kara 10 man which was fun for a time and a pair of throw away raids that were infested with GDKP so that downward trend dosnt surprise me
I had the opposite experience. I loved TBC classic up until SSC/TK dropped (as someone who played it very little back in the original release). Magtherion and Gruuls were great raids because it was just one or two bosses and minimal trash, and Kara was really fun though did get old after a little while of farming. When the next phase dropped, I realized I was committed to doing not one but TWO raids every week with SSC/TK, and I saw the enormous amounts of trash you had to clear in those dungeons, I was done. I liked the boss fights in those raids (almost fully cleared SSC and probably halfway through TK). But I HATED how much trash they loaded those raids with.
Shadowland was all part of the Jailers plan ...
For me, I exited mid BfA and have completely kicked the MMO habbit since. I play some PoE when a new league hits, I play some modded Skyrim and Fallout 4, some modded Satisfactory and I play some new games when they come out.
But no more MMOs and no more 10-15 characters with up to 1000 days playtime.
WoW manged to completely burn me out on MMOs during BfA, I already spent far to much time in that game and the sheer grind that expansion put us through, yeah, that was it for me.
And, I'm still in contact with quite a few of my old guildmates, whenever I drop into Discord I check the old guild one too, out of the 200 something daily active players and about 30 raiders, there's about 20 left still playing WoW.
All the rest either followed my path of no longer doing MMOs, only play Classic and expansions for it or just moved to Final Fantasy.
What blows my mind is that I thought Blizzard couldn't possibly do worse than Azurite gear and that they finally understood how shit that was going further in the expansion, but all I hear from people is that those talent trees in Shadowlands were somehow even worse.
I think not showing the Y scale is not by mistake and by removing WoD from the it's hard to create a frame of reference so these are scaled to after WoD numbers. Basically never recovered above WoD
Well we knew wod went back to 10+ mil subs. I think the phrasing was the subs went back up to wotlk numbers
I mean sure but wod numbers were high 10mill so thats abit of a nothing point
I don't think this is a bad thing? Most people just don't play the same game for years. And at some point the amount of new players will drop because most people who were going to try the game, already tried it. Sometimes an old game can attract a ton of new players who never tried it before but this is extremely rare.
10:55 I am a purely classic player. Can't stand retail these days, but even for us I remember the lawsuit era and all of the bad will from BFA and SL we still lost about half our guild. They were just done with Blizzard and wanted nothing to do with them and they never came back as far as I am aware. Expecting DF to magically fix that is insane on their part, especially with how mid the setting and cinematics for DF were.
I think dragonflight does have a key feature though. It’s dragon riding. We got flying at launch for the first time in almost a decade. Maybe that hits people differently than others. I think it’s a better key feature than Garrisons but isn’t something that hypes you to buy the game if that makes sense.
Looks like the big incline at the end started right in the middle of the Hardcore logo there, so I would say Hardcore has more to do with the resurgence than anything. That was what was being streamed most of the time too.
I'd interested to see what % of the 4m was Shadowlands and which % was Wrath, essentially without Classic the sub count would have been so low..
I have never played WoW but I have seen many memes about it being dead or mmo's in general dying year by year, by wow players or non-wow players.
I hope you wow players realise how absolutely insane these numbers are for any live service, there are studio's out there who wish they could even have 1/500th of a playerbase like this.
When people say a game is dead they really mean to say that the game isn’t the most popular game in the world.
People have been spouting that WoW is dead since launch and that probably wont ever change. The issue is most people are just mad that they aren't 12 anymore and that sense of wonder is now missing for them. I've introduced people to WoW and that same sense of wonder I had when I was younger and first experienced in WoW is still there for them. I sort of rexperienced it with FF14 which has been really nice.
doubters in complete and utter shambles
It's a graph of subs that lacks a Y axis and has no dip when they lost 3 million Chinese subs and 1/2 million Russian Subs. It's simply not accurate.
It's not a "hater's gonna hate" scenario either: It's just easily and provably not accurate.
@@henrychurch6062even if the real sub number is closer to 3 or 4 million this is still good sub count for a game negative people always try to say doomsday things about
@@alihorda2 games. this sub count is retail + classic.
@@henrychurch6062 yeah them straight up lying to their investors, which is illegal as a publicly listed company, is obviously far more plausible than whatever magical numbers you just conjured up out of thin air.
truth is, even without the Y-axis, you can extrapolate the last known data from WoD and note the success of legion and directly compare that on the graph to current classic+retail. for a 20 year old game that is insane.
fact of the matter is, even during its low points, the game isnt even close to the low-ball numbers these doomsay andies put out.
i wouldnt say classic is carrying retail around shadowlands. retail was just popping off then SL turned sour
I played sooooo freaking much wotlk on private servers for years and years and years. I couldn't imagine trying to play it again just on retail.
I did come back for vanilla classic tho. That was bomb
Maybe they can tell different stories within the classicified expansion, different quests that a different hero did during that era
As they progress the backwards rep merge and get to SL, they should just merge all the covenants into one; shared anima pool, can access all features of all of them, just replace covenant abilities with a short CD mini heroism only usable in open world...
Have the only thing the actual selection affects be your campaign questline.
lets be honest, of that 7.25m, half of that is retail and the other half is spread between the classic servers, season of wowhead and softcore. a mere fraction of what wow had in its highest.
I'd really love to know what the ratios are in terms of which is being played more, all of the classic umbrellas or retail. People are always so adamant that retail has more players but personally I think that's big cope. Either way though yeah its definitely a fraction of what it was despite you getting way more value for your sub now with classic.
@@EmpyreanDreamer Of the 76 people on my friendlist i know of 6 people who still have an active subscribtion.
Two of them play retail
@@VarichanFunnily enough my friend list is just about the exact same numbers. Of the 7 who still play I've only seen one of them play retail in the last year or so.
@@Varichan Of the 64 on my firendslist 40 has active accounts 30 are in retail and 10 in classic.
@@EmpyreanDreamerThere is a huge amount of casuals and collectors in retail who log for like few hours a week and do some random thing. I don't even think it's 50/50 split, I think it's like 60/40 or even higher for retail. It's true that even if retail numbers are 4-5 mil that's nowhere near peak numbers but all things in the gaming landscape considered those are insanely good numbers, no other mmo comes anywhere near those numbers. Ff14 during it's peak had like 2 mil if I remember right and most of those people aren't playing anymore.
different conclusion about Wrath: Imagine how steep Shadowland's fall at that time must've been for wrath to not bump it up
I thought the same thing about Dragonflight with Hardcore.
@@ProfoundFamiliarity Granted, it's anecdotal, but my wife streams and all the data we see on Twitch and within her circle is for SoD, not hardcore. Still, I think your overall point is right.
@@ProfoundFamiliarity I don't think hardcore has as much of a draw as you think. Those who aren't interested in Classic aren't gonna come back to play "Classic but more punishing". And of those drawn to classic maybe half? I know quite a few people who play/played Classic or SoD. A grand total of one resubbed for one month to give Hardcore a shot and of the 21 who play Classic, 8 tried hardcore.
@@WarMonkeyPlayshardcore had quite a hype when it came out. Not SoD level hype, but twitch streamers really built so much hype around hardcore with their streamer guilds. I was noticing a ton of people playing WoW for the first time on hardcore. I thought to myself "oh lord, why do this to yourself?", but people enjoyed it and found a love for WoW who had never played before. So its success shouldn't be understated.
@@hobosnake1you have to put my comment into the context of the trend we're seeing. You're spot on about hardcore having a good amount of hype when it came out. Since then though, what we've (my wife and I) seen is SoD mostly cannibalize it, and since then we're seeing WoW subs grow. So _if_ - and that's a big if - what we're seeing personally is reflective of the larger audience, a big part of the growth is likely SoD, though Hardcore did have a brief moment to shine. Admittedly, it's just speculation based on the data we have access to and our own experience.
I went to the Legion Cafe in Cologne and it felt like the most hype blizzard had since wotlk to me. I quit mythic raiding in legion due to legendaries
This just reminded me I have an active sub that I've not used to play for 2+ months.
I think you are not alone in this XD.
I do this with both WoW and Netflix just out of convenience if i ever want to just jump in.
Some things i think is just worth it and WoW for me is part of more than half of my adult life by now so i'm never really going to fully abandon it.
Some of the best friends i have, i found through WoW.
So for me, it's like a little sanctuary, a little second home, my little place of safe haven for when i need escape or a break from the struggles of what real life is.
@bojnebojnebojne I think he was more saying he needs to cancel his sub cus he isn't playing. I agree though. Even if I unsub at points, I'll always play WoW now and again. Especially since I love classic. Retail I'm very hopeful for.
I know that's what he probably meant :).
Yeah we all like different things, which is why it's good both retail and classic exists now. For me the pace of the game is too slow in classic.@@hobosnake1
@bojnebojnebojne for sure. Classic is really easy. I enjoy retail combat and end game more. Classic is more about the chill sessions and leveling for me. Only reason I'm not playing dragonflight is because the theme wasn't my favorite and that's a big thing for me. But I do see and acknowledge how much better the game is in DF and how it respects your time more. So I'm really excited for metzen being back. Definitely I want retail to be the more popular version overall. I have high hopes lately.
Yeah when they announced Metzen comin back and seeing the audience reaction was pretty epic :).
Yeah i get those chill vibes with classic. :P
I played it for like 2 hours when i was bored of DF, but then i haven't played it again for 2 months now. :)@@hobosnake1
What got me in legion was getting my first 2 legendaries being trash. So rip my desire to play the game.
Although subs were the highest during Wrath, i dont doubt a major facet of the loss in Cata was the loss of the Vanilla world and experience. And i hate the nostalgia argument. To some degree, yes. But Vanilla WoW is a fantastic game with so many lightning in a bottle aspects that all come together
I agree
agree
@@HiddenEvilStudios and taking out the Battle for Undercity. Is that scenario in Wrath Classic?
BIG AGREE, it was an interesting idea IF they were optional changes.
my dream for the future of wow would be they update the code with the classic updates all the way to retail, update the game and split it into smaller chunks with SoD, makes some way to remove the squishes and make the progression from vanilla to retail feel better (no clue here, but i hope), and then keep rolling servers going in SoD incriments where eventually you will get to add your character to your retail account once you've gone through all the expansions, kinda like a wow recap.
I would even be okay with them just using the retail talents and retroactively adding hero talents to each of the older expansions, (and also them doing the same for all the retail systems), but i know some will see that as heresy.
Some major assumptions on Bell’s part for a few things. It’s highly unlikely that graph starts at zero. And the page he got the legion comparison from was referring to engagement success being slightly better than Word not subscriptions… not necessarily directly comparable. WoD’s sub numbers stayed high because it was so easy to earn go;d to buy tokens but actually engaging in the game was very low. A lot of people just logged in to do mission tables and log out. Also it’s Blizzard so “slightly better” means 0.5% better.
Looking back at the soulbind/covenant system what would have been way cooler is instead of having to choose a covenant and all the problems with that is if they had a story where like the different classes got recruited by a certain covenant. Like all the paladins got recruited by Bastion cause that's their theme and then the soulbind system was just like one Power of Bastion instead of all these characters that no one liked
I feel like people didnt play wrath classic as it was the beginning of a lot of issues
I don't think tbc & wrath had traditional sub spikes. I think people already playing continued to play and those that tried it at stopped didn't really re dive into it again.
Sod I think was a fresh wave of players.
I also wonder how many people play multiple versions. Maybe a chunk of your classic crowd are the same people that carried wod. Folks that will always sub but don't do much outside of wanting to be in game.
Everything I keep hearing seems to be that a bunch of new people came in to try it out, and were promptly driven out by the toxic sweaty classic playerbase.
God I forgot about the 2nd interview with ion.
It was that day I canceled my subscription until DF
Sounds about right. I want to see split numbers though, and what the numbers were, before classic launched.
Hmmm. And where's the dip from entire China being lost? 😮
Good question
Where classic can really fix things is accelerated releases to avoid content droughts. They held onto icc extra long but if they did 3-4 month cycles then cata will last 1 year. Even mist only lasts maybe 1 yearish instead of 1+ year of siege. Warlords was fun for the raids it had but it shouldnt last more than 9-12 months either
I started playing in patch 3.3 and I have zero desire to see how the game was before because I know my experience in wrath is subpar to my experience now. And as a result of starting in ICC, cataclysm was my first real expansion and I'm very nostalgic for it, but I do not want to go back and play it again. Things have just gotten better and I'm not trying to play a worse game.
This is actually pretty similar to google trends chart, interesting stuff
It'd be interesting to know the split across retail, SOD and classic. It looks strong, but you're not viewing like-for-like here.
I would probably assume it's a pretty even split right now. No matter what. It diversifies their platform so I don't even think the split matters tbh. If one product isn't doing well at the time. Instead of leaving the game, people can just play one of the other options. That was always the plan which is why everything is on a single sub and I think it worked spectacularly.
It allows them to take risks without eating a substantial loss. If SoD was around after Shadowlands. The number might not have gone down so drastically.
I think it's quite important. The majority of investment in terms of time and cost goes into retail. I think you're right that it's quite an even split across the three strands in terms of subs. That means that retail is costing a lot and bringing in little. It explains why retail players feel WoW is dead. For the version of the IP that they care about, it is dead, relative to what it has been. The financial minds in Blizzard will be looking at the ROI and questioning if they're investing in the right place. If retail isn't bringing in what it costs to make, they will question why they're continuing to do it.
There's a huge part of the playerbase that plays both games. It's not a clean split by any means, which muddies it. But that's why Blizzard offsets launches, so retail and classic don't cannibalize each other.
I'd wager classic is doing better than retail. The spike of players when the season of discovery released correlates to the spike at the end of the graph. Also, dragonflight was riding the high from wrath classic release, so the numbers were already climbing. Pretty smart move to embolden the board of investors by Blizzard, lmao.
TBC relaunch coming out is right when the sex scandal happened also
TBC Classic is when they added MXT's to classic. I think that's what drove off a lot of classic players
Watching him lose his shit all over again when talking about SL…. Oddly satisfying 😂
If you look at the expected increase from DF and the actual they nailed the increase. Churn + classic not being as predictable seemed to throw it off. Kind of interesting. Just have to look at it in terms of delta and not total.
It's so funny how Preach keeps removing remaining time from Plunderstorm when it was only a week old at time of recording.
Wrath had big bump it came out end of 2022 not where it is on the graph.
7M across all the fragmented versions of the game. No wonder each one feels empty. Remember when we had 12M in ONE version of the game.
The classic WoW Leveling experience doesn't get enough credit. 1-60 is a game by itself but without a playbase it is painful. What they need to do is give retail rewards for getting to 60
I think Burning Legion was spoiled by Naxx. Naxx, while not hard, was consumed to the gills. Even in P3 and P4 of classic (and even P5 to an extent) most people were only consuming a flask if they were the tank, or they just wanted to parse. When Naxx came out, it was basically required to have full consumes, full world buffs, frost pots, titan flasks, supreme power flasks, FR gear, etc. The only way you got around those sort of crazy requirements was being a carry in a GDKP run. So your options as a casual player in Naxx was either to be in a guild (likely weren't clearing Naxx, or were taking multiple raid days to clear Naxx if you were to say nothing of the churn of 40-man raiding for a guild not clearing current content in a day), get all the consumes, or be carried in a GDKP and have gold to bid with so GDKPs will take you.
So, all that to say, that by the time Burning Legion came out, the mentality of "min-max, struggle, or get carried" was already dominant for any of the players who stuck through Naxx content in P6. Basically Naxx self-selected for the sweatiest of casuals because anyone else was just left out of the content or just got tired of the grind of farming consumes each week. And then once you have Burning Legion come out, the culture is dominated by guilds and pugs from this culture and it just dominates.
I remember P1-P4 of original classic. It was really fun, and casuals were more than good enough to clear content with because the content just wasn't that hard to clear in a single raid night, even without maxed out consumes. With Naxx, you either full consumed, got carried, or struggled to clear the content because it was a step up in difficulty that most casuals cannot meet with skill alone.
A lot of people like classic and TBC FOR the slow gameplay though. This is a pro for classic players.
Player housing is something I'd probably return to the game for. Idk much else tbh. I don't think I or any other player really care how "hard" this system would be for them. Either it happens and we come back or pick something else the players have been asking for. That or I guess don't get your players coming back.
Maybe if they created the Thunderdrome... Maybe... Instead of designing a crap city with nothing in it, a circular same-i-ness that makes you constantly lost, like Oribos, design a city around the Thunderdrome. An arena of sorts, the Brawlers Guild on steroids. The 3rd place. Rome's Coliseum. Constantinople's Hippodrome. New York's Madison Square Garden. The place you go, afk and watch other players, as if you were watching twitch but you're there. Contestants doing Mage Tower events, Torgast-esque events, arenas, battlegrounds, transmog comps, races, rp events, darkmoon faire events, mount-offs etc. The players in the arena, would-be gladiators, are seemingly instanced where they can't see the spectators, but all spectators can see the gladiators.
Wow I love this idea. One of the best I've heard.
The numbers between 2020 and mid 2021 would have been at least partly inflated by the pandemic. People working from home have more time to play versus attending the office daily. It also contributes and exacerbates the heavy drop off in Shadowlands given the grind and the return to more typical working arrangements.
Y'alll wanna be disgusted?
I had more fun in WoD than any other expansion. And i have played them all.
Come at me.
I respect it. If it didn't lack so much content or direction after launch, it would've been a GOAT.
#WeirdFlexBruh
In January 2023, gaming platform and digital storefront Steam reported 33 million peak concurrent players, and you're telling me WoW has 8 Million Active human subs?
There is no way it would still have 1/4th the amount that number. Theres literally no way.
Whats really going on is they are using the insane amount of bots that have invested this game for years towards their player count. Farming gold is lucrative, its always been. And with the WoW token they can just throw gold back into the game and get their free sub. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of bots running around in Retail and Classic.
you are using the word "literally" wrong, maybe look up what it means, since you can't prove any of your claims about bots :)
How are you comparing peak players and active subs? Completely different numbers, active steam players are probably in the hundreds of millions per month, so compare that to wow 8mil that pay monthly could be true.
"back at legion levels" yeah if releasing about 20 different versions of WoW is needed to get back to the numbers, a single expansion was able to reach, then maybe we could consider this a "success" *inhaling multiple trucks filled with copium*
I would guarantee that retail numbers alone are still higher than any other MMO out there. Relax, let people enjoy the game modes that suit them.
@@SatansRoyalBoner how many bots do you think are making up those numbers? 10-20%?
1:10:20 Alternative storylines is the best way to kill this game for good because you get people fighting over legitimacy. It's is an absolute No-Go.
The question they have is can they keep the interest going with what's essentially multiple "games" going even if they all share the same base source. If folks are able to find their enjoyment they want in A, B, or C game modes that person won't care much if at all about the X, Y, or Z elsewhere and if it tanks or is just terrible.
I'd be worried that someone comes in and says, "Why are we spending 3x the budget for one game" and tries to remerge everything and tell the devs to make it work.
Fixing covenants aka giving somebody on a sinking ship a mop.
I find it curious how wow can be 7mil strong.
while having combined with classic about 3mil active uses per 30th day.
insane how shadowlands managed to almost go down to bfa levels before classic
not surprised they brought metzen back just based on that dip
With my job I just can’t put the time in wow like it deserves so I stop playing
You can in DF
20yrs later and still 7+ mil strong, WoW straight up will never die. If anything it's only gonna grow even more these next few years with the Worldsoul Saga and Blizzard actually making an effort to listen to the community. Been playing over 16yrs myself and have honestly never been more optimistic for the game's future. Heres to another 20yrs 🎉
I’m convinced this game will outlive us all at this point
Too bad 5 million of them are bots
Wow will never die because of mid 30s gamer dads that never play anything else. I still doubt the game will improve any in the next expansions under the same leadership
@@PedroIgori ceo gone, president gone, narrative director changed. Entire studios acquired to work on the game. They clearly agreed with you
The real question is, how much of those 7 mil is retail and how much is classic? I would say retail is maybe at 3 mil and the rest is classic, which again is split among like 4 versions. This 7 mil is complete WoW ecosystem, meaning retail plus all different versions of classic. Retail only is probably not doing that well. This is the problem with WoW nowdays, playerbase being split among like five games and if the entire thing is only 7 mil that means that each of those individual ones are dong pretty average numbers of about 1.5 mil each at best
The issue with that argument is the very low amount of servers classic across all different flavors has. There are dead servers on retail for sure, but classic also has dead servers. Retail likely has more players, by far. Preach misremembered (or maybe I am), but when he asked Ion about classic carrying retail, what Ion said was that the only time classic came close to retail numbers was on Classic launch.
compare SL to DF; there is so much more to do in DF, the antagonists were better developed by far, very little borrowed power. just looking at everything they acknowledged was wrong with SL, they fixed most of that (to varying degrees) with DF. Hopefully they continue that with TWW.
dragonflight had a "definite antagonist" ? where? i've never heard about any of them post DF launch, nor am i sure who it was even though Ion stated that with the end of VOTI it should've been obvious.
Definitely convenient that the player count graph cuts off before 2024.... so we can't see how well Dragonflight is currently doing or how well it's done at actually retaining players.
why was bfa launch not as high as legion?
PTR coverage? I was dreading shadowpriest getting obliterated and the azerite ermor system looked woefull.
I do really hope TWW is good enough to pull me back. I'm hoping we maintain a state long term where FFXIV and WoW both have generally good stuff going on. Keep some competition in the top end of the MMO space.
Even 4 million put WoW in the top 3 MMOs in the world.
It’s either the top MMO or the 2nd highest. An insane achievement that only looks bad given it’s previous ridiculous height that is no longer achievable.
27:20 It's because likely nobody who was working on those systems in MoP are still there in Shadowlands. It's almost entirely a new team, so the only thing Blizzard still holds is the IP, and the older versions of the game as a reference.
Funny they didn't put Season of Mastery on their graphs... I wonder why LOL
Legion Legendariers wernt capped, just the bad luck protection that ever increased with activites was capped at 4, they still dropped, just the drop rate was so abysmaly low, basicly no one saw them untill they the re‐allowed the bad luck protection. Well that was the public info that was released.
I'm not sure why people think player housing will save wow and bring people back. I guarantee that you will get hype for it, login, customize your house to your satisfaction, stand around alone in your house for a few days, and then cancel your sub and not be playing again.
i do not believe the graph without a scale because i know how easy it is to manipulate such graph if you dont have a scale. its takes 1 second and it uniformly skews the graph by however much you think you can still pass as a real ammount...
i actually found shadowlands quite impressive, they managed to ruin every single thing that has happened since warcraft 1 in just one expansion it was amazing.
I agree with Preach that Classic in it's OG form is hitting diminishing returns and we'll see that with Cataclysm no doubt. At the same time, Retail is doing better than it has been in years, especially this late into an expansion, which bodes well for The War Within depending on how great the Beta reception and /Marketing goes into the launch.
It's entirely possible that within a few months of TWW, the ratio of Retail vs Classic will be the highest its ever been by quite a significant margin in Retail's favour.
I think this is a naturally evolution of a nostalgia initiative and I don't think the WoW team would be surprised by the result. I think the future of that particular slice of the WoW experience lies within some more transformative experience(s) down the line if they don't want that particular subset of players to die down to really small numbers.
Which is why I consider TWW to be the 2nd most important expansion after DragonFlight.
Blizzard has to be able to replicate and improve on the success of DF to continue that momentum upwards, not only for retail but to counteract some potential diminished Classic engagement.
Delves are a potentially good addition for more outdoor casual players and the Warband and other misc. things they're implementing here is going to reduce friction for players which is a good thing for existing players and those that are just about ready to jump back in.
But they need to nail the opening arc of this trilogy and retain the highest amount of players in preparation for Midnight and The Last Titan.
For Midnight, I think the return of a BIG EXPANSION FEATURE(YOU WONT WANT TO MISS THIS!) is going to be needed. It's great that the core experience is much better, but to regain or entice a new audience, you've got to have some bigger hook than just "our game is great we,come check it out. No, we're really serious, it's good."
So yeah, these are my thoughts about WoW and how it's trending and what it needs to continue doing to keep it in that direction in the short and medium term.
MoP is still a lot of people’s favorite expansion so I could see them doing it for classic, but after that they should stop unless they’re gonna have mechanics fixed and WoD and Legion from the get go. Legion was solid but not until 7.2 and on too much grind and RNG until then.
@@NoobGamer-di1dw While that might be true, it's undeniable that along the way to MoP, there's going to be attrition.
All I meant with that is that Retail is going to have to do better due to a loss in "pure" Classic's playerbase.
Which is why TWW has to do things DF did not significantly improve over SL WHILE also continuing to do what it did well to offset that loss.
Classic carried hard since pre-SL but now Retail is in a position where, especially due to its resource and teamsize, it has to produce quality for a significant amount of time. Something WoW has historically had issues doing consistently in the distant and not so distant past.
We can only hope for the best.
I'm one of those who drifted back. I started FF in 2019 and left WoW altogether in late 2021. I re-subbed a few days ago, and I have to say, it's just not working for me so far. It honestly has less to do with WoW and more to do with FF. I think the storytelling in FF has probably permanently broken me for games like WoW.
The WoW combat and the dungeons are just as great as I remember, but honestly that's not enough for me any longer. I want to actually care about the characters and the campaign, but I just don't. Here's hoping end game delivers. (I haven't quite made it to 70 yet.)
Its a good sign when they recognize why shadowlands failed
7.25 mil now realize that 670 guilds have cleared the mythic raid. If we assume that all the members are not alts and aren’t in multiple guilds that cleared it. at most 13,400 players have cleared the mythic raid. That is 0.002% of the population that blizzard balances raids for. 0.002% is 14,500 players.
i can say very firmly that Blizzard KNOWS that Classic saved them last time and that it wont save them again, at least not to the extent of it's initial launch in any case. so Blizzard are DRIVEN to fix Retail, as they've been doing so following Dragonflight's launch.
Isn’t plunderstorm free to play? I thought the whole point was you didn’t need a sub to play
i would love to have classic legion and just have it never go away XD so i can get all classes decked out over time and have the best gameplay loop i've ever played XD but maybe i'm just wrong haha
idk theyve almost done a full runescape. they should just commit to going full runescape and develop 2 mmos. retail, classic+ and also maintain the legacy classic experiences with seasonal modes. if they do that then chances are there will always be at least 2 good things going always.
I personally hated legion. I hated the weapon system, and really never came back after the first month. I came back in BFA to discover what legion had done to WoW, and it's still trying to recover from that mindset.