World of Warcraft subs fall to 8.3 million

Wow will not die until blizzard comes out with another mmo. It still has 8.3 million subscribers after 10 years, this should be proof enough.

It was announced that Rift will be free to play in June, so that will be another quality free-to-play wow-clone with a recent and extensive expansion so you have to wonder whether the market can support pay-to-play for much longer. Surely, if you are wanting to play a cooperative online rpg then you will play between expansions for the new content of each mmo? WoW is lucky in that it has a vast adolescent player base whose parents pay the fee maybe that will be sufficient to make their business model viable but in terms of future games it will be interesting to see whether the market will support their new project as pay-to-play. Same with Elder Scrolls Online which I am now finding difficult to justify paying to play. I paid to play Star Wars The Old Republic when it came out because I accepted the pay-to-play model as a necessity of the genre but now I don't. I played the Dragon's Age Beta last night, it's not great, but it's operational and eventually surely the market conditions will be such that they undermine any rationale for paying when we've all seen the genre well executed and developed in each expansion of each product.

please god please let this raging piece of chit die its long overdue death. how many lives has this garbage ruined over the years....you get a copy of the game as a high school graduation gift...you wake up 32 years old one day and realize...OMFG I WoW'd my 20's away! sad chit mate

even if it was to stabilize at like 5 million, they may have lost a lot of subscribers but they would still be way ahead. this game was always going to lose subscribers at some point due to its age.

9.6 million from end of 2012 to 8.3 million currently is over 200,000 sub losses per month.

Excellent. Once WoW dies there can be real competition in the MMO market again.

15 x 8.3 million... So now they're only making, generally, around $124,500,000 a month from store purchases and subscriptions.

I suck at math, but it doesn't take a math wiz to realize that 8.3 million subscribers is a FREAKING LOT OF MONEY for game development.

W.O.W subs fall to 8.3 million? Thats like saying poor justin bieber has to settle for F-18 Private jet instead of newer model F-19

What a coincidence that so many subs are dropping roughly one year after the "Pay for 12 months of WoW in advance, and get a free copy of Diablo 3" promotion. It's amazing what giving away one of the most eagerly anticipated games of all time will do to boost subs. Especially when your next expansion takes place in the worlds gaudiest Chinese gift shop and revolves almost exclusively around stupid fucking panda bears.

WoW is a terrible game and old. That's why they're stuck with a measly 8.3 million subs... only 7.8million more than the nearest competition lol.

"and subscriber declines in our World of Warcraft business"
Uhm no Kotick, Blizzard's WoW. You had nothing to do with it. Stop taking credit for games you had no part in.

Euzeth is the one behind it! (I take only a few will understand this)

lol if it doensn't turn into free to play the number of subs will countinue to drop

Star Wars the Old Republic has fewer than 500,000 users !?! But it has lightsabers and voice acting .... I bet WoW subscribers are all asian -__-

WoW has been played out and is expected to keep declining as the years go on. With the "explosion" of F2P games on the market, WoW and several other "subscription" based games are going to take a hit.

The hardest thing for a lot of game developers is seeing where the market is going. Will F2P be the future just like everyone said MMO would be 5 years ago at the height of WoW era?

Personally, I'm not sure what will win the battle. With the economy finally "regaining" some strength gamers may have a few extra dollars to spend but not enough to send WoW 13 bucks a month or other MMO sub games. I seriously think we'll see the re-entry of Retro / Indie games. Nothing more than 10 dollars eating up a lot of market shares. Just look at how successful Super Meatboy was and similar games like that. It's the Dark Horse of the race.

I literally played for a week and I gave up. Got tired of high levels running around me with no help and spending hours "figuring it out on my own"

next expansion

2 races,alliance kangoroo

horde rooster

classes kickboxing

capoiera

good news

Come on Blizzzzzard, make a new warcraft not wow.

Personally I see that the income from the number of subscribers way exceeds the cost of developing a new game.

People still play this?

The best MMO out there now is called "The Infinite Black", not WoW.

They spent 2 yrs developing pandas and it only kept their audience engaged for a few months. I don't see how they can keep up with the user hemorrhaging with time tradeoffs like that.

Who cares? Vanilla WoW was special, Burning Crusade was excellent. After that it's been a gradual dumbing down and homogenization. I stopped playing 4 and a half years ago and never regretted it.

Meanwhile Eveonline turns 10 years old and is still going from strength to strength.

I blame global warming.

Yes! I hope this should resume falling down. (FFXI ftw)

Game is old and still doing well..

I've always wanted a Starcraft MMO ever since WoW came out. But I don't know how that would work.

@Saketume @tgMan69 As much as I hate to say it, I agree with you. When Diablo 2 came out, I played through that four times. I haven't finished Diablo 3 ONCE. There's just something about it that seems... not quite right. Same with with Starcraft 2. Something's different. They just aren't the same any more, which makes me very sad.

WOW is still the #1 MMO, so many games still tried to be it. (SWTOR, Warhammer). Many have failed. Now to bring more gamers back to WOW, they just need to launch WOW2.

I think this shows how shortsighted their CEO is. This raises concerns? Really? What were you expecting, it's a miracle the game is still number 1 MMO after 8 years, and not a single other has come even close in number of subscribers, but, obvious to anyone but this guy, that can't last forever, and instead for planning out in the future how to compensate this, he sounds like he wasn't expecting this at all ...(?)

Game simply isn't worth 13 euro a month. It's just clicking for more and more people that this is daylight robbery.

really? how in the hell is the disappointing wiiu launch having any effect on the WoW subscriptions?? idiots... it's still the largest and most popular MMO out there, enjoy it! nothing lasts forever.

I would rather play Runescape.

@Imperiacommando Wow vanilla graphics were way better than ps2, WTF whats the problem with graphics? graphics means nothing.

The proof is in the article, half of it is about declining subscribers where the rest of it is about shareholders,profit, and oddly, blaming the Wii U for decreasing subscribers?

'"The shift in release dates of competing products, the disappointing launch of the Wii U, uncertainties regarding next-generation hardware, and subscriber declines in our World of Warcraft business all raise concerns, as do continued challenges in the global economy." '

What does next gen hardware have to do with the quality of the video game?

A game that ugly, old and cheap shouldn't have any subscribers.

This doesn't come as a surprise to me, there's other, much better mmos around now and after Mists of Pandaria it got kind of ridiculous. This game is so outdated and when games like The Elder Scrolls: Online and Neverwinter come out, people are really going to realize it and subs will drop even more.