Blizzard CEO: "WoW subscriptions have stopped growing"

[Oskuro]

From The Escapitst:

Only 30 percent of new World of Warcraft players ever make it past level ten, according to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, who also revealed an even more chilling statistic: The game has stopped growing.

MMOGs are the kind of game you play for either a very short time or a very long time. Gamers who become sufficiently immersed in one online game or another can spend literally years playing them and, more importantly, faithfully paying their monthly bill. The trick is getting people over that initial hump, which as it turns out can be a tough sell even for the mighty World of Warcraft juggernaut.

"Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft past level ten are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time," Morhaime said during Activision Blizzard's year-end financial call. "Currently, only about 30 percent of our trial players make it past this threshold. So anything we can do to improve the new player experience is a huge opportunity for us."

"With Cataclysm we will be overhauling the early gaming experience for players, bringing all of the content in World of Warcraft up to our current design standards and ensuring that even new players to the game will experience the best work of our development team," he continued. "This will also provide additional replay ability for our veterans players as well. In the long run, we hope that this effort will capture more players and drive continued growth."

I have no idea how the average MMOG performs in this regard but a 30 percent rate of retention seems pretty low to me. Even more shocking, however, was news from the House of Warcraft that the most dominant game in the genre has finally stopped growing. There are currently 11.5 million World of Warcraft subscribers, Morhaime said, the same number of users the game had in December 2008. Blizzard remains upbeat about the game's future, however; the release of Cataclysm is expected to get those numbers moving again and the huge Chinese market, where Wrath of the Lich King has not yet been released, currently makes up about half of the World of Warcraft subscriber base and represents a tremendous opportunity for future growth.

Unsurprising. I wonder what effect will this development have on the MMO market. Will competitors (Blizzard's next MMO included) try to wrest MMO dominance from WoW? (Hopefully through innovation) Or will they just jump ship and claim the MMO market is dying? We'll see.

[General Zod]

I'm not sure I see the downside here.

[Broomstick]

Couple of factors at work here, in my opinion:

1) not everyone enjoys MMORPGs. It could be they've reached most of the people in the world who have internet access and would enjoy playing WoW. I mean, shit, 11-12 million players is more than the population of a lot of nations.

2) WoW has been in limbo in China for months - nevermind Wrath of the Lich King, I think they haven't even release The Burning Crusade yet, the first expansion. That's a billion plus people who haven't had access to the latest WoW, couldn't even keep up their subscriptions from my understanding, and so of course all the Chinese players (except those using Taiwanese servers) have dropped off the total.

3) I think the WoW juggernaut will rule for awhile yet just on sheer momentum.

4) Nothing lasts forever. One day WoW will be superseded by something else.

[Terralthra]

The CEO is quite right when he says that the early levels don't live up to the later-game experience. The writing, level design, and art design go up in quality by orders of magnitude when you go to tBC zones, and again when you go to WotLK zones. Suffering through the 1-58 content really is grueling, especially for a first-timer. The zones are not well-populated except capital cities, and there's a fairly typical newb-bashing attitude.

[Darmalus]

Unsurprising. I wonder what effect will this development have on the MMO market. Will competitors (Blizzard's next MMO included) try to wrest MMO dominance from WoW? (Hopefully through innovation) Or will they just jump ship and claim the MMO market is dying? We'll see.

WoW would likely have stiffer competition if the competition didn't keep releasing buggy half-built games. I think WoW did so well because it arrived when standards were pretty low, had an established fan base and was marginally above average at the time. Standards are slightly higher now, and the competition is large and entrenched. Why do these other companies keep turning out to be their own worst enemy?

Oh, and after (Ghost Rider? Can't remember.) pointed out my rose colored glasses in the last thread about the next expansion of WoW, I went back and redid the original starting areas. Yeah, I can see the 30% retention rate. If they have WotLK quality writing and better phasing integration, I expect the retention rate to rise quite a bit.

[Stark]

Guys, you think retention is related to the writing?? Oh dear.

Poor retention is due to poor early experience, which includes things like commmunity attitude and population.

[Darmalus]

Guys, you think retention is related to the writing?? Oh dear.

Poor retention is due to poor early experience, which includes things like commmunity attitude and population.

I don't know how they would solve that, with 11.5 million people to police (who will be much closer to the starting zones next expansion). A massive GM crackdown is the only thing that comes to mind, and I'm not sure if that would add as many new players as it would lose.

[Alyeska]

Growth will always cap out eventually. Market saturation means that they could not expect growth to continue indefinitely. If this news surprised Activision, they failed business 101.

[Stark]

You don't need a GM crackdown to solve noob problems; you just need to redesign the early game. Remember the mmo has changed a lot since they set up wow; many of its problems are just legacy.

[Minischoles]

A good way to see how different the zones are, is roll a new character - Say roll an orc, then roll a blood elf, then try a DK. You can actually see a huge difference between the early starting zones that were in Vanilla WoW, and the way WOTLK is. The early zones are absolutely universally horrible, roll a Tauren and you spend most of your first 10 levels, running around an absolutely huge zone, that's practically empty.

I can see retention being so low, because even as an experienced player, with the Bind on Account items (that grant extra xp and are far better stats wise) it's painful to level those first 10-20 levels, because of how awful the starting zones are. And like Stark pointed out, the population in most starting zones is pretty low now, unless you're rolling on a newly opened server, on some servers the population is almost overwhelmingly level 80s, or people who have rerolled and are just powerleveling past you.

[Edward Yee]

Problem is that they probably won't get to do so until Cataclysm, as their own plans made the Fall of the Lich King the last major content patch for current WoW, other than the pre-Cataclysm events (presumably including some signs of Deathwing's emergence). Fortunately, that's probably when they're giving the game the whole super do-over, although that in and of itself may drive some players away... I've already seen at least one Tauren hunter QQ over both the changes to the Hunter class and... well, the fact that she was nostalgic over the early zones that she had taken her Tauren through.

2) WoW has been in limbo in China for months - nevermind Wrath of the Lich King, I think they haven't even release The Burning Crusade yet, the first expansion. That's a billion plus people who haven't had access to the latest WoW, couldn't even keep up their subscriptions from my understanding, and so of course all the Chinese players (except those using Taiwanese servers) have dropped off the total.

This was apparently due to a mix of local bureaucratic snafus, and the ban-on-skeletons thing (to the point of altering the look of Forsaken in WoW China), which pretty much put the kibosh on WotLK.

The CEO is quite right when he says that the early levels don't live up to the later-game experience. The writing, level design, and art design go up in quality by orders of magnitude when you go to tBC zones, and again when you go to WotLK zones. Suffering through the 1-58 content really is grueling, especially for a first-timer.

This here is why I have no alts, as easy as they may have supposedly made stuff -- and I was a Tauren. Took me months to get to level 80... the stretch from level 20 onward til maybe 40 was godawful.

[Oskuro]

Poor retention is due to poor early experience, which includes things like commmunity attitude and population.

I can't imagine the abysmal retention that EvE must have. I know I didn't make it past the tutorials, even when I keep meaning to really try it out.

And agreeing with Stark and Minischoles, the difference between Vanilla, BC and WotLK starting areas is quite telling. No wonder that Blizzard is both adding two new races and reworking Azeroth in Cataclysm, asking new players to walk through a hostile desolated wasteland (aka Durotar - I hate that starting area) to get to the good bits is a really bad idea.

As for why the competition of WoW sucks, my opinion is that they don't understand what Blizzard did right. WoW isn't an innovation, nor is it an imitation, it is a refinement of a formula. Blizzard are good at taking the fun bits of a concept and improving upon them, and they in fact succeeded at creating a true sequel to EverQuest (the big one back then) that not even EQ2 managed to create.
What I keep seeing is that, since big companies are allergic to innovation (as it is a risk), they try to imitate, making WoW clones with different flavouring (I mean, how many failed games has it taken for them to try other non-sword&sorcery settings?), and fail, since WoW is so big already you can't expect to launch a comparable title both in scope and popularity (I mean, why go play an imitation if you're already playing the original?).
The only title I feel tried to refine things was Warhammer Online, with its focus on PvP battlegrounds. Unfortunately, it got bashed with being too similar to WoW, and not WoW enough (yay, doublethink!).

Now, subscriptions slowing down might not be inmediately significative, but I bet there are many analists out there plotting to make a move aganist WoW, and this might be what gets the proverbial snowball rolling. And that'll be fun to watch, at least.

[Stark]

EVEs retention and early game used to be horrid, but I ran a new character a few months ago and it's far easier and informative. EVE naturally has less structure than most MMOs though.

WoW doesn't need to he the best or most innovative MMO to continue to dominate; it just has to keep up with the back edge of expectations. As the Market widens play experience changes, and when WoW was set up a lot of things taken for granted hadn't even been considered.

[Civil War Man]

They have put a few band-aids on the early game to tide them over until Cataclysm is released. Improved tutorials, faster health and mana regen, starting characters with weapons better suited for levelling with their class, etc. Now they just need to nuke the Barrens and Darkshore from orbit and it'll be about ready.

Fun fact: I started playing WoW late in Burning Crusade. My first character was Draenei. Having rolled alts in other races, I can say that had I gone with a trial account (which would have forced me to pick a different race for my first character), I may have ended up in the 70% who don't make it past 10. There is that big a difference in the quality of starting zones.

[Broomstick]

A good way to see how different the zones are, is roll a new character - Say roll an orc, then roll a blood elf, then try a DK. You can actually see a huge difference between the early starting zones that were in Vanilla WoW, and the way WOTLK is. The early zones are absolutely universally horrible, roll a Tauren and you spend most of your first 10 levels, running around an absolutely huge zone, that's practically empty.

I started WoW in December 2007 - yes, I've wasted a lot of hours on it - which was before the first expansion. I remember starting a Tauren in a Mulgore so crowded you sometimes had to wait in line for a mob to respawn for you to kill and advance in the game. So a high population in a starting area isn't always a wonderful thing.

They have improved the early game from what it was back then, believe it or not. It goes much faster, among other things. MUCH faster, even if it still seems a grind. And with the zepplin between Thunderbluff and Orgrimmar you no longer have the Jog of Death for low level Taurens through the Southern Barrens which was (and still is) a hideous design flaw.

Problem is that they probably won't get to do so until Cataclysm, as their own plans made the Fall of the Lich King the last major content patch for current WoW, other than the pre-Cataclysm events (presumably including some signs of Deathwing's emergence). Fortunately, that's probably when they're giving the game the whole super do-over, although that in and of itself may drive some players away... I've already seen at least one Tauren hunter QQ over both the changes to the Hunter class and... well, the fact that she was nostalgic over the early zones that she had taken her Tauren through.

Some people need to get over it. There have already been big changes since "vanilla" WoW. Every time one occurs people scream and whine and QQ it's the End of WoW. Yeah, there are some changes I don't like, but overall it is now a better game. Half the people crying are the L33T types are who pissed off the average player will get to see end-game content without living in the game 12 hours a day. Screw them.

And yes, the big do-over is with Cataclysm - with some changes planned for before the expansion is actually released. As the changes are to the world and will not require the expansion itself, I actually expect most of them to happen before the official release. Yeah, I get all gooey over some of the proposed changes too - awhile back I took a tour of Azshara, which I think is a beatiful (but much neglected) zone because with the new expansion it will become the Goblin starting area and I'll miss the visuals in the old version (but not the crappy design of the quests)

2) WoW has been in limbo in China for months - nevermind Wrath of the Lich King, I think they haven't even release The Burning Crusade yet, the first expansion. That's a billion plus people who haven't had access to the latest WoW, couldn't even keep up their subscriptions from my understanding, and so of course all the Chinese players (except those using Taiwanese servers) have dropped off the total.

This was apparently due to a mix of local bureaucratic snafus, and the ban-on-skeletons thing (to the point of altering the look of Forsaken in WoW China), which pretty much put the kibosh on WotLK.

Yeah, well, since the Undead Scourge are dead people that's kind of an issue when the Chinese government doesn't want bones showing, now isn't it? Frankly, I always did find the number of lopped-off heads you wound up carrying around in you backpack a bit... grotesquely disturbing and wouldn't have minded a few wrapped up in burlap sacks (another Chinese requirement - no disembodied heads as quest items, they're in bags) but yeah, Wrath is a problem in regards to the Chinese.

I wonder if the Chinese get pissy about skeletal wyverns and dragons, too?

As for why the competition of WoW sucks, my opinion is that they don't understand what Blizzard did right. WoW isn't an innovation, nor is it an imitation, it is a refinement of a formula. Blizzard are good at taking the fun bits of a concept and improving upon them, and they in fact succeeded at creating a true sequel to EverQuest (the big one back then) that not even EQ2 managed to create.

Another thing WoW did was truly try to accomodate everyone. Of course, you can't, but they did try. As a result you can play the game from level 1 to max either in a group or entirely solo, and mix and match those any way you want. There's lots of extras that aren't required, yet are reasonably accessible to the player. There's stuff for fanatical PvP, raiders... and the very casual player who likes some silly in the game.

WoW actually gets accused of stealing stuff from other games... and they do, in a sense, but then other games "steal" from them. Why shouldn't they adopt best practices from their competition?

WoW would likely have stiffer competition if the competition didn't keep releasing buggy half-built games. I think WoW did so well because it arrived when standards were pretty low, had an established fan base and was marginally above average at the time. Standards are slightly higher now, and the competition is large and entrenched

Don't kid yourself - WoW is also full of bugs. They fix one and acquire another. At the last BlizCon the developers actually admitted to 120,000+ identified bugs in WoW. Those of us who suffer through "emergency maintenance" and "server resets" on a regular basis just nodded our heads in confirmation.

Several differences between WoW and the other guys, though -

First, after they release anything new, even a minor thing, they have 11 million+ semi-intelligent naked apes start bashing away at their program. Inevitably, some of those apes find something wrong, and usually pretty quickly (one of the more recent ones was the guild Ensidia exploiting a bug in a boss fight to get the first world kill of the Lich King in 25 man raid mode, which got ugly). While they never fix it fast enough to keep people happy, WoW does address these issues. At times, they have even extended player subscriptions when their fuck ups really badly interferred with playing though that hasn't happened in awhile.

Second, they have actually exploited some of the bugs to make later content, which is a sort of interesting approach. The Corrupted Blood outbreak bug was later used to engineer the Scourge Invasion pre-Wrath of the Lich King which, up until the final couple days, was a lot of fun (for most of us). Another, unnamed bug that appeared in the Eastern Kingdoms (if I recall correctly) lead to the "phasing" effect used extensively in the most recent expansion and which has been popular among the player base. This makes me think that there is some genuine analysis and creative thinking taking place.

And finally, Blizzard has been greatly criticized for releasing content and patches late - but they refuse to rush a broken, buggy product to match a particular release date. Yes, this pisses some people off greatly, but others would rather have working content late than broken content on time. Although WoW is not a perfect game, this practice ensures some consistency of quality. Certainly, it would be even worse in regards to bugs if they didn't do this.

Why do these other companies keep turning out to be their own worst enemy?

I suspect some of it is pushing to meet goals and deadlines that should retain some flexibility - most notably, the difference between insisting on releasing something on time versus a delay to fix problems before they go public.

I also think there are other factors at work as well.

[General Zod]

A good way to see how different the zones are, is roll a new character - Say roll an orc, then roll a blood elf, then try a DK. You can actually see a huge difference between the early starting zones that were in Vanilla WoW, and the way WOTLK is. The early zones are absolutely universally horrible, roll a Tauren and you spend most of your first 10 levels, running around an absolutely huge zone, that's practically empty.

I can see retention being so low, because even as an experienced player, with the Bind on Account items (that grant extra xp and are far better stats wise) it's painful to level those first 10-20 levels, because of how awful the starting zones are. And like Stark pointed out, the population in most starting zones is pretty low now, unless you're rolling on a newly opened server, on some servers the population is almost overwhelmingly level 80s, or people who have rerolled and are just powerleveling past you.

I've tried the vanilla demos a few times and every time it was inevitably the same result. Bland environments plus pretty much zero tactical action, forethought or real skill necessary to do anything means it bores me to tears. Adding more players or fetch quest won't fix that.

[Oskuro]

I began playing WoW way back there (we're talking pre-honor system era, pre battlegrounds era, pre-Felwood era), and I enjoyed all the starter areas (save Valley of Trials) the first time through. They become tiresome when rolling alts. The new areas are better streamlined, and thus, even if boring by virtue of repetition, you can go through them without so much soul crushingly boring tasks as the original areas. Except Teldrassil, that area is so relaxing I sometimes went back just for a stroll.

Now they just need to nuke the Barrens and Darkshore from orbit and it'll be about ready.

That's pretty much what Cataclysm is about. Only Deathwing is so badass he nukes the sites from underground.

[Edward Yee]

I wonder if the Chinese get pissy about skeletal wyverns and dragons, too?

I dunno man, this is the same government that got pissed over Chinese people analogizing Avatar to the plight of people being evicted by local government for real-estate developers, to the point of pulling it from 2D screens in favor of a Confucius biopic reportedly so bad that it did what Mao and the Cultural Revolution couldn't: make Chinese people really hate the idea of Confucius.

To explain the "Jog of Death": First a Tauren has to walk* all the way north from Bloodhoof Post to the capital city of Thunder Bluff in northern Mulgore. Unfortunately, because the correlation of level to geography in the Barrens is backwards for Tauren, the hapless level 11-12 Tauren will then have to cross through level 18 areas to get to the nearest Tauren settlement of Camp Taurajo, and then walk even further up north to get to the much more relevant, lower-level area that is the Crossroads... and to get to Orgrimmar? More walking, this time to the east, but that's actually to lower-level areas. To get further than level 18-20 while still sticking to a generally Tauren area, one has to go south from Taurajo to Thousand Needles... which is, other than Freewind Post and a few settlements far from each other, friggin' deserted. (Going up north from the Crossroads to Ashenvale is risky for PVP.)

The reason for the zeppelin being so awesome is that flight paths require you to meet/talk to a flight master at both ends, so previously a Tauren had to go through the Jog of Death all the way to Orgrimmar in order to pick up that flight path; now a Tauren character can just ride the zeppelin to Orgrimmar, pick up the flight path (transport-on-demand), then go quest not backwards.

* There's still no bind-to-account mounts, so the only way to get there faster is to have another character as 'taxi' with a sidecar-equipped Mechanohog or other multi-seat "mount" (vehicle rather).

[Oskuro]

Pfff, ridiculous. The path a Tauren must take is pretty easy (as long as it sticks to the road) compared to the Jog of Death a Night Elf has to do to get to Ironforge and Stomwind, through the level 30+ Wetlands. My first time, I just swam around the continent until I hit Stormwind, and that was before the docks opened, in fact, I expected docks, and was dissapointed to find none.

Funny thing is that, originally, I believe both Thunder Bluff and Darnassus were meant to communicate directly with the other capitals, TB via Zepelin, Darnassus via the Deeprun Tram. But for some reason, they left them isolated, and thus turned them into Ghost Towns. By the way, that's why the Deeprun Tram goes underwater, it was originally meant to go from IF to Darnassus, under the sea.

Now, at first I felt uneasy about the Orb of translocation in Silvermoon, but walking through the fucking Plaguelands would have been the most epically awful Jog of Death (I know, I've done it).


Wait.... You mean to tell me there's finally a Zeppelin from TB to OG? Nice.

[Edward Yee]

Now, at first I felt uneasy about the Orb of translocation in Silvermoon, but walking through the fucking Plaguelands would have been the most epically awful Jog of Death (I know, I've done it).

As a blood elf who was levelling? Egad, I remember that place. *facepalm*

Wait.... You mean to tell me there's finally a Zeppelin from TB to OG? Nice.

It's only really needed once (to get that TB-OG flight path), but there's no way that it isn't helpful for levelling.

[Minischoles]

I began playing WoW way back there (we're talking pre-honor system era, pre battlegrounds era, pre-Felwood era), and I enjoyed all the starter areas (save Valley of Trials) the first time through. They become tiresome when rolling alts. The new areas are better streamlined, and thus, even if boring by virtue of repetition, you can go through them without so much soul crushingly boring tasks as the original areas. Except Teldrassil, that area is so relaxing I sometimes went back just for a stroll.

God that takes me back, I rolled my first char right when the EU servers were released. Another problem back then was how godawful most of the gear and talents were, most of the gear got revamped somewhere in TBC and in WOTLK (thats why you see so much spellpower stuff around in early levels now) and talents have changed massively since then.

I'm the same really though, i've got 7 level 80s now, and i've been through the starting areas so many times I don't even look at the quest text or map anymore. But even the new areas (Belf, Draenei) end up feeding into the vanilla wow areas eventually. One area I absolutely loathe as Horde is Hillsbrad, since there's a long line of quests that involves going all the way back to the farms on one side of the map, before going back to TM, and then back again. Pre level 20 mounts, that was absolutely stupid.

All credit to Blizzard though, they have tried to make the early levels as streamlined as they can before the major revamp in Cataclysm. BoA items for someone rolling an alt, LFD system so you can actually find a group for Ragefire Chasm, sorting out the starting weapons, and most of all progressive drop rates (at least I think that extends back to Vanilla areas) - my most enduring memory of the Barrens is slaughtering nearly a hundred plainstriders in search of beaks that they just wouldn't drop.

[Broomstick]

Now, at first I felt uneasy about the Orb of translocation in Silvermoon, but walking through the fucking Plaguelands would have been the most epically awful Jog of Death (I know, I've done it).

As a blood elf who was levelling? Egad, I remember that place. *facepalm*

That is known as "corpse-dragging", which in Vanilla days was done by the insane. You ran two steps, died, rezzed, ran two steps, died... rinse and repeat.

[Ghost Rider]

Now, at first I felt uneasy about the Orb of translocation in Silvermoon, but walking through the fucking Plaguelands would have been the most epically awful Jog of Death (I know, I've done it).

As a blood elf who was levelling? Egad, I remember that place. *facepalm*

That is known as "corpse-dragging", which in Vanilla days was done by the insane. You ran two steps, died, rezzed, ran two steps, died... rinse and repeat.

Or better known as fucking retards. If you couldn't take a 10 minute debuff you deserved all your gear broken 10 times over.

As for the announcement? Not amazed given while there's nothing much out there, WoW has basically settled into it's own domain. There's only so many people inclined and the ones that have left aren't always going to return.

[Skgoa]

I think she is refering to the practice of "dying your way through" an area that was to highlevel or when it was just easier/faster than fighting all the mobs.

There are two quests in Hillsbrad that are much worse than then the farms. One had you kill a shitload of mobs in a cave until one of them randomly droped the quest item (a staff) - seriously, the droprate of that thing must have been < 1/10^4. The other one had you going very very VERY near Southshore, the local alliance town. Alliance players, npc guards... can you see where I am going with this?

[Ghost Rider]

I think she is refering to the practice of "dying your way through" an area that was to highlevel or when it was just easier/faster than fighting all the mobs.

Way back then when it was crap...you ran to the graveyard of the place you wanted....and revived. Eventually it was changed because that was best way of avoiding places and getting to where you wanted at low levels. Plus you were faster then normal.

As for dumbass quests. They were there by the boatloads, and fuck the rewards were SPIRIT PLATE. Vanilla and old WoW in general still has huge amount of fuck up issues that's only slightly allievated by BoA gear AND less XP needed in general.

And at least they did something about Cooking. Fucking took them forever given how broken it was throughout Vanilla.