| (Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) | |
But...level 10 takes like three hours to get to. If that. That's probably slow actually. Jeebus ;/ Cataclysm will give them a jump in numbers. Completely revitalising the Azeroth will likely bring back old customers *coughlikemecough* as well. | |
Still a healthy number of players to be sure. It would be intresting to see those numbes put up against other MMO's though so a real comparison could be drawn. Other than that, good on Blizzard I suppose for the honesty | |
I'm sorry, but that's just hilarious. If they can't get folks passed level ten, they're doing something wrong. Dreadfully wrong. | |
I still can't bring myself to play it. I'd never stop. | |
While a 30 percent rate of retention may seem low, keep in mind these are for the trial accounts... the accounts that are not necessarily considered active, as they are not subscribed. If you think about it... 11.5 million accounts, and those only being roughly 30 percent of those who have given it a shot... That's still incredibly impressive, and in my opinion, makes it even more so. | |
The game is just boring. I tried giving it a shot 3 times already, the longest I could handle the game was 3 hours, got to level... 13 or 14, didn't bother to play anymore.
Well, the point is - what stops growing, will eventually die. If they can't get new players, and they lose old ones... and it goes without saying that WoW might finally crumble under its own weight.
Do I have to use a hammer to get it inside of people's head that WoW doesn't have 11,5 million accounts anymore? Not since they closed the Chinese servers? There are more or less 6 millions of players in WoW. | |
Stupid Chinese government and it's restrictions of Wrath of the Lich King. | |
Well 11.5mil players hooked up on the game is huge enough...noone has ever come close yet. | |
It's a fundamental problem that they still haven't fixed. They originally made the game top-heavy so that players would want to stick around until the end. The game is still top-heavy and moreso than ever and the gap between the beginning and the end is intimidatingly huge. So you either have been on the forefront for a while, or you're just starting and have a crapload of nothing between you and level 80. To make matters even worse, due to certain design decisions, their retention rate of those top-end hardcore players has been really bad for the current expansion. | |
This is for Trial accounts. Basically demo players. If 1,000 people download the trial, and 300 buy the full game, that's not that bad given that Blizzard didn't lose anything in giving them the trial. | |
Blimey, the behemoth has actually halted? Well, I'm guessing Cataclysm will change all that... I don't play WoW, but I'm pretty sure Blizzard know what they're doing. | |
Cataclysm won't bring new players in mostly, I think it'll mainly bring back players who had got bored and gone away. They are basically reaching the saturation point where everyone even vaguely interested in trying it already has, and decided to leave or stick around accordingly. Hard to see what they can do after Cataclysm to keep people interested, I would say "WoW in Spaaaaaaaaace" but they kinda already did that with Outland. | |
It may seem low, but i'd like to see numbers on how many other games keep players on there trial after the same Threshold. The only other MMO I can think of that has been around as long as WoW and is still growing is EVE, which will have nowhere near 30%, though it kinda doesn't work on the leveling system, but I doubt 30% of trials get picked up, what with the notorious learning curve. | |
Most people on the server I'm on get to level 80 then give up when they relise that getting into a raid group requires you to either raid 24/7 or know someone in there and because all the raid groups/guilds are mainly closed off 'Old Boys' clubs it's not really possiable, since leaving my old guild over the fact I got bored of their 'LOLHARDCORERAIDINGBBQSAUCE!' attatude I'm saying good bye to WoW at teh end of my sub. | |
Hmmm, well honestly I still think Blizzard should stop while they are ahead rather than milking this for everything it's worth. The game is aging, and despite being something of an addict myself I'd rather see an epic send off, and then developing a new MMORPG, so maybe some day a new "WoW 2" can be released that won't have veterans vomiting due to the way the original was squeezed. Such have been my thoughts since the release of Cataclysm. Arthas pretty much ends the intended storyline, that's a good place to stop. I'm not sure if I especially like the idea of the Cataclysm in general, and I figure if they are re-doing the entire starting areas and such it would have been better to simply develop a new MMORPG from scratch with newer technology and their current design standards. | |
I think one problem WoW has now is the high cost of entry. Buying the game and both expansions will run you ~$80, and that'll probably jump to $120 when Cataclysm comes out (unless, of course, they release a cheaper bundle, which would be a wise move on their part). | |
Didn't stop STARS from playing. | |
Read the OP. Morhaime said the game still has 11.5 million. The game is facing troubles in China, but Morhaime confirmed it was still operational. Re: The 30% statistic... I'm honestly surprised, though it IS just Trial accounts. But WoW is probably the most newbie-friendly MMOG on the market (short of games like FreeRealms), so I'd be curious to see how these numbers hold up against other MMOGs. Not to mention that Rob Pardo said that the game's TOTAL lifetime subscribers were two to three times the current subscriber base, so that's 22-33 million not counting Trial accounts. The game's certainly not immune to churn. What I wouldn't give to take a plain look at Blizzard's balance sheets. There'd be so much interesting information there. | |
Misinterpretation. It only takes most people ten minutes to figure out they don't like mmorpgs. | |
Chilling? This is the sort of thing that keeps people up at night? Faith in humanity, dwindling every day...yup. It's a game. | |
Really? You spend 10 minutes on a game and then decide whether you do or you don't like it? | |
The exact point I was going to make. I made it to 60, ran MC and all the other instances, got bored and left. The first major expansion came along and my friends convinced me to come back, problem was everyone had left me in the dust already (lol) so it was a grind to get to 70 so I could "play the game again". Trying to get groups together to run instances was a pain, I think I made it to 67 before quitting again. I can only imagine the uphill climb it is to get from 1 to 80, and with all of the low level content abandoned... No way in hell would I subject myself to that again. Cataclysm should fix things for a short while, but you'll still have the problem of all of the low-end areas becoming ghost towns a few months after launch. | |
Depends on the MMO. I got the Eve demo, and played for half an hour. I got Dungeons and Dragons online, and i played for about 10 hours before I ran out of free content. It's not so much they figure out that they don't like MMOs, it's they figure out they don't like THAT MMO. | |
Yah, there are people like that. Though their numbers in WoW are presumably low, considering the cost for WoW can be through the roof. Download space for patches can run in to gigabytes, a subscription fee is 26 bucks for two months which is a whole hell of a lot if you're not even sure you'll like the game and the game itself can still cost oodles of money. | |
Is this the first sign of the WoW empire crumbling? I dunno, it seems like everyones jumping on this as a chance to say "SEE!!!111!!! WOW WILL FAIL LOLZ". However, it will be interesting to see it fall when it does. | |
I'm not an MMO guy. I bought Star Trek Online last week, and instantly regretted it (I think I may have been drunk) I could have spent the £30 on Bioshock 2 or something. Damn. OT: 30% seems ok considering the number of trial players. Cataclysm should give it a shot in the arm. | |
mmos are special like that. You either like them soon after they start letting you play or you simply won't.
Well, eve is special. It took me three days to figure out I was actually playing the game. Back to wow: As it makes the best use of the limitations of the format, its about as good as mmos can be until verizon starts rolling out their quantum entanglement plans.
Was thinking something similar, but blizzard always botches the wording of all their press releases. He could be talking about 30% of characters, 30% of accounts, 30% of credit card numbers... All of which make equal amounts of sense, but mean very different things. | |
Maybe people want to play the game and not have to get through (soon) 2 dead expansions just to finally start the game. | |
I just never understood the appeal of the endless grind. I got one of those 30 day free trials and at the behest of my friends and cousins damn well tried to like it. I think i did actually get up to perhaps level 20 (it was a while ago) but there was just no sense of real achievement, no over arching story that made me want to keep playing. sure you CAN go out on raids and get the best items and whatnot, but it's all for it's own sake. I struggle to think what a player does once he's reached the level cap. | |
I got to around level 15 or 16 in my trial of World of Warcraft. The game is a yawnfest against Ragnarok Online, since I typically play mage and therefore can take on much stronger dungeons just by evading damage. By comparison, the spellcasting in WoW produces interesting combos but I'm still slowly killing monsters that are at my level, or even below my level. And for all the praise heaped on WoW's quests, the early game quests are all the dullest collection of fetch quests. I guess if you approach WoW after another MMO it loses a LOT of its appeal. I also disliked the graphical style, and found the early game environments to be incredibly dreary and dull. | |
I wouldn't be surprised if thats the normal number across most MMOs. I tried the trial. Realised I had no influence whatsoever on the game world then left. But thats what happens, you cant expect 90% of people to like your game. | |
Numbers are a bit off actually. Most trial accounts are created by gold sellers who usually make up a name like lfgdg and then either: option 2 was removed a while back when they increased the decay rate of pre level 10 corpses to fix this problem. These are TRIAL accounts. Most people using them are not even sure if they wanna play the game. Get me some numbers using fresh accounts being payed for, and I'm pretty sure this number is in excess of 95 percent. | |
It'd be tough to say, since other MMOs don't all have the same pricing model. Someone who plays the WoW trial has to enjoy the game enough that they're willing to spend $40 for the game and then another $15 every month, and that's not even including people who for whatever reason made a trial account but have no intention of purchasing the full game. | |
Sadly, I wouldn't put it past the average person to lose interest/fail at getting to level 10 in wow. Not that it's hard, just...takes time (Not 3 hours though..). | |
| (Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) | |
Extra Punctuation
MovieBob: Intermission
Experienced Points
First Person
Exploding Barrels
Miracle of Sound: Encore
Loading Time
Special Attack
Backchat
Drinking Games
Escape to the Movies
Escapecraft
Escapist News Wrap - Premium
Escapist Podcast
Feed Dump
GinxTV
Jimquisition
LoadingReadyRun
Mahalo
Meatbag and Co
Media Sandwich
Miracle of Sound
No Right Answer
Pro-Gamer Gauntlet
Reviews
Space Janitors
Tales from the Table
The Big Picture
The Escapist Presents
The Retro Show
Trailers
Unskippable
Zero Punctuation
Max Payne 3 Review
Company of Heroes 2
XCOM Enemy Unknown
Black Ops 2
Diablo 3 Review
TERA Review
Firefall Beta Preview
Starhawk Review
Critical Miss
Name Game
Only 30 Percent of WoW Players Get Past Level 10
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.
Permalink