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300,000 is still very good, I don't think warhammer is gonna die like most mmos | |
As a devoted Games Workshop fan and a WAR beta tester all i can really say is: :S | |
I hope they do well. 300k+ isn't anything to be ashamed of, but I can't help but think it's not what they were hoping for. | |
Oh, it probably won't die completely, but I'd say that unless the WoW team suddenly go collectively insane, it'll be like the other surviving MMOs - strictly niche value with a subscriber base of around 200,000 to 250,000. | |
Is the game actually anything like the warhammer world? | |
Its the closest your'll ever get to the Warhammer IP. Games Workshop were kinda specific that nothing Mythic put in would break the IP. | |
I think the issue is now that most people have seen what happens after playing an MMO for four years and the idea of doing it again is lestened. I loved the Beta and spent the better part of last year waiting for it. However, after 2 months I cant help but feel that I have been here before. I do not consider myself a player of MMOs anymore, which is a shame. I think most the people my age, 25-30, can't justify spending 20 hours a week playing a game, with families and jobs etc. I dont think I could justify spending 20 hours doing any hobby. Just my 10 cents. | |
Warhammer Online has some flaws, or at least it did before my free month ran out around November (too much school work, I never went back to WoW). But it is nothing that can't be fixed. I think that if people give it a year or so it will be able to compete with WoW. | |
I don't understand why WOW has this longevity. Are people returning to it because there's just a comfort factor to consider, or is it truly that far and above its competitors? | |
Comfort. | |
Hahaha I knew it. Every MMO which's main selling point will be "beign better than WoW" will fail just as miserably as AoC and WAR. | |
Atleast it's main selling point wasn't a new haircut? Iguess I fail to see your point Kukul? | |
I really dont get why people are so obsessed with there being an mmorpg that will be better than wow. If something beats wow then everyone will flock to that and it'll just become the new wow and nothing will have changed but a name. As for War it was a great game imo, i would love to play both wow and war but sadly i'm a poor uni student and can only afford the time and money for 1 so i had to go where my friends are. | |
I said it before, and I'll say it again. "OMG........ warhammer dudes. You get to level up and orc\human\other warrior\magicuser\hybrid and then engage in PVE\PVP battle accross the realms... AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALL THE WHILE COLLECTING GEAR I have GOT to get to the store..." I was relentlessly attacked for such statements at the time, during the run up to war. A 60% drop in the member base since launch suggests that I am in fact correct, and fanboiz are in fact fanboiz. I'm not always right, though, I thought Iraq was going to be "ezmode" back in 2003. | |
I suppose again doesn't account for the people who never played any MMOs before, huh? arrogant much I have to agree with Max about the player drop. I know a bunch of people who went to WAR, only to run back to WoW because they had invested more time in it. When you've invested that much time into a game, you'd be reluctant to just leave it | |
I would just like to say....the dam thing doesn't wanna work on my computer. (And no i can run it, it just doesn't wanna work). | |
They need to give high fantasy a break. WoW, AoC, LOTRO and WAR are all pretty similar as far as setting goes. We need something fresh! Where's a Pokemon MMORPG when you need it? OK, I'll settle with Old Republic. Maybe. | |
Ouch. | |
Maybe they should have tried something.. new... rather than yet another fantasy MMORPG. Warhammer or not. Well, Warhammer 40k would have been interesting, for sure. | |
Ya know man, after being a devout player of SWG from the launch to the NGE, and then spending so much of my life in WoW, up until BC, I have been really thinking, what is it that is keeping me from enjoying MMO's? I LOVED warhammer, absolutely connected with the game. But I cannot get past level 24. Why? I just don't have the patience for it. And ya know, your comment basically nailed exactly why. I'm a 25 year old single guy with a daughter that lives with her mom, but still, despite all my free time, I just cannot justify playing the game. You, sir, have hit the nail on the head. | |
...So it's Warhammer 300k? *badumptsh* | |
Sucks, but as MMO's go it was just a bit too samey, and like others have said, leaving WoW is like quitting a job as a professional Gimp. You're job involves you going through hell and mistreating your body but you love it, and just don't want to leave. They're just too rooted in WoW to ever move on. Still hoping for The Old Republic to be good. | |
Hence, again. I don't see why you felt it necessary to get all smarmy. As has been mentioned several times in this thread, more orcs, more humans, more high fantasy. again. Revolutionary game changer it is not. And everyone went right back to wow as soon as wotlk came out. Should have put the development effort into a war40k original ip and hope that more people than disgruntled shaman, tanks, and raid healers would head over. I think we could call it "new game smell." | |
Warhammer Online is a freakin' sweet game. It's pretty and it's fun and it's, well, okay, more of the same fight-PvP-grind business that we've all seen before. It does it well, so we can't fault it for that! Problem is? Everyone plays WoW. EVERYONE. I swear, every single person in my immediate circle of IRL friends plays WoW on some server or another. The reason I keep getting dragged back in? "Hey, I play WoW! Come play with me! I gots a great guild and we shall level and do fun things and C'MON C'MON C'MON" and out comes the credit card for another month... I play MMORPGs for the interaction with others these days, and WoW's got the highest likelyhood of your friends already being there. | |
I loved warhammer, it was a hell of a lot less grind then WoW (well, it didnt feel like grind with the PQ's) i loved WoW to, right up the point in which they fucked up in BC... the reason i quited was that i could not bother to be online everyday x o clock and do stuff... | |
An MMO can absolutely thrive on 300,000 players - if they're budgeted for that. 300k players at $14/month is a nice, solid revenue stream. The trouble is that WoW has created unrealistic expectations for developers (and their investors). Look at EVE Online, though, which is quite proud (and quite successful) with its roughly 300k audience. They had realistic goals and knew better than to jump off a cliff in pursuit of the next "WoW-killer." Maybe Mythic knew better, too, and they can keep their operation running with 300k steady players and occasional spikes and cash infusions when expansions come out. | |
And, yet, nothing of value was lost. | |
I was playing WAR, till they destroyed my character (Engineers were unpopular before, one-trick ponies - now they are just plain useless), didn't give me ORvR I loved so much...
Bzzt, fail. They never said they want to be better than WoW. Especially since 90% of people that left are PvE tards that came, hoping for easy grind and a lot of levels. Then they've found out they have to PvP (IN MY PVP GAME?! NEVER!!) to actually get far in the game.
A 4-months old game having fewer people than a 4,5 year old game? Blasphemies!
All those games you mentioned except for WAR are focused on PvE. Sure, WoW has "pvp". But I don't consider ganking a form of PvP. I still don't get it, why people have to talk about WoW everywhere. The game is freakin' boring, and I'm saying that as a Blizzard and Diablo 2 fan. I don't think I would play it for free, maybe if someone paid me $15 a month... | |
Whoops! Looks like you're a fanboy, since you use such absurd arguments to defend that game. | |
im just waiting for some patching to be done lol :P | |
Like Paul Barnett said, WoW is The Beatles. Try being the Beatles and you'll end up like The Monkeys. WAR is Led Zepplin, the next generation of rock! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! | |
If I wasn't such a cheapskate, I would play WAR, simply because of the IP. Since I am such a cheapskate, its Guild Wars for me (occasionally). | |
It's intriguing that some people believe A high fantasy MMO has to be a WoW clone. To these beautifully, intensely stupid people, I respond with Everquest. Around long, long long before WoW, easily as addictive in its day, and, oh! Lookit that! High Fantasy! No MMoRPG will ever be a "WoW-killer" barring really damn weird circumstances. No MMORPG can stand up to WoW, not at release anyway, for all the reasons people have already given, ESPECIALLY the one regarding time devoted. I just lost all my PS3 data (flipped a switch a half-second too early. At least it was my own fault and not the system killing itself like if I'd bought a 360), and it is crushing. On the one hand, I like Devil May Cry 4 and Resistance: Fall of Man enough to replay them, and getting all the stuff I had back won't be too hard. But Final Fantasy XII? That was 80+ hours of play. And a lot of that time was leveling and sidequests. I have a PS2 and a spare memory card with plenty of space, but right now even thinking about picking the thing up again kicks in a strong aversion for me. And this is a SINGLE-player RPG. I can't imagine one where I have friends involved as well, a ton of stuff, significantly more time and a good deal of my social life, which is to my understanding what WoW is for its players. And since everyone in the entire world who likes MMO's is playing the game, this leaves only a small percentage of people who could be interested in the concept to get involved in any new MMO that comes out. A high fantasy MMORPG is not by needs a WoW clone, and you are a very special kind of stupid if you think it has to be. Emphasis on special. And stupid. Hell, I can just put "WoW fanboy", with the notation that you're embarrassing even that group. But a high fantasy MMO cannot help being compared to WoW, and no matter what that's going to hurt it. And again. Almost every MMORPG fan is already playing WoW. It doesn't really leave you with a big pool to draw from. | |
Yeah, WoW did the standard MMO thang almost perfectly, and so if you want to compete with WoW, you have to break the mold. Though WAR skewed toward PvP and made the leveling grind a little less onerous, it was still the boring hours-wasting MMO grind that I was already long sick of with WoW. A lot of times MMOs are fantasy-themed or space themed chat rooms-- that's fine, nothing wrong with that. Mythic didn't recognize that and failed there. I cancelled my subscriptions to both WoW and WAR the end of December. I can't see going back to WoW--WotLK killed it. NOTHING new in WotLK; just variants of the same thing, and a whole lotta good content was effectively lost between starting area and end-game. Burning Crusade had similar problems but at least we had flying mounts and Illidan is cooler than Arthus. Given the generally low enthusiasm which surrounds WotLK I'm finding it harder and harder to believe Blizzard's numbers. WAR I can see going back to, maybe, someday, if I have that MMO need and nothing better comes along. Heck, the orc choppa already has me curious. Give me an MMO that truly focuses on PvP and almost completely removes leveling (at least PvE leveling) and I'm there. Even a couple of months ago most people on the IGN forums were figuring WAR would stabilize with numbers in the 250k-500k range--it would have been really surprising if things were higher than that. Well WAR was ok. I wish it the best but I never got really passionate about it, unlike WoW, where in its heyday I was. | |
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Warhammer Online Population Drops to 300,000
The population of Warhammer Online has dwindled to 300,000 subscribers, a loss of 500,000 since November, according to figures announced by Electronic Arts yesterday.
"Warhammer Online now has over 300K paying subscribers in North America and Europe," EA revealed yesterday in a conference call. The MMOG had previously built quite a bit of momentum at its launch, boasting around 750,000 users in October and then nearly 800,000 in November. Even then, however, competitor Blizzard was already claiming that the majority of World of Warcraft players who had left to try Warhammer were already flocking back to Azeroth. And that was before the launch of the newest expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King.
Now that Lich King has been out for some time and that WoW has again asserted its dominance in the MMOG game with more than 11 million subscribers, it seems that only the most dedicated of WAR players remain. It's hard to keep an MMOG populated when people keep flocking off to other pastures - the fewer people there are to play with, the less reason there is to stay, regardless of the quality of the content.
Still, those who do decide to stick with WAR won't be left out in the cold. Mythic recently announced a series of major expansions for the game that will be available for all subscribers, including two new classes: the Dwarf Slayer and the Orc Choppa. The new classes will be introduced in a live in-game event this month, as will the rest of the updates for the game later on, which also include a new realm-vs-realm dungeon zone called The Land of the Dead.
Keep in mind that there are more than 300,000 subscribers in the game, as EA states that there are "over 300K." Still, it can't be much more since they didn't say it was 400 or 500K. 300K is still nothing to scoff at, but the massive drop-off has to hurt. I'll have to count myself among those recently departed: I canceled my WAR subscription last week.
[Via Shacknews]
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