James Brightman for GamesIndustry.biz:
One of the standout data points from Activision’s earnings announcement today was that the company’s subscription numbers for World of Warcraft have fallen by more than a million in just the last three months. WoW now stands at just 9.1 million subs, but that isn’t making Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime nervous.
Morhaime said on the investors call that it’s actually quite normal with each WoW expansion pack for players to drop off. Moreover, this time around, before Blizzard launches the Mists of Pandaria expansion, Blizzard fans were pre-occupied with Diablo III, which Morhaime acknowledged had an impact on WoW as well.
Diablo III got off to a rocky start – players have complained about the game’s requirement to keep a live Internet connection to Blizzard’s servers (as a form of copy protection and to keep cheating to a minimum), Blizzard’s slow activation of an auction house, and other issues.
I hope it comes back, but I think we may have seen peak WoW. My guild went from running three raid teams to having maybe five people on during peak times over the course of the Cataclysm expansion.
This sounds like when the iPhone started to kill the iPod. Jobs and team weren’t concerned with cannibalization as long as it was one of their products doing it. Seems weak that this guy is trying to make excuses. He should have trumpeted the fact that they made a game good enough to pull players out of their previous blockbuster. “yeah Diablo 3 is killing WoW, isn’t that great!” would have been a better reply to the question.
I never really like the WoW franchise, I am a huge StarCraft II fan though. Diablo III is okay, it did suck the first few weeks while they fixed things, but I have not had many problems with Diablo III since.
They need to go ahead and bring WoW, StarCraft and Diablo to the iPad!