The giant hasn't fallen yet, but it's certainly staggering a bit.
World of Warcraft
has been king of the MMO landscape for the better part of a decade, but
now it seems it might be approaching its twilight years, as despite new
expansions, its subscriber numbers continue to drop.
In a recent call, Bizzard CEO Mike Morhaime
reported that WoW's numbers have dropped from 11.4M to 10.3M active
players, a 10% decline in about six months. That's a fairly sharp drop
for a relatively short amount of time, and it appears factors like
player exhaustion and unwanted gameplay changes could be to blame, as
the newest expansions haven't been received very well. But also a main
contributing factor? Competition, something WoW never really had to deal
with for many years as it was the number one played game by a huge
margin.
But now today we have a new report from League of Legends
which reveals the game has 11.5M active players with as many as 1.3M
concurrent players at a time. To put that in perspective, the newly
released Elder Scrolls: Skyrim has 250,000 concurrent players on Steam, and that's leading all other titles by a mile outside of LoL.
Though League of Legends isn't an MMO
like World of Warcraft, it's a MOBA, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
and it does share some similarities to WoW in terms of genre (heroes and
fantasy creatures and the like) and combat with spells
and hot-keyed abilities. So it might not be a direct competitor the way
another MMO would be, but any game that takes play time away from your
title is a threat, and LoL would seem to be doing just that. Though it
should be noted that Legends is free-to-play while World of Warcraft
still commands a monthly subscription fee.
What's a formerly dominating
franchise to do? Well, even with the long shelf life Blizzard games
have, it's becoming apparent that no amount of expansions can really
turn the tide around for World of Warcraft. The ultimate die hards will
stay no matter what, but Blizzard will likely focus on its other
properties like Diablo 3, Starcraft2, Warcraft 4 and whatever the
secretive "Project Titan" turns out to be as WoW's numbers continue to
drop. The company is in fine shape, but one of its champions is just
getting a little past its prime, and there's no real shame in that.
Via news.yahoo.com
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