11/19/2011

World of Warcraft's Players Fall Sharply, Surpassed by League of Legends

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.

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