Activision posted a rise in sales and a massive jump in profits for the three months ended September 30, but the "lone blemish on the quarter was a significant decline in World of Warcraft subscribers".
"They further specified that a majority of the decline in active accounts was 'coming from the East', i.e. mostly from China."
Last month, Blizzard announced the fourth expansion for World of Warcraft, the long-rumoured Mists of Pandaria. It will introduce the panda-like Pandaren as a playable race, add a new player class and up the level cap to 90, among other features.
Of course, World of Warcraft also has upcoming competition from December release Star Wars: The Old Republic. Developer BioWare thinks its game "will more than compete" with WoW following "a fantastic response" from beta testers.
But analyst Creutz delivered a pretty damning hands-on impression of The Old Republic back in June, when he described the game as "highly derivative" of World of Warcraft.
"We got hands-on time with the game, and were largely unimpressed," he wrote. "Despite promises from EA/Bioware that the title represents a major step forward in MMO design, what we saw was essentially a World of Warcraft clone with Star Wars character skins and the Bioware RPG nice/nasty dialogue tree mechanism bolted on for non-player character conversations."
Comments
12 comments so far...
DAEDALUS79 on 9 Nov '11 said:
Has there been a sudden influx in fat kids dying?
03b2wgm on 9 Nov '11 said:
I guess 10.3 million subscribers for any game still isn't bad.
clayf1ghter on 9 Nov '11 said:
Both my bro's have been playing this since day one and they play nothing else. I've keep telling them about the 5 years of gaming goodness that they've missed out on but it's like talking to a brick wall.
It's like gaming crack to them!!
Blumiere on 9 Nov '11 said:
Good, hopefully all the jackasses who plague WoW leave, its worse than Xbox Live for its prick to decent person ratio thesedays.
hi0marc on 9 Nov '11 said:
I think i know the only person who has (re)subscribed to it in the last few months.
We mock him plenty.
almanac2015 on 9 Nov '11 said:
Warcraft numbers rise and fall. Big rise when Cataclysm came out, then a big fall. When MoP comes out, it'll rise again.
f**k all has been going on in WoW however. With Skyrim out in 2 days I'll be cancelling my WoW subscription for a couple of weeks, though will pick it back up a little into Patch 4.3 undoubtedly.
Imaduck on 9 Nov '11 said:
Activision will soon be done with Blizzard and confine them to the washout pipe. You wait and see.
damoxuk on 9 Nov '11 said:
I played Wow for hours a day until Catacylsum expansion which in my eyes made the game well crap.
I ended up playing less and less and not played it at all in over 2 months.
Might get Old repupblic or just get skyrim and play that during my xmas break.
verynaughtyboy on 9 Nov '11 said:
I reckon the decline is due to to the governments cutting peoples benefits! They are either going to have to quit WoW or get jobs - Bet that is a harder decision than they've ever had to make in game!
liquidphantom on 9 Nov '11 said:
I have a Job... and some semblance of a life, so hardly played it and from what I did play, I can't see what all the fuss is about. It's like Disney meets Lord of the Rings with angry ADHD kiddies.
King Bohan on 9 Nov '11 said:
Good! It‘s about time this geekfest was put to rest!
nash121 on 9 Nov '11 said:
I loved this game at the start then I had a break and couldn't get back into it, its just not for the casual gamer which I turned into but I wish it was!
I wonder out of the 10m people on it are just people that signed up and just haven't cancelled...