Analyst house Lazard Capital Markets thinks World of Warcraft could lose between 900,000 and 1.6 million players following December's Star Wars: The Old Republic launch.
Half said they cent plan to buy The Old Republic, while a further 38 percent declared an interest in the title, Develop reports.
Worldwide active subscribers to World of Warcraft declined by 800,000 to 10.3 million in the three months ended September 30.
According to Lazard, 33 percent of those polled said the release of WoW's fourth expansion, Mists of Pandaria, would be enough to make them re-subscribe to the MMO.
The Old Republic developer BioWare said in June that it expects its game "will more than compete" with WoW following "a fantastic response" from beta testers.
Comments
12 comments so far...
nologo on 23 Nov '11 said:
i'm 1 of those
RichPerry on 23 Nov '11 said:
Admittedly, I'll be among them. Can't really afford to keep two MMOs going at the same time, especially when none of my friends really play WoW any more.
Bring on the bounty hunters!
liquidphantom on 23 Nov '11 said:
381 out of 10.3 million is hardly a fair assessment of the state of the game it barely even registers as a statistical blip. and the 800,000 recent cancellations could be for a number of reasons not least of which are probably a shift in financial priorities of subscribers.
It's a shoddy survey at best and CVG should know better than to report on such poorly represented statistics.
And no I'm not a WoW fan boy, I really don't care for the game, in actual fact I pre-orded the SWTOR CE. I just detest poor reporting.
nologo on 23 Nov '11 said:
its a good assessment tbh, my entire vanilla wow guild has joined SWTOR - a large number of my current wow guild are going to play. i'm also 1 of those who won't be paying x2 subscriptions... SWTOR until i get bored.
i honestly don't know what more wow can do.. i'm just in the camp of ive played it 2 long..i want change.
i personally would love to see world of starcraft.. even using exactly the same game engine etc as current wow..im just sick of seeing the same stuff.
the new race/class they are introducing will work.. but thats only a short amount of game time.. you can lvl to 30 within a couple of hrs these days..
johnafirth on 23 Nov '11 said:
Like the adverts for soaps, shampoos, skin creams, etc, that claim 80% agree when they only have a sample size of just over 100?
Drusus on 23 Nov '11 said:
Star Trek goes free to play on 17th of january as well and though it's not very user friendly and has it's flaws for free it's very worth playing, the restrictions to it's 'silver/free' accounts are not very strict either you'll get countless hours of free fun gaming.
With Star Trek and SWTOR I can't see myself playing WoW again. Blizzard's Titan is on the horizon and Bungie's Destiny/Tiger can't be long away from an announcement. WoW is going to face it's toughest year but I'm confident it's community will be strong for a good five years yet. Unless Blizzard really screw it up. Plus once they're down to 5 million they can always pop the free to play bubble and gain many more players.
nee50n on 23 Nov '11 said:
381 respondents is perfectly representative number for such a survey. Of course, as long as their sampling models were reasonable.
jukkiz on 23 Nov '11 said:
I think everybody who wanted one, got a beta key for the stress test next weekend. After that, that number falls down to about 1600 WoW players.
Yeah. It's that bad. Honestly.
(Well, not necessarily bad. Just boring as watching paint dry.)
And no, I don't play WoW. I'm just waiting for other MMO's (that shall remain nameless) that are going to bring something new to the table.
Blumiere on 23 Nov '11 said:
I was thinking about dropping WoW for this as I do like The Old Republic games but on the other hand, many of the features in MoP (next expansion) have grabbed my attention, so ta-ta Star Wars, you tried but failed.
almanac2015 on 23 Nov '11 said:
I have absolutely no interest in the Star Wars MMO because I bloody hate Star Wars. What I've seen of it doesn't look special really, but I hope the people who buy it enjoy it. But when an MMO is released, WoW players are always going to give it a go. Fact is though, a fair amount will come back. Just like they'll come back for MoP. There's no doubt at all that WoW is in decline at the moment, but the situation with Old Republic isn't new.
WoW has bored me this year though. I look forward to 4.3 and Mists of Pandaria.
damoxuk on 23 Nov '11 said:
As cataclysm soured my interest in Wow from playing it since day 1 i'll be checking out Old Republic but if that doesn't gel with me it looks like the MMO genre is dead to me
goku_ssj_uk on 23 Nov '11 said:
I have been playing WoW for 5 years, been wanting to play SWTOR for 2 years and now it's really close I am going to be playing this weekend in the Beta to see how it is/if it will run well and then make up my mind based on that.
Pre-ordered so I will get a free 5 days playing if I need more persuading, then getting the game and a free 30 days which comes with it so I have plenty of time to decide if I want to play more SWTOR. Bad thing is I already signed for the WOW annual pass and agreed to pay for a year, though if SWTOR does make me play it over WOW then I guess I wont mind skipping a few months of WOW and can find a way to pay for both
Love what they are doing with SWTOR tbh, been a fan of the KOTOR games and Bioware for years. If anyone can take a shot at WOW's subs, it's them.