Best selling PC game for July: World of Warcraft

On the list of best selling PC games for July 2006, World of Warcraft takes spot #1. Which isn't bad for a game in it's 23rd month. But it made me think about the demographics of WoW, in terms of new and old players.

It used to be that Blizzard announced new records of subscription numbers nearly every month. But this has slowed down. Beginning of this year WoW had 6 million subscribers, and in May it had 6.5 million, and it seems it never hit the 7 million subscribers mark. It is probably fair to say that the subscription numbers of WoW are stable for the moment, neither rising nor falling much.

Now if we put record sales and stable subscription numbers together, we arrive at the conclusion that lots of players are leaving World of Warcraft every month. Which, frankly, isn't surprising. WoW is a very good game, and MMORPGs tend to keep a players attention for longer than single player games. But people leaving a MMORPG after over a year-and-a-half isn't unusual.

A MMORPG has two parts: the "basic repetitive unit", which in the case of WoW is a combat, and the content, which in the case of WoW is the quests and the zones. World of Warcraft did an excellent job in making combat fun, and quite different for the different character classes. But as the "basic repetitive unit" term implies, you do quite a lot of combats in every game session. If you played World of Warcraft since November 2004, you have done thousands and thousands of combats, and even if you played alts of different character classes, there isn't much more what is new to discover in combat.

The content is both a strong and a weak point of World of Warcraft. The total amount of content when the game was released was already huge, which is good. But the rate at which new content was added to the game wasn't all that high, and much of the recently added content (like Naxxramas) is not accessible to the majority of players. So WoW is living on borrowed time, people leave when they get bored. And they get bored when neither combat nor content is offering them anything new.

That is somewhat different than what happened with Everquest. I personally, and many people I know, left Everquest because while there was still a huge amount of content I hadn't seen in the game, that content didn't seem accessible. If you don't level in a month of playing, you just tend to give up. Of course some people are more resistant to such frustration, or level faster because they can play more hours per month. New Everquest expansions didn't tempt me, because they only offered new content for levels I had no hope of ever reaching.

That brings us to the World of Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade. It is pretty safe to say that most of the players who left WoW did so after reaching level 60. The content of the Burning Crusade *is* accessible to the average player. For anybody who enjoyed leveling his character from 1 to 60, but didn't enjoy the level 60 end game, the expansion promises more of the fun leveling content from 60 to 70. And for everybody who liked the level 60 raiding end game, the expansion promises a new level 70 raiding end game, with new raid dungeons and new phat loot. Thus the expansion offers something for pretty much everybody.

So it is predictable that the Burning Crusade expansion will cause quite a lot of players to resubscribe to World of Warcraft, renewing their cancelled subscription. Because lack of content is easily remedied with new content. The number of people who found leveling to 60 too hard and wouldn't want to level to 70 is probably rather small. The downside of lots of people resubscribing will be an increased load on the servers. Blizzard seems to be aware of that, and announced an increase in server capacity and numbers of players per server by 25%. But the first week after the release will certainly be rather chaotic. Maybe *that* would be a good time to take a break from WoW. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:09 AM Permanent Link