Sep 12, 2008
Is World of Warcraft Near Its Plateau? [A Semi-Scientific Analysis]
by windshell
Despite that fact that WoW’s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, is expected to be released this holiday season and despite all excitement about it, the question about WoW’s popularity peak should be raised.
It's more or less known that MMO games lifecycles have three general phases of subscription growth: acquisition, plateau and decline, as shown on the picture.
Picture from MMOGchart.com
First or the Acquisition Phase starts with launch and is marked by a rapid rise in subscriptions.
Second or Plateau Phase is literal plateau portion of the top of the chart, where the number of new subscribers each month roughly equals those who stopped playing. Eventually, the game starts to lose consistently more subscribers than it acquires each month. That puts the game into the decline phase, which is the third and the last phase of the lifecycle.
Decline Phase can last for years before an MMO game is finally shut down.
Let’s look what does WoW's subscription curve look like. MMOG Chart got this data from Blizzard press releases and various pieces of information about subscription estimates in North America, Europe and Asia.
Picture from MMOGchart.com
As you can see, according to the data from each of the three regions, subscriptions have been growing since WoW's November 2004 launch, with a slight dip in Europe in late 2005. Growth in Asia has far exceeded North America and Europe, mostly because of China's huge gaming population and Asia's history of large MMOGs before WoW, particularly Lineage.
Furthermore, WoW's initial growth finally slowed by mid-2006, with subscription rise in January 2007, with news of The Buring Crusade expansion coming.
Also, each holiday period in all three years shown, has seen a boost in subscriptions, mostly because Blizzard was very aggressive with advertising during that period and first expansion has been released. So no wonder that holiday is again great time for next expansion.
Based on the MMOG Chart data, it's hard to say that WoW has reached the plateau phase. The game grew by roughly 2 million worldwide subscribers in the last year. Information about subscription numbers in 2008 still isn’t available, but it's clear that Blizzard is still aggressively trying to grow the WoW subscriber base.
Good indicator of growth in 2008 is available in the following chart taken from Warcraft Realms, a site that tracks player activity each month since May 2005.
Picture from WarcraftRealms.com
Check the shape of the chart. You’ll notice the same growth pattern from the game's launch to December 2006. Then, the release of The Burning Crusade in January 2007 shows a huge increase in active players, with the decrease that follows until new holiday season, where you can see growth again that coincides with the annual Blizzard holiday WoW marketing campaign.
According to the data given in chart, number of players in June 2008 has fallen to slightly above where it was in December 2006, before The Burning Crusade has been launched.
This chart estimates the number of active players, so it does not necessarily reflect a drop in subscriptions. The fact that the growth has not been steady since The Burning Crusade's release, makes the room for the idea that WoW has entered a plateau phase again.
Based on the brief analysis of the data provided in the chart, the current 10+ million subscriber base and their reaction to to previous expansion, The Burning Crusade release, it is quite possible that Wrath of the Lich King expansion will sell at least 1.5 million copies in the U.S. alone in the first days of release, and an additional two to three times that number in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world combined.
Wrath of the Lich King will certainly retain most existing subscribers, and it will likely lure back those members who quit playing as well.
It's very likely that WoW will pass 11 million worldwide subscribers by mid 2009.
What is guaranteed is that a huge spike in the number of active players will follow the Wrath of the Lich King release, and subscriber numbers will skyrocket as well.
But according to the data from2008, it is likely that active players might level-off again.
If at the end of 2009 WoW's total subscription is less than 10 percent higher than it was when 2009 started, WoW will probably enter its plateau phase.
But even if that happens, and WoW in a few years declines into a steady state, it will probably still have three or four million worldwide subscribers, and still be profitable game.
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