Originally posted by scorpex-x Everyone that doesnt like wow can play one of the niche titles, problem with niche titles is they almost all struggle to remain profitable.
The only benefit to having niche tastes is that you can see how you diverge from mass appeal tastes by the tiny nature of games you like. The MMORPG hobby is the domain of the more societal creature with tastes that run the middle of the road. Everyone else is Not Supported.
MMORPG players are often like Hobbits: They don't like Adventures
Originally posted by scorpex-x Wow does everything correctly, this is why they are still top. In a crowded field they are still king so to say they are doing anything wrong is stupid, they have numbers to prove silly arguments wrong.
More content is not a plus, it overwhelms your players. They know this, if more content was a plus they would do it to make more money due to attracting more players. More content is a negative, they add it at the perfect rate.
Fixing or updating things that dont need updating would be stupid, if you're a massive success you stick to what people like.
Wow is king because it does everything well and the devs have enough self control to not ruin what they have.
Fancy graphics, amazing combat or massive amounts of new content do not make a game successful.
Coming from someone who played WoW for all of 20 minutes sometime shortly after launch, can you tell me if their design philosophy was always bullet proof, or did they make any mistakes and just corrected? I hear people talk about Vanilla and all that, so did they actually have the flawless ascension you describe, or did the game just manage to grab a giant market and now maintains that audience by simply not offending their appetite?
So many people play WoW, leave, but report going back to it because it is what is familiar. That doesn't sound like anything other than homeostasis to me.
I reckon that if you ONLY played a game for 20 minutes, you simply lack the knowledge to see the difference with the ones that you know.
You hear, you smell, you post, but perhaps you should play its end game first.
Not hard to do: you have a level 90 for free when buying WoD and since you "played for 20 minutes" somewhere in WOW Vanilla (after launch) your account gets every content up to lvl 90 for free...
So instead of howling with the usual wolves, it is about time you played its end game these days and come up with ORIGINAL thoughts instead of reading some forum talk from the usual suspects.
The FIRST thing you'll notice is that players are everywhere. TY seamless connected open world play.
The SECOND thing you'll notice is that WOW has fluid/responsive movement.
Of course you may like niche products.
But liking something without knowing the BIG game in the center is not very intelligent either.
Wow is a turd but it's been around for so long, nobody leaves. It's like these forums. They are basically garbage but I've been on them for so long I still visit them.
Originally posted by Bladestrom Does wow have the best graphics in the genre - nope.
Does wow have the richest skillset in the genre - nope.
Does wow have finest control over balancing gameplay - nope.
Does wow have the most active open world in the genre - nope.
Does wow have the friendliest community on the genre - nope.
Does wow have the best pvp in the genre - nope.
Does wow have the best crafting in the genre - nope.
Does wow have the best raiding, close call with rift and ff.
What wow has is good animations.
So yup Wildly successful subscription rate.
I would agree except wow also has the best raiding, I would just hard commit to that as well. The animations though - I am baffled how no games really come close to WoW.
It's why I say stop chasing the graphics and focus more on game quality and polish. Animations have a lot to do with that.
Poor animations (ESO) makes good graphics irrelevant, it's like playing a game with paper cut outs.
This is such a laughable debate... you hate WoW, you don't play WoW, but you don't like anything else that's out there either, thus WoW is king because for 10 years someone has been playing it?
Really people... WoW's success is not based on the number of players who choose to play WoW over other MMOs, but rather the number of players who play WoW. There's a big difference between shopping for a new MMO and merely playing the same game you've always played because that's all you know. These people don't intend to play anything else regardless of what may be released today or any other day. They'll play WoW like a religion until death do they part.
Wow is a turd but it's been around for so long, nobody leaves. It's like these forums. They are basically garbage but I've been on them for so long I still visit them.
10 million people disagree with you.
Not to say you're wrong. Just to say thats just your minority opinion.
Originally posted by scorpex-x Originally posted by Foomerang
Wow is a turd but it's been around for so long, nobody leaves. It's like these forums. They are basically garbage but I've been on them for so long I still visit them.
10 million people disagree with you.
Not to say you're wrong. Just to say thats just your minority opinion.
Is it? The game has sold over 100 million copies and less than 10% stick around. I would say the majority have moved on.
Originally posted by scorpex-x Originally posted by Foomerang
Wow is a turd but it's been around for so long, nobody leaves. It's like these forums. They are basically garbage but I've been on them for so long I still visit them.
10 million people disagree with you.
Not to say you're wrong. Just to say thats just your minority opinion.
Is it? The game has sold over 100 million copies and less than 10% stick around. I would say the majority have moved on.
In a time and age where NOT ONE single game has a fixed subscription rate , I think that's pretty impressive ... after 10 years. Forget even EVE has it has PLEX to pay for subs...
The rest is free to play or B2P, while in 2014 WOW closed with 10 million paying subscriptions.
Not even CoD Elite could sustain a subscription for more than 2 years.
Me thinks you just ran out of arguments.
Actually what you see here is that WOW OUTPERFORMS with a SUBSCRIPTION every other MMO game that's free to play or buy to play by a LONG LONG LONG shot.
That's freightening and telling everything about the so called "quality" of the usual duds you see hyped over here.
In fact the situation (and gap) gets worse and worse with every year passing. Instead of 1 million you see now games with 400K in their launching months and instead of holding it out for 2 years, they hardly make it to 6 months before turning F2P these days...
Originally posted by Bladestrom There are more players playing other MMO than wow. Don't worry about the dinasaur, let it plod along while the majority have fun with more modern games.
So you are comparing the entire MMO genre to WoW? I can't comment about the current situation but there was a point at which WoW actually had more than 50% of all MMO players, making it bigger than all MMOs combined.
Now it's really difficult to measure how much those players who play F2P games are "worth". It's like with the ios and android thing. Android is 80% of the market, apple has around 18% yet Apple earn more profit than all major android manufacturers combined. How many cheap android phones equate to one iphone? 3? 5?
WoW is the only wildly succesful P2P MMO. It's quite telling when every single MMO except EVE and FFXIV have to go F2P.
You forgot, they "redefined" the MMO to include farmville, and basically any game with an online component in which more than 2 players interact in the same instance. So, now the "MMO" genre has like 120 million players. Players have also been redefined to include anybody who has spent more than 1 minute online in a month. So, those super poor south american or central asian kids who might play 3 games of LoL or Dota in an internet cafe in a month now count as an MMO player.
You and i both know that ACTUAL mmo playerbase is around 30 million players, which means WOW still has roughly 1/3 of the playerbase.
What i think is most telling is that the subscription model is absolutely still a perfectly good model, you just have to actually provide a product that people feel is worth $15/mo. And sadly, not one example of that has come out in the last roughly 10 years.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Originally posted by Bladestrom Yep and nope (30 million +) and who cares how much of an audiance 1 game has, it doesnt affect choice, although ths investment blizzard suckles from subs would be better used improving the mediocrity.
I think Blizzard are already at a point where they don't know what to do with WoW. At this point it feels like they are only adding more raids, zones and quests just because the game is ultra successful and tons of people pay them truckload of money in subs and for expansions.
In the entire 10 years of WoW, we haven't seen any new systems or mechanics which would expand character progression or the way you play the game. They could've added:
- an alternate progression systems
- heroic specs/classes which they once talked about
- revamped crafting completely to not be so mindnumbing
- something similar to GW2's WvW and ESO's RVR
- world events aka rift/gw2
- housing
There are tons of stuff they could've done to expand their core gameplay beyond just raiding in PVE and battlegrounds/arenas for PvP.
Things which were great but they should've had more stuff like it:
- archaelogy to promote world exploration
- pet battles
They should've just included tons of alternatives.
I think at this point they only care about recycling the same type of content until people stop playing lol. But people just don't want to stop playing WoW.
The blizzard forums are blowing up at the moment complaining about the current end game in WoD. I think things have finally come to head in WoW. The game hasn't innovated at all and it is starting to show. Players are leaving in droves many long time subscribers.
Yes OP it's an awesome title and has been for years, but it's nothing new to post and gloat about. I'm pretty sure all members of this site know it's popularity and to me it's just posting common knowledge.
Why is WoW popular? It released in a time when folks needed a good mmorpg and it built a huge playerbase. That base of people have held on to each other and it's because of that community it became so popular. Of course, this is my opinion!
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
It reminds me of these mmorpg.com posters who back in late 2007 stated WOW would be down to 1 million subscribers in 2010.
I am willing to post the link.
But it is much more fun to see these posters continue to up up their efforts.
Froums are around 0.001% of the active players of WOW and ... it was pretty clear already in MoP, 6-7 million was the very low bottom of the game.
2016: World of Warcraft the movie.
Don't let me explain why this game will probably outlive most of us anyway.
it is like asking for the end of Superman or Spiderman.
Sure. Keep dreaming but WOW passed already long ago its ciritcal mass to implode. It simply won't happen as the franchise will go into the next century even.
10 billion bucks. You might as well ask for the moon to blow up.
It reminds me of these mmorpg.com posters who back in late 2007 stated WOW would be down to 1 million subscribers in 2010.
I am willing to post the link.
But it is much more fun to see these posters continue to up up their efforts.
Froums are around 0.001% of the active players of WOW and ... it was pretty clear already in MoP, 6-7 million was the very low bottom of the game.
2016: World of Warcraft the movie.
Don't let me explain why this game will probably outlive most of us anyway.
it is like asking for the end of Superman or Spiderman.
Sure. Keep dreaming but WOW passed already long ago its ciritcal mass to implode. It simply won't happen as the franchise will go into the next century even.
10 billion bucks. You might as well ask for the moon to blow up.
I agree with people who say the genre is in dire need of something good and the titles currently are not up to standard, in-fact I think this can be said of pc games in general... But mmorpg's are possibly in the worst position.
I am actually quite optimistic about the genre though and the reason for this is that the worse it gets, the more chance something very good will crop up because of a gap in the market. You see people love the concept of mmorpg's and always will... Many of us love to play an rpg with an open world which includes thousands of other people, and will continue to do so.
Developers are just currently stuck with tried and tested mechanics and development, they are scared to take a chance and no wonder because the money and time involved to make a good AAA mmorpg is certainly not low, but someone will do it eventually. Remember the industry of gaming itself is forever growing. We will just have to wait it out and keep on the prowl for that hidden gem or barrier breaking mmorpg.
Started playing mmorpg's in 1996 and have been hooked ever since. It began with Kingdom of Drakkar, Ultima Online, Everquest, DAoC, WoW...
Originally posted by scorpex-x Originally posted by Foomerang
Wow is a turd but it's been around for so long, nobody leaves. It's like these forums. They are basically garbage but I've been on them for so long I still visit them.
10 million people disagree with you.
Not to say you're wrong. Just to say thats just your minority opinion.
Is it? The game has sold over 100 million copies and less than 10% stick around. I would say the majority have moved on.
I believe to 100 million number includes every sign-up for the free trial version which is a very different metric than copies sold.
Originally posted by Bladestrom Yep and nope (30 million +) and who cares how much of an audiance 1 game has, it doesnt affect choice, although ths investment blizzard suckles from subs would be better used improving the mediocrity.
I think Blizzard are already at a point where they don't know what to do with WoW. At this point it feels like they are only adding more raids, zones and quests just because the game is ultra successful and tons of people pay them truckload of money in subs and for expansions.
In the entire 10 years of WoW, we haven't seen any new systems or mechanics which would expand character progression or the way you play the game. They could've added:
- an alternate progression systems
- heroic specs/classes which they once talked about
- revamped crafting completely to not be so mindnumbing
- something similar to GW2's WvW and ESO's RVR
- world events aka rift/gw2
- housing
There are tons of stuff they could've done to expand their core gameplay beyond just raiding in PVE and battlegrounds/arenas for PvP.
Things which were great but they should've had more stuff like it:
- archaelogy to promote world exploration
- pet battles
They should've just included tons of alternatives.
I think at this point they only care about recycling the same type of content until people stop playing lol. But people just don't want to stop playing WoW.
The blizzard forums are blowing up at the moment complaining about the current end game in WoD. I think things have finally come to head in WoW. The game hasn't innovated at all and it is starting to show. Players are leaving in droves many long time subscribers.
People always do, after every expansion. Its meaningless.
Its also worth keeping in mind that mmo players are the worst people to listen to about what mmo players actually want, gw2 was a game made around the foundation of what the player wants. See how that worked out?
Originally posted by Bladestrom Yep and nope (30 million +) and who cares how much of an audiance 1 game has, it doesnt affect choice, although ths investment blizzard suckles from subs would be better used improving the mediocrity.
I think Blizzard are already at a point where they don't know what to do with WoW. At this point it feels like they are only adding more raids, zones and quests just because the game is ultra successful and tons of people pay them truckload of money in subs and for expansions.
In the entire 10 years of WoW, we haven't seen any new systems or mechanics which would expand character progression or the way you play the game. They could've added:
- an alternate progression systems
- heroic specs/classes which they once talked about
- revamped crafting completely to not be so mindnumbing
- something similar to GW2's WvW and ESO's RVR
- world events aka rift/gw2
- housing
There are tons of stuff they could've done to expand their core gameplay beyond just raiding in PVE and battlegrounds/arenas for PvP.
Things which were great but they should've had more stuff like it:
- archaelogy to promote world exploration
- pet battles
They should've just included tons of alternatives.
I think at this point they only care about recycling the same type of content until people stop playing lol. But people just don't want to stop playing WoW.
The blizzard forums are blowing up at the moment complaining about the current end game in WoD. I think things have finally come to head in WoW. The game hasn't innovated at all and it is starting to show. Players are leaving in droves many long time subscribers.
People always do, after every expansion. Its meaningless.
Its also worth keeping in mind that mmo players are the worst people to listen to about what mmo players actually want, gw2 was a game made around the foundation of what the player wants. See how that worked out?
It worked out extremely well. GW2 is one of the most successful titles out, has a great community of players, and is fun to play.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Originally posted by Ludwik Lot of ignorance on that MMO champ thread and this one. Q4 sub numbers are pulled from late December near Christmas.
WoD would have been out just slightly over a month at that point. Not many people cancel in the first month on an expansion especially considering they staggered Highmaul release for LFR.
Call me when the Q1 numbers come out, I'd be far more impressed by 10 mill.
This is somewhat true.
When an MMO gives out its quarterly numbers, it often chooses the peak point of the quarter. That peak point is usually at the end of the month for things that are quantitative, but it's not always necessarily that way. If WoW had 8 million subs at the end of December and 10+ million subs in mid-November, it would almost certainly report that the game has 10+ million subs during Q4.
To say that WoW is holding stable is a farce. They very well could be using the same exact numbers now for their Q4 report as they used back in November to inform everyone they surpassed 10+ million in the first place.
Originally posted by Ludwik Lot of ignorance on that MMO champ thread and this one. Q4 sub numbers are pulled from late December near Christmas.
WoD would have been out just slightly over a month at that point. Not many people cancel in the first month on an expansion especially considering they staggered Highmaul release for LFR.
Call me when the Q1 numbers come out, I'd be far more impressed by 10 mill.
This is somewhat true.
When an MMO gives out its quarterly numbers, it often chooses the peak point of the quarter. That peak point is usually at the end of the month for things that are quantitative, but it's not always necessarily that way. If WoW had 8 million subs at the end of December and 10+ million subs in mid-November, it would almost certainly report that the game has 10+ million subs during Q4.
To say that WoW is holding stable is a farce. They very well could be using the same exact numbers now for their Q4 report as they used back in November to inform everyone they surpassed 10+ million in the first place.
8 million or 10 million, it really doesnt matter. Name another mmo with even 1 single million subs.
Its a 10 year old title with 10 to 20 times as many subs as any other mmo, quibbling over how vast the lead is kinda silly.
Originally posted by scorpex-x Originally posted by Foomerang
Wow is a turd but it's been around for so long, nobody leaves. It's like these forums. They are basically garbage but I've been on them for so long I still visit them.
10 million people disagree with you.
Not to say you're wrong. Just to say thats just your minority opinion.
Is it? The game has sold over 100 million copies and less than 10% stick around. I would say the majority have moved on.
That simple, huh? Ceteris paribus in while tossing various personal/event/life changes over a decade out, right?
Originally posted by Bladestrom There are more players playing other MMO than wow. Don't worry about the dinasaur, let it plod along while the majority have fun with more modern games.
no idea how many of your majority are still left, after you substract WoW's 10 million
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
I dont know if people know how to see this chart but when you see the bigger picture its a big fall after wotlk and there is nothing suggesting that it will pick back up as that last increase shows nothing because it is the release of a new exp thus will obviously get a short increase.
What blizzard has always been doing best is releasing polished games. their exp packs and wow alone have all the essentials a mmo needs. Its not the best at anything it has, it just has almost everything majority of players want.
And then on the other corner there are these games we hype up for and are relesed with such short comings I cant believe devs play their own game. Therefore they all fail before they can fix their faults that they should have included on the launch anyway.
Therefore it is easy to explain the high amount of players in wow. As wow can provide your A,B and C needs at an enough level, you stick with it, and some want more A and they go to game where B and C are almost inexistant resulting in a few mediocre games with lower pop than wow.
How much of a king can WoW be among half assed competition?
In fact, OP's post and the chart are just sad, the only thing they together show is a general decrease of quality and population in the whole MMO industry for the past few years. WoW is only losing subs in the bigger picture, most hyped up games are being released half assed, even pre-released games are being butchered.
Comments
"Everything the light touches is our kingdom" -- Mufasa
---
I don't even know what point you were trying to make here but thanks for such a lovely list of subjective reasons.
The only benefit to having niche tastes is that you can see how you diverge from mass appeal tastes by the tiny nature of games you like. The MMORPG hobby is the domain of the more societal creature with tastes that run the middle of the road. Everyone else is Not Supported.
I reckon that if you ONLY played a game for 20 minutes, you simply lack the knowledge to see the difference with the ones that you know.
You hear, you smell, you post, but perhaps you should play its end game first.
Not hard to do: you have a level 90 for free when buying WoD and since you "played for 20 minutes" somewhere in WOW Vanilla (after launch) your account gets every content up to lvl 90 for free...
So instead of howling with the usual wolves, it is about time you played its end game these days and come up with ORIGINAL thoughts instead of reading some forum talk from the usual suspects.
The FIRST thing you'll notice is that players are everywhere. TY seamless connected open world play.
The SECOND thing you'll notice is that WOW has fluid/responsive movement.
Of course you may like niche products.
But liking something without knowing the BIG game in the center is not very intelligent either.
Wow is a turd but it's been around for so long, nobody leaves. It's like these forums. They are basically garbage but I've been on them for so long I still visit them.
I would agree except wow also has the best raiding, I would just hard commit to that as well. The animations though - I am baffled how no games really come close to WoW.
It's why I say stop chasing the graphics and focus more on game quality and polish. Animations have a lot to do with that.
Poor animations (ESO) makes good graphics irrelevant, it's like playing a game with paper cut outs.
This is such a laughable debate... you hate WoW, you don't play WoW, but you don't like anything else that's out there either, thus WoW is king because for 10 years someone has been playing it?
Really people... WoW's success is not based on the number of players who choose to play WoW over other MMOs, but rather the number of players who play WoW. There's a big difference between shopping for a new MMO and merely playing the same game you've always played because that's all you know. These people don't intend to play anything else regardless of what may be released today or any other day. They'll play WoW like a religion until death do they part.
Originally posted by Foomerang
Wow is a turd but it's been around for so long, nobody leaves. It's like these forums. They are basically garbage but I've been on them for so long I still visit them.
10 million people disagree with you.
Not to say you're wrong. Just to say thats just your minority opinion.
Is it? The game has sold over 100 million copies and less than 10% stick around. I would say the majority have moved on.
In a time and age where NOT ONE single game has a fixed subscription rate , I think that's pretty impressive ... after 10 years. Forget even EVE has it has PLEX to pay for subs...
The rest is free to play or B2P, while in 2014 WOW closed with 10 million paying subscriptions.
Not even CoD Elite could sustain a subscription for more than 2 years.
Me thinks you just ran out of arguments.
Actually what you see here is that WOW OUTPERFORMS with a SUBSCRIPTION every other MMO game that's free to play or buy to play by a LONG LONG LONG shot.
That's freightening and telling everything about the so called "quality" of the usual duds you see hyped over here.
In fact the situation (and gap) gets worse and worse with every year passing. Instead of 1 million you see now games with 400K in their launching months and instead of holding it out for 2 years, they hardly make it to 6 months before turning F2P these days...
that's telling everything really.
You forgot, they "redefined" the MMO to include farmville, and basically any game with an online component in which more than 2 players interact in the same instance. So, now the "MMO" genre has like 120 million players. Players have also been redefined to include anybody who has spent more than 1 minute online in a month. So, those super poor south american or central asian kids who might play 3 games of LoL or Dota in an internet cafe in a month now count as an MMO player.
You and i both know that ACTUAL mmo playerbase is around 30 million players, which means WOW still has roughly 1/3 of the playerbase.
What i think is most telling is that the subscription model is absolutely still a perfectly good model, you just have to actually provide a product that people feel is worth $15/mo. And sadly, not one example of that has come out in the last roughly 10 years.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The blizzard forums are blowing up at the moment complaining about the current end game in WoD. I think things have finally come to head in WoW. The game hasn't innovated at all and it is starting to show. Players are leaving in droves many long time subscribers.
Yes OP it's an awesome title and has been for years, but it's nothing new to post and gloat about. I'm pretty sure all members of this site know it's popularity and to me it's just posting common knowledge.
Why is WoW popular? It released in a time when folks needed a good mmorpg and it built a huge playerbase. That base of people have held on to each other and it's because of that community it became so popular. Of course, this is my opinion!
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
It reminds me of these mmorpg.com posters who back in late 2007 stated WOW would be down to 1 million subscribers in 2010.
I am willing to post the link.
But it is much more fun to see these posters continue to up up their efforts.
Froums are around 0.001% of the active players of WOW and ... it was pretty clear already in MoP, 6-7 million was the very low bottom of the game.
2016: World of Warcraft the movie.
Don't let me explain why this game will probably outlive most of us anyway.
it is like asking for the end of Superman or Spiderman.
Sure. Keep dreaming but WOW passed already long ago its ciritcal mass to implode. It simply won't happen as the franchise will go into the next century even.
10 billion bucks. You might as well ask for the moon to blow up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s13X66BFd8
I agree with people who say the genre is in dire need of something good and the titles currently are not up to standard, in-fact I think this can be said of pc games in general... But mmorpg's are possibly in the worst position.
I am actually quite optimistic about the genre though and the reason for this is that the worse it gets, the more chance something very good will crop up because of a gap in the market. You see people love the concept of mmorpg's and always will... Many of us love to play an rpg with an open world which includes thousands of other people, and will continue to do so.
Developers are just currently stuck with tried and tested mechanics and development, they are scared to take a chance and no wonder because the money and time involved to make a good AAA mmorpg is certainly not low, but someone will do it eventually. Remember the industry of gaming itself is forever growing. We will just have to wait it out and keep on the prowl for that hidden gem or barrier breaking mmorpg.
I believe to 100 million number includes every sign-up for the free trial version which is a very different metric than copies sold.
People always do, after every expansion. Its meaningless.
Its also worth keeping in mind that mmo players are the worst people to listen to about what mmo players actually want, gw2 was a game made around the foundation of what the player wants. See how that worked out?
It worked out extremely well. GW2 is one of the most successful titles out, has a great community of players, and is fun to play.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
This is somewhat true.
When an MMO gives out its quarterly numbers, it often chooses the peak point of the quarter. That peak point is usually at the end of the month for things that are quantitative, but it's not always necessarily that way. If WoW had 8 million subs at the end of December and 10+ million subs in mid-November, it would almost certainly report that the game has 10+ million subs during Q4.
To say that WoW is holding stable is a farce. They very well could be using the same exact numbers now for their Q4 report as they used back in November to inform everyone they surpassed 10+ million in the first place.
8 million or 10 million, it really doesnt matter. Name another mmo with even 1 single million subs.
Its a 10 year old title with 10 to 20 times as many subs as any other mmo, quibbling over how vast the lead is kinda silly.
That simple, huh? Ceteris paribus in while tossing various personal/event/life changes over a decade out, right?
no idea how many of your majority are still left, after you substract WoW's 10 million
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
I dont know if people know how to see this chart but when you see the bigger picture its a big fall after wotlk and there is nothing suggesting that it will pick back up as that last increase shows nothing because it is the release of a new exp thus will obviously get a short increase.
What blizzard has always been doing best is releasing polished games. their exp packs and wow alone have all the essentials a mmo needs. Its not the best at anything it has, it just has almost everything majority of players want.
And then on the other corner there are these games we hype up for and are relesed with such short comings I cant believe devs play their own game. Therefore they all fail before they can fix their faults that they should have included on the launch anyway.
Therefore it is easy to explain the high amount of players in wow. As wow can provide your A,B and C needs at an enough level, you stick with it, and some want more A and they go to game where B and C are almost inexistant resulting in a few mediocre games with lower pop than wow.
How much of a king can WoW be among half assed competition?
In fact, OP's post and the chart are just sad, the only thing they together show is a general decrease of quality and population in the whole MMO industry for the past few years. WoW is only losing subs in the bigger picture, most hyped up games are being released half assed, even pre-released games are being butchered.