Well, it was bound to happen, eventually. In its latest financial report, Activision revealed that World of Warcraft has lost 1.3 million subscribers in the last three months. Despite that, WoW is still the most famous and profitable subscription-based MMO on the planet, with more than 8.3 million subscribers. However, that decline proves that F2P MMOs are gaining ground, and that it will be tougher for newer games (that are subscription-based) to meet the success of WoW (or even surpass it).
As developers have already stated, F2P is the future and it seems they were right. Lately we’ve seen increases in most F2P games, while the old, subscription-based model is going downhill each and every month that passes by.
As Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, noted:
“While we do believe further declines are likely, and we expect to have fewer subscribers a year than we do today, World of Warcraft remains one of the most successful franchises in the history of entertainment.”
Activision was quite happy with StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm’s sales. As we already know, Blizzard’s expansion to StarCraft 2 has managed to sell more than 1.1 million copies in its first two days. Unfortunately, though, Activision did not reveal how many copies have been sold until now.
In other news, the most – commercially – successful titles for Activision (for the entire quarter, not generally) were Skylanders: Giants and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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