Subs down 25%

Best post yet.

I think the bigger question from a player standpoint is how many of those "active subscriptions" are going to disappear the moment the free 30 days poofs.

I can't speak for anyone else, but without something tangible announced between now and then, I'm afraid I'll be one of them.

They repeatedly stated exactly that 'fine print' over and over all over the forums and in the facebook status', etc... how did you miss it?

This is actually more in line with what I'd read (700K). 2 mill?! No way.

Does this news really surprise anyone?

It probably surprises the fans who assured us 1.2 would increase subs. Those same people are here defending a loss of subs as progress, or like the news reports on the economy "everything isn't as bad as we thought, so therefore it's good."

No.

This kind of news needs to WAKE UP the people running things down there at BW. Stop messing around with these fluff features. Implement features that people willing to give you money will pay for. Pro tip: it isn't legacy.

Want to increase subs EA/BW? Server transfers, rated WZ, and class balance that is based on real metrics, not the threshold of whine posts being exceeded by some internally known number. Otherwise watch that churn in shock and awe next quarter.

As a big fan of this game I predicted it was fall to about 1.0 - 1.5 million. Looks like I was about right. I knew 1.7 was too high.

I have no reason to panic or think its going F2P. Its settling out and that's perfectly normal. The haters will barge in and try to spread doom. Haters gonna hate. Sad part is...what kind of sick person gets happy when they see a product decline?

People's livelyhood depends on this game. People's jobs are at stake. Even if a product isn't for me, I don't brag to people about how I don't play it. I've said that since day 1. If you brag about how much you hate this game in the forums for a game you PAID for...you have some serious justification issues. This isn't a war, its a game forum.



As for the game itself...they need to get the cross server PvP and PvE tools up. If they want to rebound those tools are necessary. I'm not going anywhere but I am on a populated server. My guilld has been rather successful so far so they should be fine. I don't see them leaving.

I would probably like to see some "launch servers" close. They should have never opened those in the first place. I had a bad feeling they were opening way too many.

On the positive, anything over 1 million is great in today's market. Rift barely had 250k. I would love to see some of these underdog games flourish, both Rift and TOR. I only say underdogs because WoW still has like 9 million subs. If WoW wasn't in the picture I have no idea what it would look like. GW2 will probably do well with a couple million after the shakeout.

Haha, this must be a troll thread, after all Developer Daniel Erikson clearly stated that subscriber numbers hadnt dropped only a week ago.......

If they follow a sensible business plan, they want to appeal to as wide a range of player base as possible, without doing a nutty and distorting it for a subset of players demands. The game is in fact very casual friendly. I happen to think it is even pretty hardcore friendly, but then again hardcores tend to be very whiny and demanding so they often leave in a huff, but then come back later and reapply their hardcore ways [I call them bipolar subscribers because they tend to sub/consumbe/unsub in cycles].

The steady playerbase will be joe average MMO player who enjoys it for it's fun and entertainment, maybe more so for the IP in this case. The bipolar subscribers are kind of the bane of all MMOs IMO, so they will come and go. I've watched them do it in several MMOs now, so it will happen here as well. They are easy to spot, as they are the vocal impatient demanding crowd you see in the MMOs forum.

Comparing the number of subs to the end of December is a little misleading anyway all of the subs at the end of December were in the free-trial phase of game. I would expect a significant number of people to not last a few months into paid gametime status. When you're talking about people that actually never entered paid game time, then it's misleading to say that their sub was "lost". From a monetary standpoint, those type of people never established that they were willing to pay for a sub in the first place. So I'd be curious to know how much of that 25% was made up of people who never actually ended up paying for a sub at all. If you want to look at trends to predict the overall health and future of the game, then you'd really need to compare how many people have actually paid for sub time and how many of those people still have an active sub right now.

ok, but I'm pretty sure they make a heap of money out of it and rumors are they are up to acquire Funcom, as they acquired Bio