Blizzard is breathlessly proclaiming this morning that World of Warcraft Shadowlands is the fastest-selling PC game of all time, by virtue of its having sold 3.7M units globally between when preorders went live November 1st, 2019, and its launch just before Thanksgiving 2020. Whether you think a year of preorders counts as fast, of course, is up to you. Either way, you probably knew an announcement like that that was coming since the company was already talking up its preorder count, but now it’s official, or as official as Blizzard can make it alone.
The company’s press release includes another bowl of word soup that builds on some of the more vague “engagement” claims made during quarterly releases.
“In the months leading up to the expansion’s release and the time since launch, the game reached and has sustained its highest number of players on monthly or longer-term subscriptions compared to the same period ahead of and following any WoW expansion in the past decade, in both the West and the East. Players have spent more time in Azeroth year to date than in the same period of any of the last 10 years. In addition, total player time in game this year to date has nearly doubled compared to the same period last year.”
We’re assuming the pandemic is probably largely responsible for the massive playtime bump this year, but the key words in the rest are “in the last decade” and “last 10 years.” WoW’s peak, of course, came prior to the last decade; the game self-reported over 12M subs back in 2010. The highest sub peak ahead of an expansion the last decade that we know of – before Blizzard started obfuscating its sub numbers as studio-wide MAUs, which have been falling heavily in the last few years – was something in the 9M-10M range ahead of Pandaria (depending on when you start counting). Is Blizzard claiming it had that many subs just prior to Shadowlands? And if so, why not just… say that instead of offering up said bowl of word soup? Who knows. Blizzard gonna Blizzard. Either way, the game is at worst still doing just fine, even setting aside the metrics mischief.
Well Cyberpunk broke their record so it didnt last very long. Not really surprising as anything from CDProjectred is going to have massive appeal and mmorpg, even the big one are hardly going to be in the same league.
3.7 million units sold. Well, of course they did. Yes, some of us did purchase preorder. Ofcourse. It is afterall, World of Warcraft, is it not?
Now, the question really is, are their truly 3.7 human units playing said game as I write about those 3.7 million units that were sold?
For the company with the biggest MMO on earth, they really talk and behave like petty car salesmen.
Not surprised, this expansion is great.
I have to just lol at all the insane mental gymnastics on this site of people trying to convince themselves that WoW is somehow performing poorly. Reminds me of all the Qanon election conspiracy nutjobs.
I think people would be less negative about WoW’s success if it y’know, didn’t also come with the newsline that Blizzard employees can’t afford to eat meals, while the Acti CEO got 40 mil. The success makes me glad for the devs that built the game, but tbh fuck upper management. Not gonna be popping open a bottle of champagne for a company that can’t invest in their employees.
WoW never clicked for me, but I know a bunch of people from my office are getting back into it after not playing for years. Basically they’re launching in perfect conditions for an MMO. It’s winter and covid is getting worse so we’re spending even more time than usual indoors, why not go back to that addicting game you loved that’ll consume months of your life? You’re not going anywhere anyway and you can use the distraction.
Blizzard pay for my game. Not sure if that counts.
MOP is the Negan of WoW… Halfway through MOP is when I quit for like 3 years after having played consistently since Vanilla, and so it was for a lot of people. They will never see those numbers again, and are just obfuscating for the investors.
Has any other PC exclusive sold so many copies this soon after release? Quibbling about pre-order numbers seems like a red herring, since that is the industry standard of how sales numbers are reported. Everyone else is including pre-orders in their numbers.
And yes, WoW’s numbers peaked over 10 years ago… so what? The fact that WoW is putting up the same numbers it did a decade ago is an amazing achievement. How many other games can do that? LOTRO, a newer game, has only 100k players and that was considered rather good around here.
It just baffles me how negative a lot of the most upvoted comments here are. Isn’t this an MMO fansite? Shouldn’t we be pleased when an MMO has an extremely successful launch? We don’t have many of those left in the genre.
It just baffles me how negative a lot of the most upvoted comments here are. Isn’t this an MMO fansite? Shouldn’t we be pleased when an MMO has an extremely successful launch?
It’s only ‘successful’ in their own minds, and what they want folks to believe. The lack of any significant number of players in any specific zone is pretty indicative, I think.
Compared to previous expansions? This one is at density levels similar to what they would be 1.5years in.
Math isn’t hard, you take the number of units sold and release the numbers, which is what they did; I my self am not playing the hell out of Shadowlands but I still bought the expansion.
It’s financially successful, and no ammount of you dismissing will change that.
Sure, that would be great, but this has been industry standard practice for a long time. It’s not like Blizzard is doing anything out of the norm here. Games like FF14 talking about so many million “registered users” and so on.
Except Blizzard doesn’t actually deliver registered users. Or sub numbers. It delivers a company-wide MAU count for all of its titles, a metric that is vaguely defined and has fallen by almost a quarter in the last couple of years. This puts Blizzard somewhere between the companies like ZeniMax and Square and PA that at least give eye-rolly registered counts and the companies that give no data at all. Arguing Blizzard is industry-standard on this front is a stretch. Not for MMOs, and not since it swapped to MAUs to hide its real numbers.
This is kind of the reason why it irks me that the industry still continues to think World of Warcraft is the ‘standard’ for MMORPGs; it’s known ‘peak’ of the game was 10 years ago and the last true recorded numbers were 8 years ago – it’s clearly no longer ‘the best/preferred’ out there otherwise they would shout it from the rooftops.
Plus with these number gymnastics they need to pull a ‘record breaking’ figure, not once but twice, also is irking. They don’t need to do that, they’ve got a stable player count and it’s not even close to ‘dead’ or considered the worst out there; it’s just not ‘big enough’ to be the money gainer they used to be and by basically going ‘well my dad is better than your dad’ in PR statements just comes childlike.
I think the sole reason they ‘need’ to claim these huge ‘successes’ is the major fear they’ll lose investors because like always with any company they’ve over promised ‘massive turnovers’ for years and it’s come biting back on them.
I suppose it depends on what data you find useful. Personally I think MAU is a far more useful metric than registered users, especially to investors.
I am a registered user for FF14, but I only played for about a month a few years ago. I’m not sure how reporting that is a more useful or transparent metric of your game’s health than MAUs.
I think we can agree MAUs are more useful than the ‘registered user’ amount.
The issue with MAUs it doesn’t allow for any other data/information to be found; it’s like if I owned a chicken farm and in a statement said “my farm laid 16,000 eggs in a day”, from that one data point you wouldn’t be able to tell what size were the eggs, were they battery hens or free ranged, what are the ratios between them.
MAUs are just a clever way of saying ‘we have big numbers’ without saying how or why – something an interested party would want to know, but very few actually bother asking, they just see ‘big numbers’ and call it a day
Tbh, I don’t even think MAUs are particularly useful to investors. They certainly haven’t flinched to see the numbers go down and down. Why would they when revenue is going up? Either way, we’re not investors or obligated to look at an MMO’s health through an investment lens. We’re not here to make money off corporate shenanigans.
Getting registered users numbers from year to year allows us to at least calculate how many new players a game is picking up over time (acquisition but not retention or conversion). Concurrency counts are useful for that too. You can track MAUs, and we do, but since Blizzard reports one MAU number for all of its games together and likely counts some players multiple times, it offers only a look into how the studio is doing, now how any one game is doing.
Blizz lost accountability to me when they stopped posting sub numbers for WoW out of spite, because WoD numbers weren’t doing so hot at the time. So Blizz thought it would be “constructive” to hide them…
…it’s a shame really, but to now really get the answer to how well Shadows is doing would be to count box sales plus subs. Outside of that, its really cooking the books PR style, as far as I am concerned.
Hey just to be clear, MOP is explicitly not a fansite. Obviously we love the genre or we wouldn’t be doing this job in the first place, but as a site the way we express that passion is to analyze it and hold its lead actors accountable – to applaud them when they deserve it, and to call it out when they screw up. We’re not partisan cheerleaders! Put another way, we can be thrilled WoW friendos are having fun, pleased a tentpole MMO is doing well (a rising tide lifts all boats), and still call out obvious PR dissembling from studios.
So yes, I have doubts about this PR, and it’s my job to point out those holes. When a PR can say X, it says X. It doesn’t dance around it with modifiers and caveats when it can hand off an easy dramatic headline with a giant number in it. Unfortunately, this is in line with the type of handwaving Blizz does for its investors every three months, and that’s relevant when discussing the game’s fortunes. Skepticism is warranted here.
LOTRO is doing better than assumed after a garbage year full of unforced errors (which we also called its studio out for) – obviously, it doesn’t have the massive revenue or playerbase or staff as Blizz, so expectations for WoW (and Blizz) are exponentially higher.
I don’t know about you but for me, getting complacent with the huge ammount of garbage we deal with in the MMO scene is exactly why this scene is the pit of mediocrity it is.
So, to answer your question? No.
That seems like a low number, but either way, I am loving Shadowlands. It is the most fun I have in a wow expansion. For me Torghast is the best wow content I have played . I know a lot of people don’t like it because it can be really difficult and not really solo friendly. Those are the exact reasons why I love it. Looking forward to the raid this week
I just pull everything to the floor boss then kill it all at once. Whole thing takes like 15 minutes… and you can do it once as you get no further rewards afterwards (and you get all the floor rewards below the one you did so why would you ever do anything below that?)
Dude I am in full Mythic gear and there is no way I could pull a whole floor and kill everything. If I pull one extra pack it is a wipe. I hear it is much easier for some classes but I have tried t3 about 15 times and finished twice. It felt like an accomplishment when I finished too.