Now, that's not to say that Azeroth is doomed to complete shutdown any time soon. After all, 7.7 million people is still a lot of people. By way of comparison, if Azeroth were an actual country, where all the players lived at the same time, it would have a population slightly smaller than that of Switzerland. At last report it's also still the world's greatest in terms of gamer population, the number one MMO on the face of the Earth. And this slice of bad news wasn't enough to stop Activision Blizzard, the game's parent company, which recently announced that it had beat its earnings outlook. Indeed, Activision Blizzard is looking to augment its flagship MMO title with a new digital card game called "Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft." But still, there's the proverbial elephant in the room, as to why gamers are fleeing Azeroth.
It could be an issue of the overall economy. There's no denying that things aren't looking so great for a lot of people these days, and so, figuring that it may be better to trim some fat, Azeroth may have lost a few residents in favor of games that don't require subscription rates. There are plenty of free-to-play MMO titles out there, so that could have a piece of it. It could be that Azeroth's content is starting to stagnate just a bit; after all, a new expansion hasn't been released since September of 2012, and it's entirely possible some of the core gamers that were on hand for "Mists of Pandaria" may have been run off by now. Or it could be that some gamers are just starting to tire of the World of Warcraft mechanic. Speaking here as a former level 41 dwarf hunter, back even before "Wrath of the Lich King" came out, some players might well come to see World of Warcraft as largely being like a part-time job you actually pay to have.
Couple all these factors together--a little from column "I Don't Have the Money," a little from column "What, Is There No New Content Yet?" and a little from column "Shouldn't I Be Getting Paid For Doing Something This Dull?" and you may well have a reasonable explanation for a good chunk of World of Warcraft's losses. But with a movie still set to arrive in 2014, and a hefty number of players still engaged in the game, is this really that big an issue?
Of course it is. Any time a game shows losses over a long term period of several months like this obviously something is up. It may not be a particularly big problem, or even a problem that Activision Blizzard could address--clearly we're engaging in a lot of speculation here--but it's likely something to watch all the same. World of Warcraft is still a major affair no matter how anyone chooses to slice the data numbers, but by like token, sustained losses for any length of time should be a cause for concern, if from nothing more than a customer service perspective. Clearly a good chunk of gamers are no longer getting what they want from World of Warcraft. The question of course is, just what is that something, and how can Blizzard get it back, if they even can at all?
