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Comment by Goronmon | Hacker News Reader

The company's massively popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game has struggled in the past year, slipping to 10.2 million subscribers through the end of December.

I'm not sure "struggled" is the word they were looking for there.

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Without Googling for statistics wasn't WoW peaking around 13mill subscribers?

A ~20% decline is seemingly quite a massive hit if you ask me and would definitely warrant a few layoffs.

Sure, subscriptions may have declined quite a bit, but I think it's a bit silly to call the game "struggling" considering it's position in the market.

If you're slowly-but-surely losing subscribers, going through downsizing, laying off developers, from a business perspecitive it's "struggling".

I imagine the implied turn of phrase was actually "struggled to make the numbers". As TheCapn pointed out, an unaccounted for 20% drop in plans is bound to shake things up a little.

If you have a look at how player numbers have declined for any other mmo, their numbers are amazing. Can't forget that WoW come out in 2004, the life span of most games is measured in months.

The game doesn't hold people's interest indefinitely, even of it is a lot longer than most games and probably most people who would want to try the game already have. Also competition is way higher than it was in 2004.

Well, you can only play a game for so long before getting tired of it. Sure, it's a huge world. But every world dies at one point, and WoW is no different.

they will come back eventually. the last expansion came out in late 2010 and the next is due this fall(not exactly sure). thats the way wow works. people get fed up afeter some time without enw content and then rush back when theres something new.

The peak subscriber count I could find was 13 million[1] in 2009. Dropping 3 million customers at $12-15/mo would be scary for any company.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/EdwardHunter/20090924/3179/Wo...

"scary" depends on your perspective. The way I look at it, the fact that they still have ~10 million customers for WoW is damn near a miracle -- this is a game that came out in 2004!

Surely they know nothing lasts forever, which is why they are working on that other MMO. I have to believe they are smart enough there that this eventual dropoff was too expected to be "scary".

Also, it isn't like WoW is the only thing they have going on. Starcraft 2 was a big hit, and Diablo 3 likely will be too.

Actually Starcraft 2 failed in its target group: South Korea, the original is still king in The Land of The Morning Calm. Blizzard screwed themselves over with the requirement of being online to play.

The original and Warcraft 3 are still very heavily played in the ubiquitous PC방 (an internet cafe but darker, allows smoking, 24 hour and focused on gaming). Recently, Starcraft 2 is getting even less love from Koreans because Blizzard either opened up the login process or merged servers which has allowed far more Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese players onto the servers (which is affecting pings and causing more games to lag out). I saw one other guy in a 300 seat PC방 playing Starcraft 2 while I saw about 50% of people playing Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3.

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