Why Are Players Leaving WOW?

An article by Ayelet Noff    3 Comments

I don’t usually cover WOW and other multiplayer games on my blog, but since this game is after all a community, I found the latest news regarding the fact that many US players are leaving to be an interesting story.

Warcraft Realms reports that the overall number of players online at any given time has been dropping since the latest expansion of the game, The Burning Crusade, was released. In May, the average number of US players online during primetime again fell to just over 380,000 players, while the number of EU players online increased to nearly 400,000.

The below chart shows the decline in player activity in the US & EU combined:

Still, after the decline, there are 8,000,000 active primetime players, which is astounding. I am amazed by how extremely popular this game is, how people spend their hard earned cash on WOW characters on ebay, and how many countless hours users spend daily playing this game. Blizzard has done an amazing job making their product as addictive as possible and making it appealing to users of all ages. I must add that even though I am not really into multiplayer gaming, the visuals are simply breathtaking.

The answer to why US players are leaving may be because as one player comments:

“IMO BC isn’t anything special or really new.
Yes, there’s new content, and new instances, blah blah blah. But when it comes down to it, there hasn’t been a lot of real ‘changes’ to the game. I think a lot people want to see something NEW. Something that hasn’t been done in WoW before. If you think about it, all WoW is, is a grinding game that repeats itself. You grind to hit the next lvl cap, then you grind to get the best gear, which entails rep and instance grinding – only so that you can run raids and grind those instances for even better gear. One day you might have all the gear and gold you need. Finally an expansion comes out, and you do it all over again.
There’s gotta be something new Blizzard can add that would actually be DIFFERENT then what we’ve been doing since day one. I’ve never had as much fun as I did when I first started playing WoW. Once I got used to that, it was the same thing at 60, and now in BC.”

So perhaps this is the reason. Perhaps once players reach 70, they feel they have conquered the game. What do you think?

Thanks to Beketchai for this pic.

Technorati tags: wow, world of warcraft, multiplayer games, the burning crusade, gaming, ebay, blizzard