In the latest earnings release, World of Warcraft is down to 7.7 Mio subscribers. This means a total loss of 600,000 subscribers from 8.3 Mio last quarter. WoW has definitely seen better days, as at one point they had over 12 million subscribers, and since then that number is rapidly dwindling.
Activision Blizzard Purchases Shares From Vivendi
Activision Blizzard is purchasing 429 Mio shares from Vivendi for $5.8 billion. The purchase is financed with $1.2 billion of cash that was on hand and $4.6 billion of debt proceeds, leaving them with a $1.4 billion of net debt at the end of the deal in September 2013. With huge subscriber drops each quarter, it was not the best time to completely separate from Vivendi.
Countermeasures
The launch of an in-game store by Blizzard in 5.4 which is supposed to offer convenience items, such as the Elixir increasing XP in Asian regions.
Transmog items added to theBlizzard Store. Earlier this month, helmets were added to the online store for $15 each.
It’s time to introduce another AnnualPass, if Blizzard wants to lose less subscribers next quarter. Things look grim for Blizzard. Despite the vastly improved game quality in Mists of Pandaria they still arent able to counter their subscriber drops as more and more players stop playing the game, growing tired of the same content. We know that Titan development was restarted from scratch, this means WoW will need to endure a bit longer.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to WoW’s subscriber rate once Blizzard implements in-game microtransactions. After all, it’s very possible that they could end up driving the subscriber numbers down faster, but at the same time if the people who stay start buying items in-game then it’s possible that those transactions could offset the loss of revenue from the subscribers. Only time will tell. For more information you can visit the official site.
