Not Even 2 Million Subs!? Asmongold on "WoW Numbers Don't Lie" | By Bellular

it's weird i haven't watched the bell you're video and so long okay this is going to be a fun video tell me if you've heard something like this recently world of warcraft is facing a mass exodus everyone's leaving the cities are empty the gills are dying and the only people left are the boosters and the boosted it's worse than ever before have you heard something like that yeah because i think we've heard some sentiment like that across the internet you know looking at the forums the social media i think we can all say that it's gone a little bit wrong a little bit the sentimental and anecdotal evidence is uh just actually that useful do it is very useful data numbers no my feelings are stolen today we're going to get into it we're going to break down the numbers for world of warcraft to get an overall picture of the game's health okay now of course blizzard don't share their numbers but we've dug up quite a lot there's a lot of ways you can tell some intuition it's going to be pretty big but like with your intuition which is probably saying that it's time to get a great site together with today's sponsorship yes the vocal change there it is purchased i knew i was about to get hit by an ad squarespace are the fastest and easiest way to get a great looking site quickly i do i wish i had this back in the day 40 minutes just chilling out on the sofa i would be so happy hardly any time to add ecommerce to it it's pretty damn sweet they've got an excellent site builder easy to use tools and incredible templates that are all that you need to get started so start your free trial at squarespace.com forward slash baylor there you go manage all right let's get into these easy juicy numbers okay i'm not going to beat around the bush here this might get a little dry so here's something to wet your eyes extremely valuable that's why i'm on twitch world of warcraft almost certainly has less than 2 million active players right now a generous estimate is around the 1.6 million mark but it could be as low as 1.2 million and that's as of 9.1 by the way these numbers actually don't take into account the recent explosion of bad pr moving from 9.0 to 9.1 world warcraft lost about half of its player base i mean literally half the active characters and half the raiding guilds stopped mythic plus activity is down substantially and pvp pretended what the [ __ ] what the [ __ ] look at that blue line i guess it went away oh it went away because the expansion yeah of course a cliff as has activity there wow player retention is rather in the bin and we do have evidence first boss at a rough estimate just over 10 of active characters actually rate we'll explain that later okay now for blizzard overall user numbers are actually their lowest in years and that's actually in the same quarter as 9.1 and tbc classic that is cool take a second for this when do you think blizzard's numbers have recently been the lowest if you're thinking about sweaty orcs pounding drums i don't expect uh i would say that they probably i think that i think right now they're the lowest than they've ever been i i think right now because the difference between now and 2014 or 15 or 16 whenever wad came out and wod was was the expansion is that there were not a lot of alternatives for other games i think that now because there's a lot of other alternatives it's easier for people to make a switch quickly and then come back later on if they want to mansion cut short then you're right because the last time that blizzard's monthly active users were this low well it was before legion it was before overwatch in q1 2016 they had 26 million monthly active users in q2 2021 despite tbc classic going live and patch nine point one releasing that is crazy they're back down there again at 26 million wow now for a comparison their peak was 46 million in twenty overwatch pumping diablo launching the necromancer yeah and topping off all while legion was in the midst of patch seven point two which was good but that was uh how does this 26 million monthly active users apply to world of warcraft well it's time to bring out our secret weapon reading in between the lines oh because when you're talking about world of warcraft all they said in their investor slides was that net bookings grew driven by tbc classic's launch you know six month subs store mounts and the dark portal pass yeah they did their job right this year's testing users into whales meaning that bleeding players isn't as big a deal to your bottom line no the most important thing is that shadowlands was not mentioned specifically and i think that means that they basically had nothing nice to say to their investors about it yeah it's like if they if they had something good to say about shadowlands like with uh with growth and the patch i think that they probably would have said it you know like that's what makes sense yeah it's not long term though these people don't think long term because they're going to be out of the company in three years and onto another company with a golden parachute and a seven million dollar uh signing bonus so uh or seven figure signing bonus so they don't really give a [ __ ] they don't care so if you want the zingers if you want the numbers in their simplest form then in a way there you go there absolutely has been an exodus across the world and blizzard in general even before the big recent controversies but that's not satisfying is it that doesn't make for a good video and it's not even close to the full story or all of the evidence yeah we have to go deeper it gets worse let's go deeper also better okay here we go blizzard are tight-lipped about individual numbers for their games because that lets them control the narrative thanks to wowranks.io though we know roughly how many characters there are in world of warcraft because the armory api exists and all this data can be scraped in the 28 days before august 2nd there were just over 3 million characters who logged into world of warcraft at least once and belonged to a covenant on february 2nd that same statistic was 6.1 million that is less than half the active characters after six months not good now for context these point what on february that is once holy [ __ ] to a covenant on february 2nd that same statistic was 6.1 million that is less than half the active characters after six months oh my god oh it's so bad oh my god that's a well yeah they said the jailer was thanos apparently he just did the snap off screen it makes sense yeah he he did the snap off screen the same as like most things in the plot happen not good that's crazy now for context these characters must be out of the max level or currently he broke the fourth threads of fate in order to have actually picked a covenant yeah and that's what makes them be included in the data set we can narrow this down and yeah certainly accounting for all right characters have active soul bites because those only become available at level 60. yeah now we only have this figure for the patch 9.1 data and it's 2.7 million now since the real activity of shadowlands is in the end game that's what we can call our active player count holy [ __ ] sorry if you're below max level you absolutely do matter it's just we can't track you we have so does this mean that oh that's insane sixty percent drop-off is and this is account is this accounting or not accounting for alts though yeah i think this doesn't even account for alts like this is including alts as well it does account well how does it account if they said the number was lower i guess they'll explain it later i think this is just characters for these characters how many are alts but if we assume the average is anywhere between 1.5 and 3 alts per player then it does paint a dark picture remember you might only have one character but there are those people with loads of vaults active character warcraft is between one and two million players wow at least in that endgame i see it i understand it now estimate might seem height let me look at this again so there's a little bit over two million active players three alt average oh okay so this is like basically all right so this is like one out of every like i don't know like out of every 10 people every 15 people uh 10 of them have alt or something like that yeah okay that's nuts man that alt estimate might seem high to you but remember it's just max level characters who logged in during the month of a new patch jesus now shadowlines isn't exactly an alt-friendly experience but returning players are almost certainly going to be logging in to other characters at least once for an example on our team matt is pretty sure that he counts for six yes six characters even though really he only read logs in just one character yeah i only really played one grade so that was your zinger there were 2.7 million logged in max level characters during patch launch if we say the average player logged onto two characters and that takes you down to a 1.35 million active end game players to get an even clearer picture 9.1 has had 1.8 million unique characters complete a mythic plus run that number also includes alts all of these things point to a big takeaway world of warcraft basically must be all of these things oh my god i feel like sometimes i worry that like uh i i worry that it's like my fault you know like and like it's not really my fault but like it's like i contributed to like hurting wow i feel bad for it you know i i don't know is that stupid for me to think like i feel bad for doing that bald man bad yeah exactly exactly wow sucks right now yeah it's i know i'm not like i don't cause this to happen no of course not but like it's it it sucks man it hurt itself yeah yeah like like these numbers are just so bad point to a big takeaway world of warcraft basically must be decently below 2 million active players right now also that's only one point of data we've got no historical comparison so to get a better picture right let's go and have more data let's go through it let's talk about in-game activity in world of warcraft and we'll start by looking at the foundational pillar of world warcraft and game raiding our first comparison will be using some recent data from raider io the number of guilds who raided in the point zero patch compared to the 0.1 patch basically tracking how many raiders don't come back for the next patch yeah now while we're talking about guilds remember that raids on normal and heroic can be anywhere between 10 and 30 players in size although medium sizes are usually preferred by people so if you multiply by somewhere between 15 and 20 then you'll have an extremely rough number of uh you know the characters who are involved in raiding anyway let's take a look then i would assume that most raids i'll have on average 14 people in them if i had to guess because i would assume most groups have 10 because that's the that's the least amount of people that you need to get into a group so like most people are going to go as soon as they can get enough people they're going to go directly into it so like 14 or so to counteract people that are like doing it with 20 people etcetera i would say somewhere around 14. in the first month of castle nathria 37 447 guilds killed shriek wing and normal in the first month of sanctum of domination only eighteen thousand five hundred and ninety four killed tara group yeah so basically half of wow's gills did not come back specifically fifty point three five percent didn't come back to use our very very rough estimate of raid size this means anywhere between 560 and 750 000 characters killed shriek wing in that time period but only between 280k and 370k for tara grew oh my god um it's just like this is that's i've never seen i've never seen a drop off this bad in any game and that's what's so crazy about it i i guess like in the game i've seen drop-offs as bad for other games before that's actually not true but for a while i've never seen this happen it's kind of normal i i don't really think so like based off of like what i've seen and like what my experiences with the game is it less people came back for 9.1 then people came back for let's say 7.1 or 8.1 i guess 8.1 is a bad example but like 8.2 that looks a lot this is pretty low uh i'm gonna give you a hot take i don't think the lawsuit is going to have any sort of a tangible impact i think that what you're really seeing is you're seeing a hand it's the same as like the hong kong thing like the hong kong thing everybody said oh my god blizzard's dead after this how can they ever recover they didn't even notice it like the people the people that are making tweets about this right all people on on twitter etc there's just a very very small handful of them like really whenever you whenever you calculate like the entire player base into in into in consideration i'm not saying it doesn't matter but what i'm saying is that i don't think it's going to have a tangible impact where it's like oh after the lawsuit it went way down i don't think that's what happened that's what i'm really trying to say and uh yeah it's like a vocal minority of people because like everybody leaving because of the lawsuit is probably talking about it and everybody not leaving is not talking about it yeah it's uh it's depressing to see [ __ ] like this it really is uh i'm very sad about it but um at the end of the day uh i i do think that it's like it's not our fault right as a community it's it's the developers man like it's a it's a problem it's deserved isn't it that's food for thought out of curiosity we took a look at the same .0 patch 2.1 patch difference but in battle for azeroth the exact same methodology returns a less substantial drop in players only thirty percent over thirty four thousand people killed tallock in old deal only thirty percent of people quit in bfa those are the good days guys remember back whenever only 30 of the percent of the player base quit every patch yeah it's so much better first month and that dropped to 24 000 killing champion or champion of light in desirable champions light was really easy but it does pale in comparison to a whole 50 drop it also means less raining gills in 9.1 than in 8.1 despite there being many more at the launch of shadowlands however it's not all cut i think shadowlands was like really hyped up whenever it came out like more people i think were excited for shadowhands than were excited for bfa numerically patch 8.2 and 8.3 had a lot fewer first boss kills in the first month that's why nine point three nilotha and eternal palace only had 14k come in for those basically free first boss normal kills however it still is lower than 21k for tomb of sargeras which was another too patch messy numbers but the point it just keeps going down shadowlands is performing very poorly for player retention in between the patches time to add in more conduits while we're still on the topic of raiding we do have another figure mid-tier drop-off we've looked at how many people come back to raid for a new patch but how many actually survive to the end of the raid well for this we can look at how many gills got ahead of the curve now three had the worst drop off ever seen despite a record number of guilds trying how many guilds how many people got ahead of the curve yeah sure it only cost uh 20 dollars how much is watt token nowadays i don't know how much gold it is that's insane how much less it is clearing it the percentage that actually got curve was the lowest this red one will go up over time though that doesn't tell you really how players felt about the shadow lands i think nothing can yeah of 41 837 guilds who progressed that's about that zero 22 979 killed dinathius yeah that's just shocking 35 percent is actually similarly bad only 56 of 34 000 kills made it to gahoon that's actually really good that is insanely [ __ ] good because cahoon was a [ __ ] like in my opinion i think cahoon oh actually n'zoth too both of the old god fights were just absolute [ __ ] garbage i hated that fight even now going back and doing g'huun now is still annoying that's how bad the fight was most of the other raids that we've got done oh it was the first month of both raids true so you're saying the data here is shown for this is just the first month wow that's a lot less people 34 000 kills made it to gahoon most of the time i didn't see it we've got das before are in the high 70s so either the 0.0 raids are harder or the less dedicated sort of new expansion players generally don't come back for the later patches and stick with it for ages now the shadow lands his credit more guilds killed daenerys and heroic than any other and boss in modern wow so i guess it's a big shame about sanctum then yeah if you want a tldr for raiding this is it point number one a record number of guilds jumped into castle nathria and a record number stocked through to kill tenacious because people wanted to kill denaturatius dinatharius was an awesome boss like he was a great character like denathrius is an example of blizzard actually just bringing like invent like blizzard just invented dinathrius it's not like there was any foreshadowing for this guy or anything like that they just invented danathrius and he was [ __ ] awesome i really i think he was [ __ ] awesome i liked his it's his personality uh i like the way like he he looked i like like the having like the sword that he would talk to it was just really cool so of course people would want to kill denaturas because he's compelling villain sylvanas people wanted to kill sylvanas if you told the players you can kill that [ __ ] if you finish the raid there there'd be more completion for sylvanas than there ever was but that didn't happen however the proportion of guilds who stayed strawberry thanks for watching fell by almost 50 that's crazy 0.2 then the drop-off in raiding from nathria to sanctum of domination is around 50 and that is significantly worse than the 30 percent drop-off in early bfa point three our very rough estimate of characters who have killed tara grew on normal is between 10 and 13 of the active endgame character count on heroic that shrinks to between eight and ten percent and if we correct for alts that means that somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent of the player's rate if nothing else that proves that there's more to world of warcraft so let's look elsewhere let's look to the land of mythic plus yeah that's the thing is like now people have other ways of getting gear like as i said i don't like mythic plus i think it kind of sucks i think blizzard uh i'm just not a fan of it i wish they would have there's a lot that i have to say about mythic plus and i'm not going to say all of it right now but i just wish that i wish it was more like it was back in wrath where there were harder dungeons that gave better gear because i don't really feel like i'm progressing at all whenever in bfa season four i'm doing the same dungeon against the same mob with the same mechanics that i already did like i just it just it doesn't feel good to me raider dot io is again a very handy resource with notably the unique class population i know a lot of people enjoy it 1.8 million unique characters complete a mythic plus run of those 1.2 million have done a tanner above and 700k have done a 15 or above yeah now remember our figure from earlier that there are approximately 2.7 million active end game characters in 9.1 that's also not counting for people that are buying carries if a whole 1 million of them have not done mythic plus then there are two possible options number one loads of those characters are alts and haven't done m plus yet that's the easiest option and it does cut the projected player countdown substantially yeah kind of lining up with our earlier suggestions two they are unique players but don't actually do mythic plus yeah now since mythic plus is one of the three activities to do in endgame world of warcraft best easiest source of gear for most that doesn't bode well for the game no but it does not unique characters don't tell the whole story what about engagement in the mythic plus system okay thanks to best keystone we can actually track that via completed runs what so here's a look at the three most recent seasons it's early days but the lower starting point for patch 9.1 is instantly apparent you can see battle for azeroth season four started off strong just below a million dungeon runs per week and it fell off slowly over time shadowlands season one for comparison oh it's the yellow bar i see it start but there actually are two factors there factor one is gear scaling mythic zeroes were providing gear for more players for longer before they needed to hop into the keystone dungeons right factor two then is the release date of the expansion because you can really see participation pickup in week five and that is when the christmas period was well and truly over yeah that's where people were playing the game but what's kind of funny about it is that i actually feel like how is it that bfa season four had as much participation in mythic plus as the first patch of an expansion that's what's so crazy to me is like bfa season four had as much it's like the worst of bfa was still higher participation than the best of shadowhands is that it the corruption and that's the thing is like going back at it like looking at bfa season four i actually thought that was fun to play and i'm i'm sorry like it like twilight devastation's dog [ __ ] but it was fun it was really fun it was [ __ ] fun uh there were a few things that were really bad with corruption but i actually thought that corruption was a good mechanic like yeah corruption was a genuinely good mechanic that blizzard stopped doing because they implemented it badly and they didn't cut down bad uh like bad extremes like infinite stars we're here to talk about the current numbers then i think you can see that season 2 was off to a very slow stage oh you guys didn't like it dude i loved it the time or gear barriers exist it's the opposite since players with existing gear can immediately hop into the higher level keys but even in each of the first two weeks only around 720k runs were finished in season one it took until around week 18 to dip that low that's crazy hard to draw a meaningful comparison here but patch 9.1 is trending to be 30 to 50 percent lower in engagement than 8.3 and 9.0 we don't have time in this video to go too deep here but there are other other interesting things like the breakdown of classes and specs in mythic plus is a bit tragic 37 of runs use a guardian druid tank for example and the bottom six dps specs make up for less than four percent of overall dps see this is the uh this is the problem i know you guys can't see it i'll show you the whole thing real quick look at that demonologies to rival farrell was down there at like less than one percent arms fury like that's so crazy that they can have balancing like this it's so crazy that you have because like the reason why the reason why you see breakdowns like this is because the balancing is just completely bad and i understand why and i i made this chart i want to show you guys why balancing is so bad because i was comparing palace of the dead with um a tour guest and this is the way like for for blizzard to balance tour guests they have to accommodate and make content that can fit all of this power gap right here you're getting so many different buffs so many different things so many different items that it's changing your character's power level by so many different ways but in palace of the dead all you really have is your 50 stack at the beginning of the fight with the uh the palm ender of witching or whatever it is or not witching of lust and then you have your 30 percent power palm ender uh strength palm ender that's it so because there's so many variables in wow like you think about it right you have like the speck you have the talents you have the covenant you have the conduits you have the shards of domination now you have all these different things that you have to simultaneously balance together and because of that there's no way like there's like this is to be expected like they're doing a good job and that's the saddest thing they're doing a good job because they're trying to balance 80 different things against each other in three different simultaneous systems like imagine how much easier it would be for blizzard to make content and balance the game if they didn't have all these verticals to work with simultaneously kind of runs use a guardian drawer tank for example and the bottom six dps specs that is why for less than four percent of overall dps they've got about four years so what a pvp pvp now then the last part of our puzzle pvp our first source will be gibbs pvp was huge at the start of the chat alliance hijacked their summary from the end of july pvp participation is down to around one third of what it was in season one this is likely due to the general people leaving but also it's because you're not getting a gear like that's a huge reason pvp gear at the start of shadowhands was insanely good it was ridiculously good and so there's a big part of this that is completely independent from the actual quality of the content so perhaps a lack of pve relevant rewards using a sample of 250k characters they found that 7.3 so far have played a 2v2 4.6 percent have played a 3v3 and 3.3 percent have done an rbg people are like oh no it's not ashman it's because their classes aren't balanced please find me the clack video from every season in bfa where it showed the same clips of people getting one shot they've been they've always been broken they've always been bad let's be honest that's not a lot of participation although the lack of pve rewards i guess could be to blame let's just take a look at the raw numbers then so here is a chart from zunamate tracking the amount of games played each day in season two all right no prizes for guessing when this season started that huge spike of activity fell off extremely sharply before stabilizing that's that is august 8th there are around 18k games of 2v2s 34k games of 3v3s and 8k games of rbgs being played on the daily from may to june it stayed around what i find is really interesting here is how 2v2 was way more popular at the beginning and then it dropped off that's what i think is really interesting there like there's actually less people doing 2v2 now than doing 3v3 that's seven boostings and 1k rpgs i think it's because there's easier to play boosting probably plays a factor for sure numbers from the start of season 1. oh 3v3 is boosting i get it yeah the peaks that's a good point larger in twos and threes and the general falloff is a lot slower we're limited by the numbers we can actually check here but let's use three weeks as our cutoff point three weeks after season one started there were around 80k arena matches and 20k rbg matches being played each day and now at the same point in season two there's around 50k matches for the arena and 8k for rpgs and that is getting close to a 50 overall drop off which roughly does match the rest of our numbers that sucks in conclusion then shadowlands has screwed the pooch that's just what it is we have the numbers the beginning of this expansion had record raid numbers over six million active characters and a healthy blend of pve and pvp for all the quality and systems issues that shadowlands had it did bring people to the game excited and ready for some content i guess the problem is that content never materialized and those systems kind of ran aground once you went more than a few weeks into them the big reason in my opinion is because the content didn't come out fast enough here's the thing if blizzard cut out all of the catch-up mechanisms not all but like 90 of the catch-up mechanisms 80 at least 50 of the catch-up mechanisms and then they also made the raids progressive like you had to do one raid to go to the next raid and then they brought out raids regularly they wouldn't lose players as fast because people would be continuously progressing through the content the problem is fundamentally that you go into the new patch if you come and you play shadowhands right now you come into the game you don't even play castle natharie anymore there's no reason so like final fantasy yes yes and this is the same thing as a burning crusade too burning crusade was great it's that system is heavy expansion and perhaps also the lore direction have just turned people away from world of warcraft the war's a problem now just after 9.1 launch there are almost certainly less than 2 million people playing world of warcraft at least at the end game which really is most of world of warcraft yeah with that drop off basically being across all activity measurements i mean roughly you're speaking half of the characters half the raiding guilds about 30 less mythic plus being completed and about half the engagement in pvp and we haven't even seen where those raid and m plus numbers are going to go over the coming weeks so maybe i'll have to do an update video oh my god now remember by the way these numbers do not include the damage that the lawsuits have done these numbers are pre that the potential to bring people back should still be there with shadowlands i mean it was the fastest selling pc game ever at the time of launch and blizzard's all strategy revolves around explosive expansion marketing and then monetizing content launches with you know your well you've got your jacked up additions you've got your six-month sub-promos things like that but the question is will they be able to sell an expansion to people who have been burned by shadowlands to the fans who feel betrayed by their beloved company's behavior internally i mean is there a a lower hook and a content hook that can actually reclaim all of that lost ground i like how the jailer just like without even really moving his hand he just traps the three of the most powerful [ __ ] people in all of azeroth and we're supposed to know like we're supposed to be like oh yeah we're gonna we're gonna beat him yeah we're totally gonna be yeah we're gonna beat him like how you make that a boss like he's like oh you're in chains now it's fine is what it is like for all powerful thrall is the most powerful shaman in all of azeroth what do you mean yeah but he's in the shadow lands now that's a good point but like yeah it's gonna have to be sargeras to kill the jayla i think that that's what would make sense to me but overall like uh yeah i think people will come back for the game if it's good i think that's the thing but i think now like wow is genuinely in the place where it has to like win back its players that's like one way i would look at it i guess we'll just have to follow up when we get next month numbers you know so we really know what's going on it may not be pretty it's a rough situation i would like to say a big thanks to squarespace especially in these rough rough times having sponsors like squarespace stick with us it's just an awesome thing really helps us and the great thing is they're an awesome company they've got an awesome set of tools we use them so check out the link below and a big thank you to them for helping to make content like this possible sure that's it for me let me know what you think take care i'll see you next time uh i'm glad i saw this video i really do like seeing the actual numbers i think seeing the numbers and getting an idea of like what's really going on is uh is very enlightening for me personally like especially seeing some of these like this is just crazy uh like losing that many people is [ __ ] nuts these graphs are a huge disappointment uh they're not uh what's this here uh these are not real numbers stop lying um i don't know man like the thing is that if if you really think if you really think that this is not indicative of a player-based shift then i don't know what to tell you like i understand that the numbers are not accurate but the trends are because they're using the same data points so if you assume all other things are equal if you're assuming that it's wrong 50 of the time and you have a hundred on one and 50 on the other you just went down by 50 no matter what and the same error rate was present in both cases it just it makes sense like if you logically think about this you would come to that conclusion does that make sense yeah it's the same it's the same type of of data like you're not comparing two different sets of data you're comparing two different points on the same data graph either way um huge disappointment to see that happening uh actually let me go ahead and link the video for you guys before we start this real quick uh i think we have a week we got a we got some primals to kill don't we boys [Music] you

Channel: Asmongold TV

Views: 1,269,896

Rating: 4.8832192 out of 5

Keywords: asmongold, asmongold reacts, asmongold wow, asmongold highlights, asmongold youtube, world of warcraft, asmongold tv, ZackRawrr, asmongold shadowlands, shadowlands, bellular wow, asmongold bellular, wow sub count, wow is dead, wow dying, wow subscribers, shadowlands sub count, world of warcraft subs, wow subs, wow dead, world of warcraft dead, wow subs 2021, wow 2021, ffxiv, asmongold ffxiv, asmongold FFXIV, wow ffxiv, wow final fantasy, wow vs ffxiv, wow vs ff14

Id: fFqcYeG-gRc

Length: 37min 41sec (2261 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021