Activision Blizzard reported today that active subscribers for World of Warcraft dropped by 1.1M players to 9.1 million, dropping below the 10 million mark for the first time in years.
Considering that WoW subscriber numbers have been holding steady around 10.2 million for the last 6 months, after losing 1.8 million the year before, it’s a bit worry some to see such a huge drop now. The massive drop could be in anticipation to the Mist of Pandaria expansion or it could mean that WoW truly has hit it’s peak and is in decline.
This puts the lose at 2.9 million players since hitting its peak in 2010 after the Cataclysm expansion launched. Can Mist of Pandaria turn the tide? We will see, but my guess is no.
This week is slow as I wake up… due to various happenings, my schedule is almost reversed this week and I’m finding myself eating breakfast at 2 in the afternoon. I’ve never minded being a night owl, but it is sad that I’ve been missing my gaming buddies all week and having to play it solo.
It’s another week that heralds both a death and a birth. It seems as though there’s been quite a few server shutdowns lately, I wonder is it an over-saturated market or just bad games? Either way, it still makes me sad. Every game, no matter how bad it is, has someone, usually someones, who worked hard to try and bring it into the world, and I’ve never seen a game that didn’t have at least one person who enjoyed it. I’ll kill a few zombies in TSW in honor of this week’s dying game.
Earlier this week, Blizzard released patch 1.0.3b for Diablo III, which added the ability to buy and sell commodity items on the real-money auction house. This includes gems, dyes, crafting materials, and most recently, gold itself. This makes it quite easy to convert gold to real-money if you don’t have outside funding available, and will hopefully start the trend of selling things for gold rather than real-money.
In related news, the “best gamer in the world”, Athene, launched his project to raise 400 billion gold for Save the Children. By selling the raised gold and items and donating it to the charity, he hopes to help address the hunger crisis in West Africa, where there are more than 18 million needy people. In today’s prices, 400 billion gold would sell for $10,000, so we will see how much he raises. He also plans to visit West Africa at the end of the August and livestream some of the benefits of the charity. Already, his project Operation Sharecraft raised $1 million for Save the Children, culminating at Dreamhack earlier this summer, and Razer has been very supportive as a sponsor in his efforts.
Dan Bull, author and performer of many video game raps on his YouTube channel, has a brilliant song about Diablo III. It’s got a sick beat with a remix of Diablo 3 music and clever lyrics. Check it out below:
Warning: The Diary of Torak posts are roleplaying posts and will likely contain spoilers. If you don’t want your campaign potentially spoiled, please play the game first then return see Torak’s adventure unfold. You have been warned.
“I told Leah to come along with me to go search for her uncle. She said that we’ll need to open the cathedral first, the guards locked it up before they were ambushed by these creatures. Rumford told Leah that they fought their way back to Adria’s hut. Leah expects the key will still be there. We used the old portal system to quickly travel back to The Old Ruins. Leah apparently had the key to open the gate towards Adria’s hut. Maybe I should watch out for traps. Leah told me that Adria was her mother, but that she didn’t know more than that. Adria died when Leah was very young, she was raised by her uncle, Deckard Cain. I wondered about her father, Leah told that he was a great warrior who was lost when Tristram fell to the demons.” Continue Reading
One of the basic ideas of economics that gets thrown around a lot by laymen is “supply and demand“. They are really two separateideas that can be used in conjunction with each other to predict market behavior. Let’s delve into some of these economic ideas to approach the auction house and its fees.
To make a basic graph of what “supply and demand” looks like, we need to understand how suppliers and consumers react to pricing. Intuitively, if something (lets say a super-awesome sword) can be sold for a high price, people are going to do what they need to in order to get it so that they can garner a large sum of money. Conversely, if the sword is offered at a lower price, less people are going to be willing to sell it. At higher prices, more swords will be offered for sale, and at lower prices, there will be less swords. As for consumers, they will buy more swords the lower the price is, as they will be able to more easily afford them at lower prices and be more willing to part with less of their hard-earned cash. At higher prices, people will only buy swords if they really want them. Thus, at higher prices, less swords will be bought, and at lower prices, more swords will be bought. If we asked sword-producers how much they would sell a particular sword for at a variety of prices and graphed it, then asked sword-consumers how many swords they would buy at a variety of prices, we would get a graph like this:
The important idea is that the supply curve has a positive slope, whereas the demand curse has a negative slope.
Blizzard’s Diablo 3 sold more than 3.5 million copies within the first 24 hrs of launching, setting an all-time record for the fastest-selling PC game. This number does not include the 1.2 million WoW players that received D3 for free as part of the Annual Pass promotion, bringing the launch total to 4.7 million.
The previous record was set by no other then Blizzard’s Cataclysm expansion which sold 3.3 million copies. What’s the fastest selling game of all time? Activision Blizzard’s CoD Black Ops expansion, which sold 7 million copies in its first 24 hrs, including 4.5 million pre-orders.
Since launching on May 15th, more than 6.3 million copies have been sold at retail stores and online making it the biggest PC-game launch in history.
Warning: The Diary of Torak posts are roleplaying posts and will likely contain spoilers. If you don’t want your campaign potentially spoiled, please play the game first then return see Torak’s adventure unfold. You have been warned.
“I asked the guard captain how I could help them fight these undead creatures. Rumford admired my courage, but warned me that Captain Daltyn and his militia were slaughtered by these things and that he was the only one who survived. I gave it some thought; I would avenge his fallen warriors, for that is the honorable thing to do. He gave an agreeing nod and told me that I needed to strike down the so called Wretched Mothers and their Queen. Apparently those creatures vomit up the other undead creatures I have been seeing.
At that moment the barricade was attacked again. I quickly helped them dispatch the enemies. At that moment Rumford pointed out one of these Wretched Mothers. From a distance these creatures looked like handmaidens and as I got closer, it started to vomit up some of these undead creatures, which turned by stomach. Before I left Rumford told me one last thing, to find this queen I needed to follow the road to the Old Ruins. Continue Reading
Activision Blizzard reported today that active subscribers for World of Warcraft dropped by 1.1M players to 9.1 million, dropping below the 10 million mark for the first time in years.
Blizzard’s 
