What the subscription numbers mean

The Burning Crusade was released in China on September 10. So it isn't surprising that the total number of players of World of Warcraft went up from 9 million in Q2 to 9.3 million in Q3 2007. Nevertheless I would say that the headline of WoW is still growing is somewhat misleading. It is probably more accurate to say that WoW is growing in Asia, while declining in the US and Europe.

I can only say "probably", because we don't get detailed numbers by continent any more from Blizzard, which is a signal in itself. But we know that there are more than 5 million Chinese players. If subscriber numbers in Europe and the US were still growing or constant, then the Burning Crusade would have only attracted less than 300,000 Chinese players, which would be proportionally much less than the same expansion caused as a peak when it came out over here. It is very well possible that the "growth" of 0.3 million is a mixed result between lets say half a million more Chinese players and a decline of 0.2 million in the western world. And despite of what WoWInsider says, me coming back to WoW won't make much of a difference in that. :)

So why is it important where exactly WoW is still growing? It is important because of time and because of money. Asia got both the original World of Warcraft and the expansion later than the West. So if Western subscriptions are declining, that could be a predictor that Asian subscription numbers will follow them downwards in a couple of months, assuming the game has the same life cycle in the different cultures. The money aspect of it is that a Chinese player pays significantly less than a US or European player, as he is paying 6 cents per hour instead of $15 per month. It is even possible that the 9.3 million subscribers now together pay *less* than the 9 million from the last quarter. And that would have business consequences, as managers are more interested in revenue and profit numbers than in raw subscription numbers. If profits per player are going down, somebody somewhere is starting to think how to reduce cost per player, and that usually means less customer service. And Blizzard definitely has to think about server utilization ratio, running hundreds of half empty servers can't be economically optimal. I'm still playing on the same server that I chose on day 1 of the European release, but nowadays that server is marked as "recommended" aka "low population".

Don't get me wrong, this is far from a doomcast for World of Warcraft. Stagnation or slight decline from a level as high as WoW's still means truckloads of money every month for Blizzard and Vivendi. I would just say that the initial growth phase is over after 3 years, and we now get into a phase of maturity. Blizzard will have to learn how to handle that new phase. Marketing campaign like the scroll of resurrection I profited from are only a start, we could well see things like server mergers or more cross-server possibilities implemented. And maybe Blizzard will even rethink their current model of how often to release an expansion, and what type of content to fill it with. I said it before, and nothing has proven me wrong yet, the Burning Crusade simply doesn't offer enough to last for everybody for over one year until the Wrath of the Lich King.