WoW's Subscription Numbers For The Past 10 Years Were Revealed - MadSeasonShow Reacts 

I wanna see my sub and unsub chart along with the ridiculous responses i gave for each unsub

WoD was super hype because it was the 10th Anniversary of WoW, and also the lore was marketed a throwback to the Warcraft era, as we would see all these Old Horde orcs like Grommash and Black Hand in their prime.

“It do go down”

33:33 as a Starcraft fan, yes it's pretty depressing. But whenever I play SC, it always reminds me of old Blizzard, when they used to have a soul and used to care about their community and games.

Azerite armor was such an awful system, my god, coming from Legion to BFA was absolutely terrible, especially losing so many abilities at level cap.

I have this cartoon image in my mind of WoW loot through the expansions. Vanilla - 40 people crowded in awe at 2 pieces of loot. TBC - 25 looking at 2/3 items. WotLK - 10 looking at 3 items. etc... BFA - 1 person looking a mountain of loot and throwing most of it in the trash.

holy shit, 7.25 million subs for a 20 year old game is really good.

I really do miss feeling part of a server community and being able to go online and always see someone to talk to and play with. I understand those days are behind me now, but what a wonderful home it was

When they announced BFA I was genuinely excited because I thought it was gonna be a legit back down to earth and MAYBE a Faction vs Faction expansion, then we got what we got and was very disappointed, the allied races were cool I guess

Yep, Classic launched around Labor Day 2019. I remember going to a festival around then and coming home to play Classic with my wife.

Loot in Vanilla was exciting. Heck, getting your first shoulders or helmet was just so satisfying.

Your voice isn’t boring, it’s restful

i am a dev, and these past few years it seems the entire industry has just been absolutely infected with people who think they know everything, nobody is as good as them, etc. it's gross.

That clip of Pyromancer losing his mind over "I will never serve" brought a smile to my face.

When we getting a Donkey Kong country madseason video? You're rocking that David Wise soundtrack in multiple videos now, it's due

the wall of no, rose-colored goggles crowd were the biggest clowns ever

I love the etiquette for react content: If there's an ad read you leave it unbroken; you always leave links to the creators in the description/caption. Very classy.

I literally just found the "Restored" version of Stickerbrush Symphony this week and have been listening to it in FLAC almost every day, and you brought it into your video too. So damn good! Love ya, SNES gang

the sub numbers are missing a huge factor that the china servers got shut down, i forget when. but id be surprised if they ever get close to their old sub count

What I find interesting is that even with seeing in realtime the loss of subs with TBC Classic, they continued on with Wrath Classic and now Cata Classic. Its like watching your vehicle literally catching fire from the drivers seat and still getting in and trying to drive it away from the flames.

I had a sub from 2007 until about half way through MoP. I hopped between retail and private servers from the Cata release until I switched full time over to private servers when I ended my retail sub. I skipped WoD, played one month in Legion, and haven't played any expansions since then. I did resubscribe for almost a year to play classic.

60% of my friends have already left SoD. Our guild would be dead if it wasn't for 2 mergers we did.

Great choice in music. I turned 34 today and cried a lot. But man that DK music really reminded me how how happy of a kid I really was. I hope to recapture that simplicity one day.

A Strange Phenomenon that will ALWAYS baffle me about some people... Is this belief that what's good enough for them, is good enough for Everybody Else... And that you must like, what they like! And hate what they hate! Well... Until we all get assimilated by the Borg Collective... So that we all think with ONE MIND... NOPE!!! Not... Going... To... Happen!!! 😊

34:34 oddly enough, all the data suggests the more money triple A companies make, the less they pay towards employees, because of cutting jobs and what have you

This format suits you well. Your voice and knowledge makes the reaction far more interesting. I'm glad we were able to take a look at these numbers. These last few months have been really hopeful and have led the game in a great direction I haven't seen in almost a decade. The lore was great and well-paced this expansion, with some great individual questlines. I don't particularly care for the Dracthyr or their place in the lore, but concepts like catching up with the flights and several lead characters passing the torch to the next generation were executed really well. I'm very happy with the communication nowadays. Even if War Within isn't great, it's very refreshing to know where blizz's head is at.

The cost to make the spectral horse was less than $5,000 (probably less than $2,000 in actual employee billable hours and $3,000 for cooperate bloat) and StarCraft 2 cost to make was never released but for 7 years of development would have been very pricy, so they probably had to sell millions of copies before it broke even, verses the 330ish to recover the horse cost. Then you have to consider that the Servers to run SC2 multiplayer and to allow players to download the game also cost money to operate. So its very believable that the horse made them more money.

Private servers offer something official servers no longer provide. Sense of community. No sharding nor layering, everyone at one world. And also there is no lag. No idea what is Blizzard doing wrong.

I personally think that the huge success of WoW was based on the continued world building of "Warcraft 1-3". The more "alien" stuff they added and the further they got away from the core concept, the less people want to play it. In TBC there is Illidan, in Wotlk there is Arthas in MoP there's.... pandas and monks? On another side note, a lot of the expansions degraded the quality of the game and discontinued successful concepts from past games/expansions. This is something I think they have done consciously, as they focused more on trying to create an addiction (to keep people subbed) than to create a good game. One interesting example to show how they fail in doing this even today, is Season of Discovery phase 3. In phase 1 and 2, you could raid at least twice a week with 10 man raids and the bosses would drop around 2 items each. In phase 3, they made it so that you can only raid once a week and in order to compensate for this, each boss now drops around 4 items each... so far so good. However, they also doubled the size of the raid to 20 man - what this means is that they actually cut the amount of loot you can get from raids per week in half, despite officially promoting it as an increase of loot. The raid loot in phase 3 is barely an upgrade to the raid loot from p2 as well, making it feel even more discouraging. I do think that the way to go would be a "classic+", where you go from classic+ and add new content. I think that if SoD would continue and they add stuff like m+, new raids, better rewards, then it would most likely be my to go game for a long future.

WoW Classic Era, where loot is still crazy and different and memorable!

Thank you MadSeason. For years of content. ❤

The relaxing music over the top of it haha

24:59 “as boring as my voice” 😂

the "i will never serve " line never ceases to amaze me how people thought that was a good line to introduce. that and the fact azeroth "forgives" her thinking she was controlled by the jailor. peak writing

I'm surprised how TBC and Wrath classic were unpopular, worst than any phases of vanilla classic.

You're so right about boring loot. It felt like they wanted to flatten everything and cram it into a spreadsheet so they could tweak and balance percentages at their convenience. WoW a 3d spreadsheet

34:57 as a big starcraft 2 fan this one hits hard 🥲

You should definitely keep doing reacts. You do a great job balancing letting the video play and when you pause for comments, and your input is well put and adds good opinions/thoughts to the overall takeaway. Thanks for the vid!

I think that Dragonflight is actually doing pretty well. It didnt have massive launch day because people were too skeptical and burned by last few expansions, but later they started to realize that its not that bad and its pretty good actually. But numbers dont show it because classic had a big drop due to wrath getting stale and soon to be completed and cata coming.

Stopped Retail in WoD. Picked up Classic on launch and have loved it. But now that Cata is coming my journey is over, Cata is not classic for me. Retail is not WarCraft for me, and has not been in a long time. It makes me very interested to see this chart one year from now, since I suspect many might feel the same way.

Yoooo Madseason. I loved this video! Awesome job. I didn't mind the pausing because you gave your two cents and added to it! Thanks again!

Choosing Donkey Kong Country music for the background is an 11/10 choice

MadSeason + Cowboy Bebop soundtracks is a match made in asmr heaven

The big issue with post-panda itemization is that it logically caters to the best players who want a piece of gear to keep them on the eternal treadmill, and makes them feel like the thing they just earned allows them to do the exact same thing they've been doing the entire expansion but 10% more effectively when an expansion is about to end. It's entirely their right of course, but a roleplaying experience where everything reverts back to a sort of origination point every 5 years won't ever feel like it has any meaning.

MadSeason really blessing us this week 🙌

I played the og WoW through Cata. Can't remember what happened that made me stop. Might have been my dad cutting the sub. Jumped back in for the transition from BFA to SL. Got through to the endgame of SL and raiding, but promptly stopped there. The endgame zones were awful, filled with horrible, super janky terrain you couldn't fly through. Upgrading your gear meant dungeons/raids, followed by hundreds of hours of farming the atrocious endgame zones. But worse than that, you could only level your gear in a season, and leveling it further was disabled once the season switched. So you had to sink those hundreds of hours in a limited time frame or be penalized for it. The tower rogue-lite gimmick locked me out of the best boosts for my class, as they were solely offered on days I had both school and work, kneecapping my ability to do dungeons and raids. The story could have been written by a 5 year-old and I still don't know what was going on because I never got to finish raids because of how heftily it handicapped people with normal lives outside of WoW. It was awful. No wonder their subs sank like a rock.

Bobby is still thanking all of you for his yachts.

Dragonflight cinematic felt like they were stuffed animals fighting. No big bad, etc

The small hump in player numbers after classic tapered off at first is when lockdowns happened and boosted player counts before shadowlands made another boost

It's over.... Westfall...

The better video title could’ve been “i told you so with Madseasonshow”

When I see this chart from Blizzard, I can't help think of similar charts from Marvel and Star Wars - ramp up, reasonably spaced out releases, lost consumer interest - and BAM - the solution is to completely flood the zone with so much stuff that it becomes a shotgun approach. "By the time they realize they don't really like it, they'll already have paid!". Something for EVERYBODY. I am not saying these aren't good products or people aren't having fun, but as a business strategy, it comes off as a bit desperate and I question the sustainability.

Big ups for including the original creators sponsor

Nothing will ever touch OG WotLK numbers.

TBC and Wotlk didn't do as well as expected because they added the Dark Portal Pass to TBC while at the same time they relaunched classic with season of mastery effectively burning out players with both "limited time events" happening at the same time. No idea why Blizzard can't just keep a single TBC and Wotlk server open for people it's insane. Also where are the Instant Lvl Cap Pvp servers for classic

i think you have to consider that during the dragonflight "peak" there are still classic people quiting because of how they handled tbc classic(store mount, wow token, no botthandling etc.) who arerent interested in retail at all. So take that in to consoderation and the upwardstrend and peek for dragonflight looks almost the same as for shadowlands imo.

Pandorahs box is my favorite YT video of all time

Keep in mind, BFA launched when Classic has already been announced (several months after Classic announcement, in fact), so many players who subbed for BFA were doing so in anticipation of Classic (that was the case for me anyway). As much as BFA gameplay sucked, I loved the theme. It's a shame it ended up being such an awful expansion because Boralus was just so awesome, the music there was great too.

Classic wow is what is keeping wow alive, its the life support equipment keeping activision blizzard running.

you're right, in fact the covid bump was that small bump after the classic explosion

Current WoW feels even more like a single player game. And on top of that they are adding dungeons with followers. And probably after that will be raids with followers and your alts. Or a solo mode - you're the only character in the whole game (like your own layer). I can already see how they say "didn't you always wanted to go raiding with all your characters?". It's the greatest multiplayer-singleplayer game.

How sure can we be the numbers' representation is correct, though? We have no reference point for the Y-axis; nor if it starts at 0 or not. Some of Bellular's theory stems from an earnings call back during Legion, where they said Legion performed slightly better than WoD. But that doesn't necessarily mean there were more subscribers; it could simply mean more revenue due to more MTX. Blizzard has surely figured out how to extract more money from their customers over the years, without increasing the number of customers.

something i wanna add about the loot, most of it you either killed bosses till you got it, or went on epic quest chains to obtain it (thunderfury, Quel'Serrar, etc) meanwhile i'm sitting here on SoD farming warlock portals since the first weekend of phase drop and still no dagger.... when i get this i'll be happy, but i don't think i'll feel like i earned it, just toughed out the rng game that didn't even include a boss.

I'll say, the way this video was made really made it feel like you were talking to us directly as opposed to funneled content. Giving your honest thoughts and opinions as they entered your head was refreshing to hear and knowing that some of things I thought were alike. Well put together, I am excited to see more content like this to consume in the future.

I played WoW on release as a 14 year old, stopped playing during tbc because of college and other stuff, got back into it during classic. 9:40 would like to add that your subtraction method, which was a great way to show it visually, doesn't show the full extent of subscriber decay considering the data going forward from the crop still includes some amount of baseline classic subs, crazy! 24:30 "the loot is boring" probably the #1 reason i thought wotlk classic was not at all as fun as i thought it would be based on the hype.

Love the Stonefire remix playing in the background ❤

"The wall of 'No' - I don't know the reason why" Very simple - because they want to look like smart boys and to be on the winning side. Blizzard answered "No" before very definitively, so in those people's eyes they are sucking up to the winning argument by repeating it and justifying it. It's like those small loser guys in School who follow the biggest bully and suck up to him all the time. It's the same mentality. Agree with the winning argument - push down and ridicule all opposition. These are the same people who will defend multi-billion corporations for any decisions they make

25:55 Just casually dropping the most disgusting ice reflector clip as B-roll footage

Legion was really good and made me try out different classes and playing their storyline wich I found really interesting.

OMG Bellular.... Madseason has just put you on the map!!!! Gz dude!!!! xD

Shout out to when wanting a special item meant something! Soulkeeper Robes of Arugal Voidheart Tier Set Sunfury Bow of the Pheonix Cloak of the Illidari Council Cowl of the Illidari Highlord Warglaive of Azzinoth

That feeling of losing power each expansion was compounded by level scaling. Not only did you lose the borrowed power, but levelling up made you weaker relative to the mobs. You were in the same old raid gear until level cap, and the same mob would gain health and hit harder while your damage output stayed roughly the same, or even decreased due to secondary stat scaling.

My guy is on fire, loving the uploads

No king rules forever…

"Death is a powerful tool" Speaking as a writer, this is absolutely true. I think you get the "bring someone back from the dead" card once, and that character needs to be a complete badass. That is unless you are literally writing a Wuxia with infinite power scaling where someone becomes a God by the end of it. Even then, in Coiling Dragon MC becomes a being so powerful he can create universes - and he still can't resurrect another character that dies. In a more grounded story, you can do this either never or once. It is much better to just never kill characters but have them be removed from the story by other means. Coma, loss of memories, emotional breakdown, an urgent quest that calls them away... And to have your highest stakes be expressed through other means. The classic "Enemies burned your hometown" is better than killing a character and then wanting to bring them back. Also note for young writers: never, and I mean NEVER kill likable characters for shock value (Varian, Garrosh, Voljin, Bane, Tirion Fordring, etc.). The audience will hate you, and you will also hate yourself when you want to bring the character back and you can't.

As a rogue main, sub was AMAZING finally in Legion. Instead of fixing DFA positioning bug, they decided to just move it to PVP and then when BFA came, the difference in the specs became minimal. Even though I am glad they backed off the pirate theme, at least they tried something different in Legion.

About the lore. I am not a lore guy by any means, but man the things that sets me off the most are names and transmogs that don`t fit the class. I just get red...

There is almost no way the estimates given for that new graph are accurate. They extrapolated those numbers by assuming a single summary line in a quarterly talking about Legion's performance means that Legion at the same point had near the same subs as WoD. Except quarterly reports are purposefully vague/ambiguous for this reason because 'performance' can mean anything. It could mean revenue, avg MAUs, retention rates, or whatever metric they can find that they can put a positive spin on. That's why they stopped reporting the sub count in the first place. Also, the estimates make no sense in context to the old graph. WoD was in total free fall losing more subs than any other point in the history of wow. So somehow it magically stabilize and gained subs over the 6-8 month gap between these two graphs? I don't think so. Basically, subtract a million from all those estimates and its probably closer to the real number.

Blizard lost alot of their old audience with how they handled classic release. Couldnt play for 2 weeks, so others had 2 week start ahead + 50% extra xp.

Funny how to reach the same subscriber count they had when legion was the only playable version of the game they have to add up the subscribers for 4+ different versions of the game.

Holy round mound of rebound, it's Bellular Gaming! I stopped watching him like 4 years ago, what a transition.

To answer your question, Dragonflight does have more interesting loot imo. I was stoked when [Ashkandur, Fall of the Brotherhood] finally dropped on my Paladin in the second raid, and I’ll probably never forget about that sword because of how cool I thought it was. The [Ouroboreal Necklet] is another highly sought after item with unique effects that I was ecstatic to finally get. There are a lot of unique effect named items in DF and I’ve loved that coming back. [Fyr’alath the Dreamrender] felt like a Classic-style grind to finally get and attune to, though I’m not sure how much that one counts in the context of what you meant by interesting gear.

Your passion surrounding WoW was a big part of the spark that got me back into the game, roping my fiance in with me along the way. We've been playing mostly modern WoW since legion, I will say on the gearing point that DF has been a huge step up. There's a long list of weapons with fairly unique effects starting with Fyr'alath and Nasz'uro but also extending to non-legendaries like Kharnalex for evokers and Neltharax for hunters. There's even a cloak with no stamina that steals stats from allies when they take damage (Voice of the Silent Star). So on the gearing point I think Dragonflight has massively improved. It's a tricky balancing act: in a modern, somewhat competitive game having iconic gear can be a struggle. You bring a measured perspective as always, @MadSeasonShow. Missed your videos when you were on break.

I leveled a character to lvl 30 on retail last week, it took me about eight hours. I literally, did not meet a single person out in the open world. I queued up for battlegrounds the whole time (up to an hour each session) did not get a single battleground. Got a few dungeons, those were only about 10 minute queues. But the people in those mostly said nothing. It felt like playing a single player game. I log onto SOD and the world is filled with players.

it's respectable to let his ad play. I skip em but I understand content creators need them to live. Might as well leave it in and let the viewers choose to skip or not.

Really loving these video reacts! Keep it up Mads! Much love! ❤

They did say that there are better way to measure success. if they can get only 1 million to play the game, and 10% of those to dump 10k, huge success. Also, the significant less amount of resources needed to keep the game running is a huge win.

Dragonflight gear is the same formula. Main stat, Main Stat, secondary, secondary. However tier bonuses were back and played nicely with some talents. Made it somewhat interesting but also tied you to a cookie cutter build based on that. If you wanted min/max

This game is going to Ebb and Flow hard until wow 2 comes out, or something that is an absolute banger.

Dragons just feel cheesy. Them being rare is great, but the norm... i dunno man feels like a cop out. *DRAGONS! PLAY NOW!!*

This pretty much confirms that Vanilla WoW is actually just peak WoW. SoD's downfalls are purely because it deviates too far from vanilla's core values and gameplay.

The most disappointing thing on the planet was finding out that the Primus from Maldraxxus was a comically benign old fart. That for me was a complete act of betrayal by Blizzard during Shadowlands. And then the creation of the Crown of Wills. I wanted to die, it felt like I got shot.

The condescending sniffles are perfectly timed. Well played, sir.

Blizzard: Wrath was our peak, so let's do Cata Classic to run off people that came back for Wrath Classic.

What’s crazy is I had RU-vid block suggesting Belluar anything on my algorithm and I just watched his sponsor’s ad on a video of his video. I feel icky.

As a mainly retail player, game actually feels extremely healthy right now. While DF didn't bring as many players back after BFAs disappointment and SLs being terrible, it feels like retention has been far better than most other xpacs, especially in recent history. Dragonflight is easily my favorite version of the game to play since MoP, really respects the players time.

We gonna pretend that 5 different versions of WoW doesn't mean 5x more bots? Ok

Vanilla was the best, tBC was fun, WotLK was fun, but quit before Cata and glad I never re-subbed to any other expansion

Really enjoyed the video! Always love your content! I would love to see the chart that shows the difference in player count in each version of the game. Personally I main SOD, and it feels great. I don't log into Dragon Flight often, but it seems to be busy enough.

In DF im fully decked out with items that have unique effects. I got a cloak that steals my teammates lowest secondary stats, and a tome that infects the enemy with spores. A ring that does fire damage if you do fire damage and etc.