The population of Warhammer Online has dwindled to 300,000 subscribers, a loss of 500,000 since November, according to figures announced by Electronic Arts yesterday.
“Warhammer Online now has over 300K paying subscribers in North America and Europe,” EA revealed yesterday in a conference call. The MMOG had previously built quite a bit of momentum at its launch, boasting around 750,000 users in October and then nearly 800,000 in November. Even then, however, competitor Blizzard was already claiming that the majority of World of Warcraft players who had left to try Warhammer were already flocking back to Azeroth. And that was before the launch of the newest expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King.
Now that Lich King has been out for some time and that WoW has again asserted its dominance in the MMOG game with more than 11 million subscribers, it seems that only the most dedicated of WAR players remain. It’s hard to keep an MMOG populated when people keep flocking off to other pastures – the fewer people there are to play with, the less reason there is to stay, regardless of the quality of the content.
Still, those who do decide to stick with WAR won’t be left out in the cold. Mythic recently announced a series of major expansions for the game that will be available for all subscribers, including two new classes: the Dwarf Slayer and the Orc Choppa. The new classes will be introduced in a live in-game event this month, as will the rest of the updates for the game later on, which also include a new realm-vs-realm dungeon zone called The Land of the Dead.
Keep in mind that there are more than 300,000 subscribers in the game, as EA states that there are “over 300K.” Still, it can’t be much more since they didn’t say it was 400 or 500K. 300K is still nothing to scoff at, but the massive drop-off has to hurt. I’ll have to count myself among those recently departed: I canceled my WAR subscription last week.
[Via Shacknews]
