Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
In the universe of massively multiplayer online games (“MMOGs”), none come much bigger than World of Warcraft.
Such is the significance of World of Warcraft (“WoW”) in the MMOG space that at its height it accounted for almost 60% of all western consumer spending in the MMOG market. And for its creator, Activision Blizzard, Wow has generated over $2.2bn in gaming subscriptions since 2005.
For a game that has been around for more than a decade, the focus has changed from growth to focusing on retention, slowing the so called “churn-rate” – the rate at which new and existing customers cancel their subscriptions. And whilst some churn is inevitable it’s the scale of subscribers leaving, some 14% (1.3m) between January and March of this year, that has alarmed shareholders, and had them equally looking for the door.
The number of players at WoW has now fallen from its height in 2010 of around 12m to just over 8m today. And Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick expects the decline to continue. Shares in the company fell 5% on the news, and are unlikely to be marching north any time soon.
But what does this mean for Activision Blizzard; is this fall in players a huge concern, or a blip that can be ignored? By any standard loosing over 30% of your players in two years is a cause for concern. Those to a degree, as Zynga and other social gaming companies have more recently found, as a game gets aged you need to have other newer titles for players for players to switch over to. There’s almost certainly some players who will have switched from WoW to other Activision Blizzard titles, but many will have simply gone elsewhere. And of those that did switch to other Activision Blizzard titles how many will have signed up for new monthly subscriptions? Almost certainly very few.
And it’s the Zynga style business model, the free-to-play with micro-transactions, that appears to lie at the root of Activision Blizzard’s woes. There are today very few MMOs that work as a viable business by charging monthly subscriptions – EVE Online is perhaps the one exception to the rule.
And these kind of business challenges are of course not confined to just WoW. They’ll impact on Activision Blizzard’s other titles as well. The company was also hit by an embarrassing bug in a Diablo III update earlier this week as players discovered that by cancelling in-game “gold” auctions, they could free of charge generate more – with one player said to have amassed a vault of some 371 trillion in-game gold using this bug-exploit. Although the auction has been closed it’s certainly not been a good week for Activision Blizzard or its investor.
James Barnes, StatusCake.com
James Barnes
Share this
More from StatusCake
When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
James Barnes
March 25, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
James Barnes
March 18, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026
Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
James Barnes
February 25, 2026
Designing Alerts for Action
3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams
James Barnes
February 18, 2026