Some perspective:
I also like how it gained almost 2M subscribers after that South Park episode.
It'd be cool with some other colors overlaying all the tiny hills that'd be other MMOs' subscriber counts. You'd need to segment out / zoom in to some higher resolution Y-axis for those 100k-500k subscriber bases.
It really is pretty incredible.
People leaving WoW towards the end of an expansion is nothing new. Subs will hike up again at start of WoD and then drop down again. Game is old, most of the people who started out in Vanilla are long since gone, same for people who began in BC. Myself I always go fuck around on new MMOs now and take long breaks from WoW but end up back to it because of time investment in it and because...why the fuck not? Am I going to go play SWTOR or TESO? As much as I enjoyed FF14, the lack of overall end content and the boring leveling left me wanting a bit more to do. (At least TERA had fun leveling for melee; which kept me hooked for awhile).
Sounds a lot like what I do. I used to go back and forth between WoW and FF11 when other games weren't fulfilling my needs, but FF11 is not the same at all anymore and I know 0 people that play it still lol.
Starting over entirely as horde has given me quite a bit to catch up on, so, at least I have that going for me for a while.
The number of MMOs that sustained >500k accounts/subs since the launch of Lich King is in the single digits. It's hard to say if any of them made a dent in WoW's numbers considering the target markets don't overlap a whole lot (EVE, Second Life), and the ones that do burn brightly but then fade away quickly (SWTOR, Aion). We'd need the graph to start in 2012 for those other games to be anything other than vertical lines.
More people leave than resub
I'll be the first to admit the game isn't "dying", going anywhere, or going to be really affected by this anytime soon and still quintuples the user base of any other mmo... But there are more leaving than resubbing and that's not changing. It'll keep declining, and at 4 mil in 3 years it's declining quick. It'll survive on low numbers of at least 1 mil forever, and it'll take a long time before it gets that low, but that is one hell of an alarming rate. After cata, shits changed.
WoW's death is probably where the trending lines are for large-scale MMOs in general. Once WoW is 'dead' AAA publishers will abandon the space just like they do with other types of games that no longer meet their revenue requirements. There will always be a market for the 500-750k MMOs and that's where anything new and sustainable will have to aim for. But Blizzard will be fine. One more SC2 expansion and their f2p/mobile efforts are doing extremely well. I've got good odds on something unannounced at this year's Blizzcon. No, it won't be Titan or another MMO.
What blows my mind is that they did this shit where they tried to "make the world more engaging" and shit by forcing us to the ground, and then forcing us into insane amounts of dailies when we hit 90, which setup the biggest drop in the history of the game...
And judging by their discussions on flying mounts, their apparent strategy with WoD is to go balls to the wall on that shit that drove so many people away...
I hate questing and dailies. I want to log on, pvp, or log on and raid. No, you have to farm coins for an hour to get bonus rolls, or you have to farm rep for this, or do this for your legendary.
Put oranges back to rare drops, bring back warglaives, stop adding more repetitiveness to an already repetitive game.
"well you don't HAVE to farm coins and you don't NEED bonus rolls or a legendary cloak" fuck that noise, of course you have to and it's stupid. Bring back TBC. Use the same loot system, none of this different difficulty and ilvl shit, make 10 man's drop more loot. Games saved.
If you literally have to farm more than 30 minutes to get 50 lesser charms ur doin it rong.
We have no good frame of reference for whether or not the sub decline is 'quick' or 'slow' since most MMOs drop subs like a rock (within 4 months of launch). It took them ~2.75 years to go from 9M to 12M. Counting an equivalent number of quarters since that peak they didn't lose all those subscribers at the same rate they gained them, and there aren't enough data points since the end of cataclysm to compare this new era of attrition to the last. So the decline is slower than, say, SWTOR, but it's also slower than its growth. It certainly isn't noticeably faster than anything, either.
I don't think you need to compare it to other games in order to determine if it's quick or slow. 12 million down to 7.5 in that amount of time is fast period.
How many of WoWs subscribers are NA/European players? I've always been under the assumption that sub 2million are actual Western players and most of WoWs playerbase is from china