http://kotaku.com/5469238/most-world-of-warcraft-players-dont-go-past-level-10

Not the best of days for World of Warcraft news, this, with the announcement of the game's stagnant userbase followed by a revelation most WoW players barely scratch at Azeroth's surface.

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said earlier today that 70% of World of Warcraft players fail to progress past level 10 in the game. Considering you can advance your character all the way up to level 80, that's not very far, indicating that most WoW players either hang around doing nothing or, as seems more likely, don't stick around too long.

And that suggests the game has a fairly high turnover rate at the moment, perhaps explaining why WoW's subscriber base hasn't moved past 11.5 million in over a year.

If Blizzard can't address that in the game's upcoming expansion pack, Cataclysm, we really could - finally - be looking at the game's tipping point in terms of popularity. Not its end, of course...just the point where the end is closer than the beginning, and that almighty playerbase begins to contract a little.

Which, to be honest, I've been looking forward to for years. I do love a good struggle over succession. The King is dead, long live the King, etc etc.

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I was actually wondering why we hadn't heard about a rise typical rise in WoW players, maybe this really is a turning point for WoW.

I would be more impressed if it said 70% of ACCOUNTS do not go past level 10

I had 6 characters above level 10 (2 at 80)

So all this means is someone has 1 or 2 at 80 and has a bunch of low levels below 10

This article means nothing. WoW guaranteed has near 100% of its PAYING accounts with characters above level 10 on the account

If everyone had 1 character at 80 and then 3 "bank characters" at level 1 that would mean 75% of wow players dont go past level 10..

See where I am going?

I thought of it, but the article isn't clear about whether it's characters or accounts.

It's called Bank alts. I had 3 characters above lvl 10 and myriad of under lvl 10 chars, as either sonds on other realms to chat with people (pvp arena related) or bank alts. This article is pretty much worthless.

I don't see the problem. For about the first 2-10 levels you really are just giving the game a trial like a demo. I think most producers would love a game where the trail/demo has a 1:3 conversion ratio.

Not to mention every person player has to buy the game and the game card. Meaning Blizzard has already made more money on it them most companies get for every game they sell.

That's like saying a majority of Diablo 2 characters never make it past level 12.

they should release a new WoW.

Like other people said, bank alts and such. There's no way that high a percentage of accounts don't go past lvl10, in fact, I'd be willing to bet that at least 80% of all accounts have one character who passes lvl10.

I'm willing to bet most of those are gold sellers who create the characters just to go to the city and spam their goods. It's easy to tell them apart as they have such creative names as "uregfdf", "wgvbgdfuigh" or "ewuhbvlkse".