I would say that what we are seeing is wear and tear on an aging game. Other games chipping away on it slowly. As crazy as it sounds, not everyone hated SW:ToR, it's sitting on 700,000 subscribers itself. Add those people to say the millions of league of legends players, and the people caught in the Day Z craze, gamers just have a lot more to do now a days. Diablo 3 was a huge release, they mentioned that they sold 10 million boxes for it.
Another big thing to note is that over the last year or two we have seen many, many MMO's go free to play. We have seen Lord of the Rings: Online, Dungeons and Dragons: Online, Everquest 2, DC Universe, and many other lesser known games not cost a dime to play. To a lot of people who maybe don't care about quality as much, these games (once they went free) where much better options then World of Warcraft.
Now, you weigh all of that, against the fact that WoW hasn't had a content update in 8 months now, and you get a very bored player base. Dragon Soul was not an epic enough raid that got nerfed far to quickly to last the majority of people 8 months. WoW has hit a weak point in life cycle, and while no one game could rise up and deliver a massive blow to it, I think that all of these little blows, are starting to add up. People who were playing a few months ago (i.e last quarter ) have now finished the content, and been left with nothing to do but wait for Mists of Pandaria. A lot of these people probably unsubscribed, and starting using there time and money elsewhere.
WoW also has a massive competitor right on the horizon in Guild Wars 2. This is a game that a lot of people have gotten into, and loved. Most people are calling it the World of Warcraft of the modern day. And a lot of people I have seen have said that they can't play WoW, or SW:ToR, or any other traditional MMO after playing it.I don't know what impact it will have on WoW, but I have played both Mists of Pandaria (in beta) and Guild Wars 2 (in beta) and I can tell you that I like Guild Wars 2 slightly more. I don't know what the endgame for GW2 will be like, so WoW might still win out, but as far as the gameplay itself, I find GW2 the winner in that regard.
Only time can tell if Mists of Pandaria will stop WoW's subscription leak. What do you all think?
