In 2010 and early 2011, World of Warcraft was at its all-time high — there were around 12 million people paying $14.99 a month to play the game. According to Activision-Blizzard's latest earnings call today, that number has since dropped to 7.1 million players.
Don't be fooled, 7.1 million subscribers still makes a decent amount of money and still leaves World of Warcraft in the top spot for a subscription-based MMO.
World of Warcraft lost 2.9 million subscribers in a single quarter, putting them at Burning Crusade numbers from 7 years ago when the game was still relatively new. That's a ton of players to lose after the hype of a new expansion. The spike that you see for Warlords of Draenor, the most recent expansion, comes mostly from how they marketed the expansion. The marketing for the expansion was amazing, but it seems as though the content for the of the expansion was lackluster – there simply wasn't enough there to retain the community. Or everyone who resubbed out of nostalgia simply did not have the time to play the content.
Between 2009 and 2011, the Wrath of the Lich King days, World of Warcraft saw it's most subscribers for a sustained amount of time. I started playing World of Warcraft then and I can testify that it was the best expansion I have experienced to-date.
No game population stays the same for the game's entire life-span and there's a chance the World of Warcraft subscriber base will rise with the next expansion. It will be interesting to see how Activision-Blizzard will react to the low subscriber numbers; reduced sub fee or free enticing months?
[graph via NeoGaf]
