The World of Warcraft community is abuzz about a new Blizzard GDC 2024 presentation that relays some trends — if not specific numbers — for the game’s population.
Blizzard Senior VP John Hight posted an interesting graph that showed the rise and fall of the “rolling average” subscription numbers (without specifics or even numbers, unsurprisingly) of the game since the Legion expansion era in 2016. There are two notable trends that we can gleam from this, however. First is that Shadowlands absolutely tanked subscriber numbers, and second is that Dragonflight has shown a strong recovery — in fact, the studio labeled it “record post-launch stability and growth” — even though it has yet to reach the launch peak numbers that Shadowlands had.
Hight also spent time dissecting why Shadowlands failed so badly. He listed several factors that contributed to the exodus from the game, such as a poor antagonist, non-evolving gameplay systems, borrowed power, gaps in content, and a community that “didn’t feel heard.”
Content creator Bellular attempted to use the graph and past known numbers to estimate that World of Warcraft currently has over seven million subscribers, but without a labeled Y scale, we have no idea whether these squiggles are even on a linear scale, and of course the perspective of years before 2016 is entirely missing.
For example, based on investor reports, we know WoW stood at 10 million subs during Q4 2014 and 7.1 million during Q1 2015. Q3 2015 was the last quarter Blizzard provided subscription numbers for World of Warcraft, in a period when the game had lost 45% of its remaining subscribers in just nine months; from then to the Microsoft buyout, the company provided only merged monthly actively user data across all of its games and most recently appeared to be hiding losses from its titles under WoW’s relative stability and Diablo launches.
Either way, with Blizzard, best not to assume anything.
