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7.25 million subscribers - "World of Warcraft" is far from dead

26/3/2024

Translation: machine translated

Normally there are no concrete subscriber figures for "World of Warcraft". However, a new chart and a clever calculation show that "WoW" has more than seven million paying players.

Is "World of Warcraft" dead? This question has been asked frequently over the past ten years in view of falling subscriber numbers. Now there are new figures: "WoW" currently has 7.25 million subscribers. That is significantly more than was widely assumed. The website Gitnux, for example, which collects figures from the economy and compiles statistics, estimated a figure of around 4.6 million subscribers for 2023.

The latest figure that has become known does not come from Blizzard Entertainment itself, the company behind "WoW", and it has not been confirmed. At the Game Developers Conference a few days ago, Blizzard employee John Hight presented a history of subscriber numbers since 2016, but without specifying the figures. Using previous forecasts, the YouTuber BellularWarcraft calculated the surprisingly high figure of more than seven million active subscribers on this basis. Here you can see how he arrives at this figure:

"World of Warcraft" and its plan

"World of Warcraft" was released at the end of 2004, making it the oldest active and commercially successful MMORPG in the world. From the very beginning, a monthly plan was required to log into the game. Further costs are added (optionally) through the purchase of major game expansions, which have been released every two years since 2008. Blizzard justified the plan by covering ongoing costs for servers and staff, as well as the release of free patches.

The plan costs around 13 euros or 14 francs when paid monthly. This has not changed in the almost 20 years since its release, while other suppliers in the entertainment sector keep raising their prices.

What do the current figures tell us?

For their plan, players get access to a huge, growing ecosystem. This includes the current "WoW" content with its numerous employment opportunities. A few days ago, Plunderstorm, a battle royale mode (player-versus-player), was released. Such releases often encourage former subscribers to come back to the game for a while and try out the new content.

Since 2019, Blizzard has also been opening additional servers at irregular intervals to run older, so-called classic versions of the game. Here, fans of earlier expansions can play "World of Warcraft" as they knew and loved it 14 to 20 years ago. They are also included in the plan.

The current number of subscribers does not say much about how many gamers play the current content and which content they like the most. In the Blizzard forums, users speculate that millions of gamers only play the Classic versions of the game. Blizzard has not commented on this.

Seven million subscribers is definitely a high number. It shows that "World of Warcraft" can still retain players even after two decades.

The demise of "WoW" was often predicted

At the end of 2010, "WoW" was at the peak of its popularity after around six years of rising subscription numbers: 12 million people paid for a monthly plan. But after that, the numbers dropped. In 2015, Blizzard announced that it would no longer publish current subscriber figures. At that time, there were 5.5 million paid accounts.

In the past, new MMORPGs have repeatedly been seen as potential "WoW killers". In other words, a game that would finally take the player base away from the old giant "WoW" and send it into oblivion. But no game has managed this. On the contrary: the new expansions are selling like hot cakes. The ninth expansion released in 2020, "Shadowlands", sold 3.7 million copies on the first day alone. The next expansion for "WoW", "The War Within", is expected in the second half of the year.

And the fact that Blizzard is still sticking with the subscription model for "WoW" shows that there are still enough players willing to spend money on the game every month.

Header image: KateV28

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Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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