NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Steep drop in World of Warcraft subscriptions levels out at 5.5 million players
Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft experienced a massive hemorrhage of its player base earlier this year, dropping nearly in half from a peak of over 10 million subscribers in November 2014 to just 5.6 million by August. While the nearly 11-year-old MMO is still losing players, the bleeding seems to have slowed as Blizzard revealed that this month’s numbers dropped only slightly to 5.5 million subscribers.
Of course, every World of Warcraft expansion has seen the game’s player base spike immediately after launch and then quickly taper off, but the drop-off seems to be happening earlier and earlier with each new expansion. The most recent addition to the game, Warlords of Draenor, saw the game’s subscriptions drop to their lowest point since 2005, the year following the game’s initial release.
Less than a year into Warlords, Blizzard has already announced the next expansion, World of Warcraft: Legion, which will likely be releasing next summer around the same time as the new Warcraft film, which is currently in production under Moon director Duncan Jones. Several of the features announced for Legion seem to be a direct response to complaints that players made about Warlords, which has been criticized for focusing too heavily on player garrisons to the detriment of other aspects of the game.
“We’ve been listening closely to our players about their experience with Warlords of Draenor, and we think they’ll be really excited when they hear our plans,” Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said earlier this year in Activision Blizzard Inc’s Q2 earnings call.
It seems that Blizzard Entertainment has gotten tired of its low subscriber numbers making headlines, as the studio has announced that going forward, it will no longer reveal its player numbers to the public.
“Note that this is the last quarter that we plan to provide subscriber numbers,” Blizzard said. “There are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance.”
So they say right now anyway, but it is hard to believe that they would still keep their numbers secret if they suddenly started to climb back up.
Screenshot by Eric David | SiliconANGLE
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