How many subs are needed for WoW to remain viable?

[Toiran]

They developed WoW with an expectation of 400,000 subs total in a best case scenario, it went just a little better than planned.

Now, that would not support the current infrastructure, however, with sub closes, they downsize on infrastructure, so the cost goes down as revenue goes down.

I'd say 300k to 1 Mill is needed to keep content updated at a decent speed, but that would bring a hell of a lot of server closes, staff lay offs and much longer and less customer support etc.

Tbh, they could make it work with 100,000k with a skeleton staff and basically no updates, but that wouldn't sustain players interests for long.

[BukkaKid]

This game won't ever dip below ~3mil subscribers, not while it's the cash money generating machine that it is. If upkeep starts taking a toll there's plenty of fat that can be trimmed off and plenty of gimmicks Blizzard can do to keep player baser steady; merge servers, get the barren Ally heavy server merged with the Horde ghost town servers. Legacy servers that feature only up to a certain expansion, or Progression Servers that unlock expansions as players beat raids, etc. Not to mention the vanity pets/mounts/outfits that take less than a week to produce but garner millions of dollars in buys.

Game isn't going anywhere and will stay valid until the next monolithic MMO comes out. EQNext (super EQ fan here) will forge the baby steps that the next blockbuster will be based off of, meaning the next WoW won't be around for at least another 3-5 years, if that.

[Deleted]

They could do with 1k subs if they wanted to, the only question is how much would the content suffer and which way would the game go. As long as the game loses a couple of 100k subs over a couple of quarters I don't think they really care. But if the game suddenly went from 7million to like 500k then they would start to shut the whole thing down.

Expansions still bring in a lot of people, old and new so it's just a question of Blizzard's bussiness model which none of us have acces to sadly.