Realistically, what do you think WoWs playerbase is at?

[Deleted]

I don't. And I'm not going to bother. Want something true? WoW has died. It has 1 subscriber left. The 1.7 million was posted by an unknown source then duplicated by weakauras then removed and weakauras had to confirm they didn't know if it was true or not. Blizzard came up and said it was false.

Even if true it wouldn't account for anything other than NA accounts. No Europe, no China.

we have weak-auras in Europe you know. maybe its true or false but id prefer a link to see self. either way im not gonna have a fight over leaked numbers and how upset the make you or not.

[Phantombeard]

I don't know but from my experience when I PVE, considering Dungeon Pug times, M+, Island Queue's, LFR (witch I don't do after my chars get 340+) and WQ I would say somewhere around 2-3mil. Now with my experience with PVP doing random Invasions with Raid Groups and seeing how the whole damn game changes in a way that is unfathomable to describe or understand, I would say 2-3 mil from that also. So my Final answer would be 4-6 million, why you may ask. I can honestly tell you WOW PVE and WOW PVP are 2 completely different games. If you only turn WM on and walk around doing WQ (getting ganked I may add) and not involving yourself in PVP raiding or Battlegrounds or even trying Arena's . Then you are missing out on a lot the game is offering and yeah, you would think the sub numbers are low.

Hell, you pay 15 dollors a month to play the game, why not try everything it has to offer. Right now the funnest time I've had in years is doing Mythic Uldir with my Guild but I have had a equally good time doing "Raid" PVP with a bunch of ppl I've never run with in my life. I think the game is alive in many places but, many ppl get stuck to doing one part of the game and they never venture out to try anything else the game offers and when that happens the game does feel small. Warcraft may have millions of ppl playing but, WOW itself has Divided the player base. Blizzard keeps coming up with a gazzillion things to do to keep people busy, playing their game and nobody has time to talk anymore. I personally think that makes it feel like a single player game more than anything. So from many people's perspective it does seem like WOW is loosing its player base. I recommend break out of your comfort zone, talk to people and enjoy all there is, there are more ppl out there playing WOW than you may think.

[Eon Drache]

we have weak-auras in Europe you know. maybe its true or false but id prefer a link to see self. either way im not gonna have a fight over leaked numbers and how upset the make you or not.

I just don't like people spreading false information thinking its true. We get too much of that on this site as is. The leak didn't come from Weak Auras btw. They just parroted it. There was so much wrong with the leak that honestly believing it was... laughable.

[Faesroll]

Dunno, during last years, when they were reporting numbers, they were going lower and lower with every xpack. Blizzard were losing around 2-2.5M players per xpack. So, now they should be around 0, but of course some players are still playing.

Legion had 10M subs

- - - Updated - - -

It got leaked a few months ago. It was under 2 million including alts. Could be under 1 million now.

was a false leak, even admitted by the guys who leaked it

[Frolk]

2.5mill

What id rather know is what % of player does what ingame, like farm tmog, pvp (rbgs, arena, world pvp), pve (5man, raids, lfr/norm, hc/M) or just for the social part.
I got a feeling the 2 major ones are social and tmog farmers.

[Archmage Alodi]

Less than 2m, china included.

[Faesroll]

Can't believe there are deluded fanboys thinking that there are still 3m subs kek

Can't believe there are deluded haters still thinking wow has less than 3 mil subs

[Deleted]

More than 6.

[Derpleton]

I'm guessing the expansion launched with 8-10 million subs and is down to 2-3 million. I think 20-25% of its launch total is likely seeing how much anger there is in the community right now. If I had to guess we're nearing the number of die hard fans that will play until the servers shut down.

[Kurve1776]

I'd say probably 4m incl. west + east players, leaning heavily towards an eastern majority at this point. I'd be surprised if there were more than 1.5m western subs. subtract all the 6 month subs from the people that were baited into it for the mount and you probably have a good few thousand to tens of thousand inactives in that category alone.

[Vineri]

Realistically ~ 1 mil, with most of them from Asia. Based off Warcraftrealms and other insightful places.

Anecdotally, once upon a time I knew people all over playing WoW. Friends, neighbors, coworkers. I currently know zero now. And the people I know nowadays play games other than WoW .. and their kids play completely different titles than either of us.

Even though it destroyed the community, Blizzard knew what they were doing when they did a cross-realm (cross-server) world. The individual servers are dead, but when linked up with 50 others, the world feels alive. It ruined the game for many, but there are still suckers around who just keep thinking all the people they see are on their chosen server. Tehe .. they think there are hundreds of other servers just like theirs. .. double Tehe.

There is, of course, the hidden population - those who subscribe, but chose to not play, until a certain event .. such as a new patch, or their credit card expiring, thus stopping recurring payments. They don't last forever.

[Sprinky]

Id say probably 4 million subs with 1-2 million people actively playing. I had 3 subs which I finally canceled last month after not playing for 3 months. My guild which never missed a single raid night in over 5 years (even on Christmas) finally stopped raiding this tier due to many of the core quitting.

[Deleted]

I just don't like people spreading false information thinking its true. We get too much of that on this site as is. The leak didn't come from Weak Auras btw. They just parroted it. There was so much wrong with the leak that honestly believing it was... laughable.

so basically like any leak its left to individuals to make up there mind on it.
of all the fake shit on this site you choose a that leak to attack?

remember theres a fine line between debunking false facts and just throwing out the term fake news on conjecture. and my origonal post when i put that number out there said where it came from and said it was a leak which should cover the "may not be 1005" reliable cause. it really didn't need the extra pointing out.

[Spiffums]

damn thats hella low

2 to 3 million times $15 a month (of course it's more because tokens cost $20) is still a hell of an income stream.

[ro9ue]

1-3mil probably.

[Vineri]

2 to 3 million times $15 a month (of course it's more because tokens cost $20) is still a hell of an income stream.

All of which is going to pay off debt or fund other projects. Very little is going back into WoW, as is evident.

Activision-Blizzard is going through hard times, thanks to mismanagement (and Activision, boo!). Cost cutting was announced.

Sell your gold for tokens. But a memorabilia T-shirt or something. There isn't any new games to buy. How about a nice coffee mug?

[Lord Pebbleton]

I disagree that the number of active players has anything to do with the enjoyment of the game (above a certain limit of course). However, looking at it from the perspective of players as investors, I can kind of understand why the population numbers are relevant. We pay Blizzard a monthly fee in order to play their game, and have invested not just a lot of money but time as well. A dying game is concerning, because it becomes a bad investment.

The "above a certain limit" is key. We don't actually know how many there are because they won't tell us, and that kinda makes me nervous tbf. We can only judge from the general consensus, which seems to be "this expansion sucks, I'm leaving".
I don't really feel safe anymore in spending money/investing my time in WoW also because of that. Of course, I have other reasons, it would be stupid to just quit because there are 2 million players instead of 3. But knowing that the general sentiment is to run the hell away from the game makes me hesitant.

[Deleted]

All of which is going to pay off debt or fund other projects. Very little is going back into WoW, as is evident.

Activision-Blizzard is going through hard times, thanks to mismanagement (and Activision, boo!). Cost cutting was announced.

Sell your gold for tokens. But a memorabilia T-shirt or something. There isn't any new games to buy. How about a nice coffee mug?

people seem to forget blizzard isn't a small company, it grown into a behemoth over the last 14 years. when it made wow its was pretty streamlined but like all company's as they grow they take on a lot of dead weight middle management and admin as well useful extra engineering and Dev staff. this creates money black holes in company's. in fact i can guarantee any one in this thread that currently or has worked at a big american company knows exactly what department is there money black hole and can usually tell you if something will be a success or failure based on how involved that block hole is with the project.

not only all that but as a public company they need to display year over year growth to grow share price. there being profitable then theres being more profitable than last year and thats what really matters to the company's health.

for some fun lets do math.
at $15 a month and 2mil players thats 360million $ a year brought in by wow subs.

now theres roughly 200 dev's working on wow (based of the tweeted pic in oct 2017) now im gonna say likely 25% of them in the pics are dead weight HR types or w/e and not pulling a full dev's salary which is $71,445 per year as the US averedge. so lets say as an estimate the averedge salary across the office is $50,000 taking into account juniors and admin crap.

so thats a staff cost per year of $120 million.

so taking away just the dev staffs wages it means wow is $240 mil in profit. but then we ned to look at the other costs.

we know that game operation and distribution cost 984,000 in december 2017 due to investor relations docs. but thats shared across all games but i would iomagine wow generates the lions share with how server centric it is.

sales and marketing cost $1,378,000 across the company.
general admin was $760,000 shared.
$484,000 payed in royalties.

so all that or what wow contributes to paying those costs has to be factored in. and when you compare to sales on call of duty BO:4 that made 500milion just on launch. black ops 2 made 1billion within 15 days now its doubtful bo:4 will post numbers like that but id still expect it will generate a billion dollars in sales over its life time. and those games take only 2-3 years to make and have very small upkeep costs.

now it dosent take a buissness genius to work out where as a company you want to be putting your investment.

[Eon Drache]

so basically like any leak its left to individuals to make up there mind on it.
of all the fake shit on this site you choose a that leak to attack?

remember theres a fine line between debunking false facts and just throwing out the term fake news on conjecture. and my origonal post when i put that number out there said where it came from and said it was a leak which should cover the "may not be 1005" reliable cause. it really didn't need the extra pointing out.

It's because it gets passed around as true. I'm not "attacking" it. Blizzard themselves confirmed it was fake. When something claims that something like 106% of all subs were pre-orders and that 6% of the players that pre-ordered never subbed I tend to think its a joke.

That's why I said WoW has 1 sub left till dead. I have just as much credibility as the person that leaked that info.

[Fascinate]

Whatever the number is, i can only say ive been subbed since 2006 straight and never have i seen trade chat so dead (well, other than spammers).

I think blizzard is in a rough spot with WoW right now, do they attempt to bring back game design philosophies that made the game uber popular or is that generation of people moved on from gaming for the most part? Classic is going to give blizzard a lot of information about this and the direction they take retail in the next expansion will give us that answer.