I'm certainly not 1 of these people who come on doom mongering every time the subs are announced and there's a drop in numbers but I honestly expected there to be a pretty big drop in subs here just because SoO has been out a while and I expected people would get bored at this point in an expansions time line...
Some people must be gutted that they aren't going to be able to make their quarterly post about how WOW is dying.
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You will have a point if 3 or 4 months into WOD the sub numbers are signigantly lower than 9.6 million (this would be about the same point MOP was at at the beginning of 2013). I'm fairly sure that the last few months of Cata had far less subs than were playing at the beginning of Cata and probably even less than the 9.6 million playing MOP a few months into that xpac at the beginning of 2013...
A lot of players only return when there is new content to play such as a new raid patch or a new xpac. You are comparing the point in the expansion when all these types of players are playing (beginning of 2013) vs the end of an xpac when there's been no new contentfor months and these types of players aren't really around.
It's always going to go in the following cycle:
New xpac comes out and subs peak. A few months later subs gradually begin to drop but rise slightly whenever a major patch comes out.. Towards the end of an xpac numbers are generally at their lowest. Then it repeats with the release of a new xpac.
The store is proof of nothing other than that Blizzard is aiming to maximise its revenue... Sort of like every single company on the planet.