Repeating it doesn't make it right tho.
On October 7, 2010 World of Warcraft reached a subscriber base of over 12 million players.
And the started selling pets end of 2009. So BEFORE the decline. So you are wrong.
That aside if you are making 1% less than last year it is still better than damaging your high profile brand permanently by acting greedy. When they introduced the pet shop they had likely the best reputation of all gaming companies....I doubt that they still got that(for sure not in my book).