My theory on Blizzard and subs reporting is a bit more complicated than most but breaks down to this:
- Tokens degraded the importance of subs as revenue. Still measurable but the revenue side for tokens is in selling gold.
- Most people play for a while and then leave. And that's OK. With an old game that's understandable and is perfectly natural for an older game.
- Lots of choices for games leads to players playing more games. Most now return to see new stuff and then move on. They've quit before but clearly they come back again and again when expansions drop...
- ...leading to box sales being a more important revenue driver than before.
- Blizzard makes it easy to come-and-go with catch-up mechanisms and making it very easy to both leave and come back. They don't mind if you take a few months off. They know and understand it happens and have factored it into their forecasts.
- The company no longer relies on WoW to be their major revenue driver. It's still important but much less important than it was years ago.
The upshot is that Blizzard's overall revenue no longer depends solely on how well WoW is doing and in truth, the finance types in Irvine probably care less about subscriptions than people who hang out on forums. Activision as a whole has consolidated most measurement for success in a title across their product line as something measurable for all titles, subscription or otherwise: MAU. Activision/Blizzard is now up to nearly 400 million monthly active users across all their titles. That's a measurement that says something to ATVI stockholders that's a lot more useful than whatever the MAU number is for WoW alone which one can imagine is relatively a very small percentage.
Taken together, the obviously cyclic nature of how their subscription model works doesn't lend itself to anything except pointless criticism about the perfectly normal idea that there are still a lot of people who like to drop in on the game now and then, especially when an expansion drops, but will move on after a while. Blizzard thinks that's OK given the game's age. I think it's OK too and think that people that operate from the idea that the game is failing because people aren't subscribed for twelve months a year sound ridiculous when they write something that starts with that assumption. Expansions are nice but the game is what it is and no amount of fiddling around with classes has made this into some entirely new game. It's an old game, an expensive game and has been for a long time now.
Blizzard continues to look for a formula that will hold player's interest longer but it's hard to design a game 18 months to two years in advance. Markets change and what looks like a good idea today may look like an effing terrible idea by late 2018 or 2019. That's another reason why MAU measurement is more informative for them. It tells them how well the players who are there are engaging with the game and very likely what they're spending their time doing. That's going to likely lead to a better design framework than plugging for subscriptions. Blizzard is perfectly aware down to the nth degree what percentage of player stays all the time, how many stay for one month, how many for three, etc. They budget accordingly and the game is still a daily free trip to the bank for them.
It's a one-of-a-kind success story, whether you love or hate the game, and will remain so for a very long time mostly on the back of the people who play a few months a year and buy all the expansions. There's no reason whatsoever to publish metrics that mislead people into thinking the game is failing when it's more successful than any other game in its class or genre and when it's such a small percentage of the overall corporate measurement.
/rant