WoW subscriber data.

[TheDeeGee]

You just wish WoW died, that's why you say 500K?

[aarro]

Go play WoW classic now! It may not be for every one, but the game is really fun!

I played it when it was current and I have no intention to go back

[Shammyrock]

I always enjoy the image that every single person who has ever unsubbed is sat waiting for classic to launch.

[Saphyron]

It's evident by any activity metric (raider population on Wowprogress, Warcraftrealms, etc.) that there are 3 million subscribers at most, probably less. It's still big, but subscriber bleed will never end and things like excessive focus on infinite grinds in Legion will cause even more extreme burn out in the long term.

Using raiding data is not a good indication, while the overall trend is downwards. It's not big enough to say there are 4 times as fewer people in the game now compared to peak courtesy of wowprogress. (click for bigger picture)

[zoned]

You just wish WoW died, that's why you say 500K?

Your delusion is strong. WoW is very dead if we are comparing it to Vanilla-WotLK.
BfA will be dead on arrival. WoW's only hope of survival is classic, which is why Blizzard announced it 2 years in advance.

[anon5123]

Classic will be popular for a few of months then start to decline rapidly as people will realise that nostalgia got the better of them.

"hurrr rose tinted glasses XDDDD"

gee, never heard this one before...

why are you even here

[aarro]

"hurrr rose tinted glasses XDDDD"

gee, never heard this one before...

why are you even here

well you see, I'm here to give my opinion... I don't really care how many times it has been said.

[Swalload]

Where are you getting these numbers? 5 million current subs? If this was the case WoW would easily be top streamed and viewed game on twitch. I would estimate WoW currently has less than 1mil prob closer to 500k subs.

You are either out of your mind or extremely bad with estimations. WoW is doing much better on twitch right now than it did during both WoD and MoP. The MDI is doing well, the arena tournaments aren't doing so hot which is understandable since they never fix any PvP issues and never make it competitive-based but always character progression-based. Either way it's not doing bad in general.

WoW is still very active right now, insanely more than the end of WoD that's beyond obvious the moment you log on. Maybe your server turned to shit? I don't know. All I remember is the end of WoD looking like a ghost town and now it's like a revitilized game in comparison so there's no way it's doing worse than WoD.

[Thimagryn]

The problem with any of this data is that it's all raw numbers with no bearing on what groups are present.

We know that WoW has had over 100 million accounts active since 2014. How does this number fit with the rate of active players through all the expansions? What is the growth and decay rates of each expansion? What is the range of sub-length for all those accounts?

I would gather that the first 5 years of WoW's growth was explosive because it was fresh, new and on the tip of every gamer's tongue. It was the 'it' game of 2004-2009. The audience was massive and composed mainly of casual players who never even played the original RTS games or touched an MMO. Many of these players probably weren't in it to stay for long, they just wanted to see what the hype was about and knew someone who played and got interested.

Now, the game is not so heavily dependant on the casual market boosting sub numbers and inflating subs into the millions. The era of casual hype is over, and that's why a new business model was implemented with Tokens and Microtransactions. The game is held up by the whales who stay in the game, not the casual market.

Whatever numbers Classic will get will never match the 2004-2009 window, because the majority of casuals aren't interested in playing an old game. They're interested in trying the new fad, like the spike of players we see for PUBG and Fortnite. That's where the current market is, and it's not something that will last very long either. As soon as a new experience pops up, casual players will migrate over to that and check it out.

The WoW Classic vocal bunch are few and far between. The petition for private servers hit slightly over 200,000. You'll see a spike of people play classic because that's inevitable, like the millions who returned to play WoD that crashed the servers. Over the long run though, it will pan out the same as WoD, and peter out to be sustained by a low population few. That's the inevitability of lack of new content. The ones who stay will be the hardcore few, not the casual majority that have no long-term interests for playing WoW.

From a business standpoint, WOW Classic has only one goal - use lowest amount of resources (no new development, only get what exists to run on new systems) to provide a new source of income from the demanding market. That's the goal of any of the Remakes. The 'this is for the fans' shiny stuff is all just marketting. Getting us to buy games they already made is, to their benefit, something that falls in line with our interests. They won't have much interest in keeping the servers above X millions of accounts (which they had moderate control over, like banning goldfarmers to get them to rebuy accounts), they're just gonna let it run and stabilize at a low-cost maintenance level as long as it continues to provide income.

[Rainyhealz]

Sorry dude, fortnite and pubg aren’t new ideas. H1z1 had it years before and arma 2 way before that as well

[Porimlys]

Some could argue that Legion is worst expansion ever, regardless WoW numbers have been declining drastically every expansion. If you had 5 million paid subscribers, you would surely see more activity on twitch. Legion typically sits at 5-10k viewers on twtich. People don't stream it because there's no audience, it's simply not profitable for streamers. This suggests a very low subscription count, my best guess is less than 1 million.

You're very fixated on this twitch angle, I think low streaming #'s probably have more to do with the fact that wow isnt the most exciting spectator game, unless you're streaming new, unreleased content

[arkanon]

"hurrr rose tinted glasses XDDDD"

gee, never heard this one before...

why are you even here

"why are you even here if you dont agree with me?"

never heard that one before.

[zoned]

You're very fixated on this twitch angle, I think low streaming #'s probably have more to do with the fact that wow isnt the most exciting spectator game, unless you're streaming new, unreleased content

Twitch is the future of gaming owned by largest company in the world... Amazon. Welcome to 2018.
It's almost like saying you are over fixated on the internet angle back in 1999.

[Akibaboy]

this was because WOD dropped to 5million after 1-2months and continued dropping making bad headlines so they no longer release this data.

Except that after the token was released, the subscriber numbers were no longer a reflection of any success numbers for Blizzard.

I haven't had a sub since April 2016, because I've done nothing but buy tokens, and have had uninterrupted game time since. If Blizzard makes a change I hate or I get unhappy with the game, can I unsub? No. I just stop playing while my game time withers away... there's no feedback or response Blizzard sees unless they monitor time played and interaction. That's the game's new measure of success.

If the game was dying or at an all time low, I doubt you would've seen it given the massive focus and legroom at Blizzcon, much less justifying 2 simultaneous versions of it existing unless the one they already has is indeed still massively successful for them.

[anon5123]

"why are you even here if you dont agree with me?"

never heard that one before.

It's not about disagreeing, it's about purposefully coming to a forum for something you hate, just to shit on people who like it.

Why are you even here? If you hate vanilla and think it's just "nostalgia" and "rose tinted goggles", why are you even here? You're not adding anything to any conversation, just parroting an old non-argument meme.

[Fritters154]

Your delusion is strong. WoW is very dead if we are comparing it to Vanilla-WotLK.
BfA will be dead on arrival. WoW's only hope of survival is classic, which is why Blizzard announced it 2 years in advance.

If their only hope is Classic, then WoW in its entirety is already dead. If we are actually going to assume that Legion is at such a low number of 500k, then Classic will be lucky to maintain 5k, because there is no way that Classic maintains more than 1% of the activity of Live after the first few months.

[Porimlys]

Twitch is the future of gaming owned by largest company in the world. Welcome to 2018.
It's almost like saying you are over fixated on the internet angle back in 1999.

Twitch is integral in the gaming scene these days, sure, but it aint the end all be all metric of how many people are playing any given game. Welcome to 1673

[Echocho]

Well they don't release sub numbers for retail so I doubt they'll release them for Classic, and they'll probably share a subscription either way so it'll be impossible to tell them apart.

However Classic will probably be bleeding players from day one, it has a finite amount of content and that's not what most people want out of a MMORPG. Some will quit before experiencing all that content, some will quit once they've consumed it all and a small amount of people will keep replaying vanilla, I'm one of those people.

[Deleted]

I think Legion dropped to 2 million players. It was not that great despite what some mmo-champion people say. There is a good chance classic can overtake retail when it comes to numbers.

[HordeFanboy]

10-15 mln on classic launch