What do you think the real sub #'s are now?

[zimboombafoo]

I know they stopped releasing sub numbers in late mop (at least I think that's when it happened). What was once a 10+ million sub game back in the day obviously had full drop weight subs comparatively. How many people do you think are subbed to the game at this point and/or what do you think they'll be come BFA?

[Logwyn]

Four!

Wait for what? WOW? People buy for subs now?? i thought everyone played free from tokens?!

[grexly75]

Surprise, surprise another dumb ass thread about a topic that has now gotten extremely old and beaten to death so much that it is now fertilizer.. As Nexx226 has stated no one truly knows outside of Blizzard..

Not really sure what this sad fascination some people have with sub numbers, so long as the game is still going and people are enjoying themselves in the game then that is all that is needed..

[zimboombafoo]

holy crap do you people have nothing better to do on a saturday night than instantly burst threads in flames? get a girlfriend (or boyfriend). like you really just sit here all evening and tear everyone's posts apart? you must be very sad individuals

[Sastank]

Pointless ass attempt. Yet another WOW IS DYING troll bait. Who cares.

[grexly75]

holy crap do you people have nothing better to do on a saturday night than instantly burst threads in flames? get a girlfriend (or boyfriend)

Same could be said of you, you post a topic that has been beaten to death so often that most reasonable people don't give a crap about it any more.. If the game is still going and Blizzard are still supporting it, then that is all that matters as that indicates that there are still a lot of people playing it..

[Airwaves]

I'd say 3-5 mil. It will shoot back over 10 mil in BFA and Classic. And drop between. It has worked the same way for the last 4 expansions.

[grexly75]

Pointless ass attempt. Yet another WOW IS DYING troll bait. Who cares.

Pretty much this^ as in my post most reasonable people don't care about it.. And the OP is so defensive and wondering why they got such a negative response so fast..

[Niwes]

with „subbed“ you mean „actualy playing“ ? or do you mean only ppl that pay sub, without token ppl or ppl that actual make a break ???

if you mean „actual playing“ i assume it was around 7,5 mio players in late feb/early march (when antorus was still heavily progressed by masses). since now many raids/players finalized antorus and maybe are already in break mode until august.

i believe in this number of 7,5 mio players, cause the availability of players via tool/lfg/etc. always reflected the overall number in a smaller ratio. with that i mean: in the end of cata when 1/3 of players of millions were lost, it feels like you have 1/3 players of that 10.000 in your region lost. when wod in the beginning was very high in subs, nearly doubled, it also felt like available players were doubled. so, even when your regional pug raiding says nothing about overall numbers, it mostly reflects the reality very well. in Legion it felt like „7 mio“ players playing the game here and there. this is just my „expereince feeling“.

another reason why i believe in this number is, that WoD dropped from around 11 mio hard to around 4-5 mio in the end. i assume Legion, as the „fan service xpac“ announced, took back a good portion and started with maybe 10 mio. but Legion did a way better job to keep ppl playing a bit longer, so i believe the typical 2-3 were lost, that nearly every xpac lost in the past. so i assume around 7 mio is also a good number here.

„playing accounts“ (last in dec 2017) in mmoc statistics and a look at wowrealms, armory 110 chars and wowprogress supports that number too, when you extrapolate them.

the third reason why i believe in this number is the following: if it were over 10 mio ppls, blizzard would take this as a marketing option and had announced it in some way or another. there are hundreds of possibilities to use this with positive effect, besides just showinh the sub numbers now again, like they did in the past. if it were way less than 7 mio players, lets say 3-4 mio, blizzard already had stopped the investment in Legion and you would have a way more stronger feeling of „WoD“.

the only thing that give me a bit of a tendence more towards 5 mio players than 7 mio, is the low investment in classes in BfA. but maybe its really the thing that they are like „classes are fine. lets just polish them.“ and not „low budget is better invested anywhere than classes“.

so, 6-7 mio is my bet. tendence descreasing because of ppl makin break until BfA.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

No one knows and it's honestly pointless to average it.

Still, I think the subs are slightly higher than 5m, perhaps 6m.

[lockybalboa]

Slightly lower than 2M

[Kyanion]

holy crap do you people have nothing better to do on a saturday night than instantly burst threads in flames? get a girlfriend (or boyfriend). like you really just sit here all evening and tear everyone's posts apart? you must be very sad individuals

So you get answers that people can't give you the info you want and that this thread is pretty pointless and you do that?

[Auxora]

Tokens made the sub number pretty irrelevant. There can be a playerbase of a certain number, but how many of them are actually purchasing a sub with real money each month? Even now with tokens fairly expensive it's really not that difficult to earn enough to play for free each month. And I know quite a few people that stocked up on time when tokens were cheap, to the point of having years being subbed paid in advance even if they don't necessarily play anymore.

The things we can take away about the state of the game are the numbers they share in quarterly earnings reports, and reading between the lines at things like Blizzcon. Blizz is obviously still putting out BfA, so they assume that another expansion will have enough support to be profitable. On the other hand there was some talk of more server mergers coming later this year, and the importance of wow at Blizzcon has declined compared to Overwatch and HS. It's also pretty clear that the Warcraft movie didn't create the massive resurgence in the game that Blizz hoped. But it's doing fine, even if the glory days of 10-11 million subs have passed.

[TickerDS]

I would guess we are right about at the end of expansion 5-5.5 million range that we have seen smartly speculated on by people in the know for the last few expacs...

Looking at my friends list over the last few months there has been a slight dip in people logging on, but I don't know a single person who was active after the 3-4 month post expansion raise in numbers that is still not actively paying for a sub. --- meaning of my 25ish or so people who have been playing basically since launch and that I know really well by this point, 3-4 stopped after the expansion launch window, 6-8 are still playing actively, 3-4 pop on every once and awhile, and the rest are paying but not playing -- some can't be bothered to just actually end their sub, some think they are going to play but never do, and a few are staying active just to keep their run going -- I know a decent number of people that got the statue at year 10 and will never let their sub drop just to see what keeps coming.

Make of that what you will....

As for tokens, Blizz was super smart with that, as they got their money from someone -- even if there are a boatload of people playing for "free" because they bought tokens -- someone paid that money into their wallet to buy the token in the first place -- they don't care who put the money in --- not to mention the 5 dollar surcharge compared to a monthly sub. And it has honestly kept a few of my friends playing, as they would have dropped off due to the cost by now normally and it actually keeps them driven to keep playing to keep making the gold to buy game time.


Now active player count...that is a completely different story.



Also if you are looking at game health -- just looking at the amazon best sellers list for video games (including consoles), Wow held a few of the top 5 spots for a good long while after allied races launched and again when the release date announced. The collectors edition physical is still 31st overall for PC and it has been sold out basically since you could pre-order it. The day the release date was announced, it was 1, 3, and 5 from my memory. And that coming from a game that has its own launcher system where I would guess a majority buy from?

Tokens, different ways to buy the game, revenue from in game purchases/services, mounts, pets....all of this is why the sub number means very little. If anything, the pure profitability of the game is the more important number at this point --- as subs leave out a good chunk of the revenue streams.

[MoanaLisa]

No one knows or can know so this topic is pointless.

Exactly right. And since no one knows these threads quickly spiral into pointless flaming, arguments and eventually infractions.

So let's not do that.

Closed.