7M is all subscribers, but a lot of people play different modes of wow.
I really don’t understand why people are obsessed with subscriber data. It feels like they use it to just doom and say “WoW iS dEaD” every year for the past 20. Myep that is a dead game(!)
I feel it worth pointing out, though, that a large drop off was also probably due to the end of covid/lockdown and people having to go back to work.
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I think people are just curious about how well the game is doing that they’ve invested a lot of time, energy and money into. If the game has plenty of players, the company has a strong incentive to continue pouring resources into development instead of cutting back and switching to maintenance mode.
So from this perspective it is reassuring that the number of subscribers is still (or again) sizable. (Assuming the numbers are accurate; like I mentioned, I’m generally a little skeptical of leaks that resemble press releases.)
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This information comes from a presentation from Blizzard’s John Hight (Warcraft General Manager) that he held last week at the Game Developer Conference:
https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/the-first-30-years-of-warcraft-the-making-of-a-game-universe/900319
Hight’s presentation doesn’t include exact numbers, but if the chart is accurate, one can extrapolate the current numbers based on the last official subscription numbers.
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Probably many are scared that less ppl could mean the end of the game
i was yesterday waiting 30 min in solo arena q so no numbers are fake
Is it important to argue about this part? 
On the picture (graph) shown in this topic, the player numbers were relatively stable since 2016 with minor to moderate variations. I don’t remember the exact moment of the Chinese separation but neither that nor Classic made a huge dent.
Considering a game twenty years of age, I would say it’s not bad.
I might be wrong especially about the effects of classic, maybe it should be 30m at least, due to player retention. I still suspect that players are on and off, like I play 2-4 months a year - I’d be more regular with F2P (existing content after all) but not more in terms of time, however that looks like on graphs.
About the arena comment above… most players jump around to whichever edition has new content, room to increase those juicy item levels, or earn some cosmetics. Which is, right now, Plunderstorm. Even then, players are well split between editions (WLK included), so it’s natural.
I think there is no way to save WoW, anyway. Each edition brings something unique that players of other editions religiously criticize.
And like those sub numbers will affect if I sub to the game or not. I played 3.1 
rated games cause I still liked them while I didnt like some 9 ones.
If I like WoW, i will play it, regardless if it has 10 milj or 1000 people playing.
This “guess wow sub numbers” topics only serve as carion for the Doomsayers and classic/retail andies to feast upon.
These are inflated numbers and do not represent the actual number of actively playing accounts.
Blizzard are known for lying/misleading the public and even lying to their employees, so whatever you see in relation to WoW player numbers, take it with a very large pinch of salt.
From a marketing point of view, if they had these numbers and they were real, it would be a huge boost to make people return or start playing the game due to the large number of players. So there would be no need to not publicly announce it on their website.
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thats a wild unsupported guess.
Why would someone start playing a game over sub-numbers? Does it really matter it is 1M or 10M or 100M?
just a friendly reminder that blizz roughly ban between 400k - 500k bot account every 3 months
those are subscribers too
so while you think its a large amount… most are bots.
Play an MMO with 10,000 players or an MMO with several million players… what do you think the normal gamer who wants to try out an MMO will go too? The one that not really played by a large number of people or an MMO which has more players than some countries in terms of population?
Very very true, you just need to look at Lost Ark’s player number as most of them are bots 
We are really not at that low numbers that people aren’t playing it because of the low number.
Apparently it does to some. I remember seeing people being very fond of Classic launch (despite problems on Blizz side) simply due to the amount of players playing the game. Same with SoD - I saw many people happy with the fact, that it’s packed with players.
On the contrary, I see people complaining that retail world seems empty.
As a side note: I know that Classic and Retail use different tech to manage population, wich highly influencec the player’s feeling, but the argument still stands: many people like to see a living world. And little sub numbers can’t really provide that.
doesnt bother me,
but ive been fed up with all blizzard games for a while
actually… im hoping a new MMO regardless of the playerbase count comes out soon so i have an excuse to leave
Blizzard didn’t actually give any numbers, the content creator guessed based on some other info.
People aren’t going to look at a website to check sub numbers of a game they want to play. Especially for wow it isn’t a factor. It has never been so low it was unplayable.
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