Expansion popularity

Community General Discussion
1

Earlier this year Blizzard released subscription data for unaccounted years since they stopped publishing the statistic in WOD. You can read on this here for example

www.icy-veins.

com/forums/topic/78140-world-of-warcrafts-subscriber-numbers-and-trends-from-2016-to-2024-revealed/?fbclid=IwAR3D6rfCFHTiut7o8ZaRXVsGeshciRfBPeeBFqeICiynSKLIgjqHbuj3-a4

I fed new and old blizzard graphs to GPT and that’s what it had to say

<<…
We’ll use the same weighted system:

  • Peak Subscribers = 40%
  • Average Subscribers = 40%
  • Low Subscribers = 20% (inverse scoring to penalize steep drops).

Normalized Scores:

  • Peak Score = (Peak / 12.5M) * 10
  • Average Score = (Average / 11.5M) * 10
  • Low Score = 10 - (Low / 12.5M) * 10
    …
    |Expansion|Peak Subscribers|Low Subscribers|Average Subscribers|
    |—|—|—|—|
    |Wrath of the Lich King|12.5M|~10M|~11.5M|
    |Cataclysm|12M|~9M|~10.5M|
    |Mists of Pandaria|10M|~7M|~8.5M|
    |Warlords of Draenor|10M|~5.6M|~7.5M|
    |Legion|8.3M|~5M|~6.5M|
    |Battle for Azeroth|8.3M|~4.07M|~5.6M|
    |Shadowlands|8.27M|~4.5M|~6.3M|
    |Dragonflight|7.25M|~6M|~6.5M (ongoing)|
    …
    |1|Wrath of the Lich King|9.2|
    |—|—|—|
    |2|Cataclysm|8.9|
    |3|Mists of Pandaria|7.4|
    |4|Warlords of Draenor|6.7|
    |5|Shadowlands|6.2|
    |6|Legion|6.1|
    |7|Dragonflight|5.9|
    |8|Battle for Azeroth|5.9|
    … >>

What are your thoughts on this? Would you apply different weights?
Do you think BFA is lower than shadowlands due to classic launch or was shadowlands overly more popular?

2

Who cares what i think?
The Company itself hates its fanbase.
They dont care what you say and think or feel.
So why bother ?

4 Likes
3

Disclaimer: No numbers were actually published by Blizzard but was speculated by a streamer in question.

12 Likes
4

no numbers were released .its all speculative .plz dont twist facts

8 Likes
5

For me TWW is worse than Dragon flight

10 Likes
6

Blizzard stopped reporting actual player numbers back in WOD(2014).

1 Like
7

What is it with these forums and it being infested with GBT posts.

Its like even the playerbase CBA anymore.

2 Likes
8

im here to play games, not statistics n polls :dracthyr_uwahh_animated:

9

That they’re off.

Launch sales are pretty indicative of popularity. So when those sales were 3.4 and 3.7 million for Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands, respectively, then that is obviously the size of the retail playerbase between those two data points (minus China).

Then we got some less reliable data, but still sufficient enough, that suggests that the end of Shadowlands saw a playerbase of approximately 500.000 and that The War Within has around 500.000 current players as well. So again, that would be the size of the retail playerbase between those two data points (minus China).

We don’t have any really good indications on Classic, except that we know the popularity spikes on release and historically drops off sharply after approximately 3 months.

We also don’t know the numbers for China, except that historically the market is about equal to the size of EU + NA. So roughly doubling those numbers seems to be the best guess for the worldwide playerbase.

So approximately 1 million retail players worldwide and an unknown number for Classic - but likely bigger than retail now, and smaller in a few months.

1 Like
10

1st Rule of Expansion Popularity is that the current expac is the Worst Ever.
2nd Rule: Wrath is God.
3rd Rule: WoD broke everything.
4th Rule: MOP is way under-rated.
5th Rule: SL finally got through to Ion that everything was broken.

3 Likes
11

6th Rule: Don’t tell anyone TBC was the best

2 Likes
12

Shadowlands was during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of people where staying home with a lot of time to play games.

1 Like
13

So basically you guys think, that those two plots published by blizzard are inaccurate?

14

No. Where did I allude to that? There’s nothing in my post that is at odds with the graph published by Blizzard.

15

I’m having fun in Anniversary Classic.
Not so much in retail.
I guess that’s better than nothing as they still get my sub.

16

Same. I think Blizz did much better class tuning in DF. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but they made improvements regularly. Now, in TWW, all the class balance changes are too infrequent and they’re only bandaid fixes. Blizz doesn’t acknowlege how bad some classes are designed at the moment, e.g. priest and DH.

17

But wait where does the 500k number come from?

18

Tbc was one of the best close to wrath for sure

19

What priest bad design?one of the most op no wonder they do such bad balance with these forums wrong opinions

20

It comes from Blizzard’s game data APIs, which allows us to – for example – see how many recently-active accounts have acquired an achievement for completing a Delve or reached level 80 on a character.
And from that we can deduct that however many that is, is equal to the number of recently-active players in The War Within (minus China).
And that number is ~500.000 players.