WoW Total Active Subscribers = 3 Million-ish

Community General Discussion
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I can’t seem to find anything more recent, probably because Blizzard stopped announcing subscriber numbers during Warlords of Draenor… But here is a link posted in 2015 on the MMO Champion website regarding active World of Warcraft subscriptions, from Vanilla through to WoD. A lot of you may have seen this already…

https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/4878-WoW-Down-to-7-1-Million-Subscribers

^^ Again these are figures from nearly four years ago. That being said, I’ve been looking around trying to find a more accurate & up to date stats regarding active WoW subscriptions. The truth is there is nothing concrete, just a lot of guess work & assumptions. However that doesn’t mean they are not educated guesses or assumptions. The best I can find is somewhere around the 3 million mark, give or take, as the current number for active subscriptions to World of Warcraft.

Tools & Articles:
#1
https://www.wowrealmpopulation.com/wow-eu-connected-pve-realms-population-alliance.php
#2
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/acqhph/i_estimated_subscriber_numbers_using_google_trend/
#3
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/world-of-warcraft-wow-subscription-numbers-battle-of-azeroth-1932930

It could quite possibly be even less but no one seems to have a handle on the Chinese market so best to over estimate.

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P.S
Some people seem to be asking what is the point of this thread? or what am I trying to prove?.. As mentioned before, Blizzard have stopped posting official numbers regarding active subscriptions. This post just tries to point out “roughly” what those numbers of active subscribers is likely to be now. I don’t claim it to be fact, & I have tried to make it quite clear that this is more or less detective work. :stuck_out_tongue:

As for those asking what does the number of active subscribers even prove?.. Well how do you measure success? In this case how do you measure the success of a game (World of Warcraft) and its expansions over the years. Generally your gonna look at its player base & how many active members there are. You could also argue how much money a game is making is a measure of its success, however this is not always true. For example when Amazon was building its empire it was loosing quite a lot of money to begin with… But its growth was exponential & that’s really what matters to share holders, Growth. Going back to WoW, it’s business model is subscription based, & so active subscriptions = money. Obviously.

If we look back at the following link. You can interpret the data to come to some interesting conclusions…

https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/4878-WoW-Down-to-7-1-Million-Subscribers

^^ Out side of the base game, so excluding Vanilla/Classic… The Burning Crusade could be considered the most successful point in WoW, as it saw the most growth… Wrath of the Lich King could be considered the most successful point in WoW, because it maintained a high level of subscribers for the longest period of time… Cataclysm could be considered the most successful point in WoW, as it was during this expansion the subscriber count peaked at over 12.2 million, the highest ever in WoWs history.

One thing is clear, ever since cataclysm WoW has been on a downward trend. This didn’t just happen over night & for no reason. This is a consistent downward trend based on the various additions & changes to the game & the general direction the game development has been taken. Essentially each expansions since Cataclysm the game is loosing subscribers not gaining. Another way to look at it is like this, there is a revolving door where new players enter & established players leave… The problem is there are more people leaving through the door than there are coming in. :stuck_out_tongue:

The spikes that you see on the above graph, as well as others, around the release of new expansions are people that actually want to play the game. They come back check looking to find enjoyment, cant find it & leave again. I would argue around the release of the last three expansions, Warlords of Draenor, Legion & Battle for Azeroth, subscriber numbers have spiked to 8.5 & up to 10 million each time! This is the true potential of WoW Subscribers, people that want to play the game. But Blizzard are not giving any good reasons to want to stick around. Blizzard turn a blind eye to this potential market & double down on the crap that has been driving players away from the game. :roll_eyes:

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The numbers jumped up quite a bit in Legion.

WoW population is not a continuous downward trend but very spiky; more people come back for and expansion and then leave soon after; the same thing happens for major content patches.

If we take 3 million figure as legit that’s still quite impressive for about 10 years from it’s peak. WoW is coming up for 15 years old!

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its not impressive. its depressive

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Name one game that’s held that number after 15 years. Most dont even get to 3 million.

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3M+ Sub and im here sitting in a 15+ minutes BGs queue time :rofl::crazy_face::joy:

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Runescape maybe?

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From ffxivcensus . com they have 1,585,631 total players of which 39,806 are active.
That’s around 3 to 4% of the total number of players who are active.
Even if WoW has 10 times this number that’s 400,000 active subs, rounded up, worldwide.
At 10 Euro/Dollar a month that’s still a cool 4 Million monthly income, so 48 Million per year.
Double it to include paid services & mounts etc.
Triple it to include non-digital merch and eSports revenue etc.
Say 150 Million a year rounded up. Almost certainly more.
Extreme back of the envelope, ballpark calculations but still not too shabby.
Buzzard’s costs, as in, staff, payroll, servers, crayons, vodka, powders etc - No idea.

Look, it’s 4 am here so I’m just doodling. :no_mouth:

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Lads, WoW has 3 Million active players in the world.

It’s still one of the best MMO, the real problem is the following, it’s dropping.

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The way things are going. I expect it to drop rapidly in the fall of 2019, provided 8.2 corrects the 8.0 mistakes. But that’s wishfull thinking…

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Obviously they are all the same faction, and want to PvP and at the same time as you. WoW clearly must be dead.

Runescape likely has a base of mainly long term fans by now and WoW’s heading that way sooner or later.

Analysts have reached the conclusion of about 500, 000 concurrent players. That’s a last year so probably about the same. Very good considering it’s history, the additional premium subscriptions and cash shop. They also have a new expansion coming summer. They follow the wrath/Cata progression system for gear with some twists.

Yes… what people fail to notice is that it spikes and falls. If it always lost players it would be in negative numbers by now.

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I am only using FFXIV’s numbers as a rough yardstick because they are “out there”.
If ActiVulture_Buzzard didn’t hide their numbers, there wouldn’t need to be such speculation.
Fortnite for example let their numbers out, 40 Million logins a month last ballpark.
I realise these are very different types of game but,
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” is the thing here.
“Doing well, Tell, on the slide, Hide.” brand of corporate thinking.

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FFXIV will get a boost in July when Shadowbringers is released but as it stands they have nowhere near the numbers that WoW still has.

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Two factors I see: shooters have always been more popular; they are easy to pick up and stop where as an MMORPG needs time invested. Fortnite concurrency is based on a F2P game.

As a comparison League of Legends concurrency was much mroe than WoW but has now hit saturation and it’s numbers are going down. MOBAs like MMORPGs are no longer as popular.

Indeed. No MMORPG game ever will.

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Totally agree. The F2P model is the new normal and is very different to the sub.
Fortnite is a FOTM at the moment so they brag up the numbers.
I’ve never played FFXIV but I know some people who do.
Black Desert Online is averaging 10 to 15K active players a day
(source: githyp . com)
I have toons in BDO so I know how it feels to have surges and dips.
WoW feels dippy at the moment but I am optimistic that it will evolve to survive.

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for WoW thats not a success it’s a massive failure…they had 12mil, 10 mil, in recent times too…3 mil (probably way less) is massive failure, it should be compared to it self, not other games

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Name one game which is 15 years old and has the same number of players , as the had in their prime.

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I’d say the F2P model is in decline. There’s going to be far more regulatory scrutiny on them thanks to EA’s foray with Star Wars.

Episodic content I think is going to be the new model.

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@Fluxache: That is way, way too low… :smiley: WCR data is incomplete… and even with data missing prime time (18-22) looks like this… (numbers in ()s prime time average lows).

EU alliance peak (67 678+) 90 649+ and horde peak (49 153+) 62 491+.
US alliance peak (44 280+) 97 416+ and horde peak (109 470+) 147 600+.

So, even using the least favourable set of numbers… that is… 270 581+ CCUs (concurrent users)… using the higher probability set… 398 156+ CCUs. And those numbers are a fraction from the actual totals, because there are a LOT of players who play outside prime time, were not detected at all or played on toons of levels 1 to 19, which the CensusPlus addon can not detect at all. Additional note: I oversimplified a bit, but the number of players, who play both US and EU prime time is so tiny it does not have any major impact on anything.

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I guess 90648 alliance are in WM off then…

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@Aundra: Unfortunately activity scans can not discern whether the characters have WM on or off.