The Purloined Letter – WoW Subscriber Numbers Leak from a GDC Presentation

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The 2024 Game Developer’s Conference was up in San Francisco last week, so I have been seeing tidbits of info coming out of it.  There are, of course, still people pushing blockchain there and AI is the big trend of the year because the finance people first and foremost want to eliminate as many expensive creative and development positions as possible.  SSDD.

But yesterday Shintar put up a post over on her blog about a chart that has leaked out of a presentation about the first 30 years of the Warcraft franchise.  She has the details on that, so you should go there, but the chart itself… it is the sort of thing that will launch a thousand blog posts, editorials, tweets, and forum comments.  So let me just get that up on the page.

WoW Subscriber Numbers from GDC 2024

Addendum: Per comment, this chart contains estimates based on the presentation.  The chart from the presentation is at the bottom of the post.

You may remember, if you are a long time reader, that Activision Blizzard decided to stop posting subscription numbers in their financial report, substituting in a monthly active user (MAU) metric that they claimed better represented their business.

This was, of course, a lie.  It was certainly a lie when it came to World of Warcraft because what better represents the state of a subscriber only title than the number of subscribers?  No, they wanted to hide subscriber numbers as they were tanking in the back half of Warlords of Draenor.

So basically our information about subscribers ended with this chart from from MMO Champion.

This chart hasn’t changed

The MAU gambit turned out to be something of a bust on its own.  Rather than being just about WoW the company looped in all of its titles so that non-subscription titles like Overwatch, Diablo III, and Hearthstone would inflate the numbers and hide any weakness in subscribers.

And then Overwatch lost its audience, people got tired of Hearthstone, and the MAU numbers were another source of “Blizzard just sucks” fodder.  Massively OP has tracked the decline of the MAUs every quarter, a metric that has probably ended with the closure of the Microsoft acquisition.

Anyway, that is another story.  We’re here about that chart up at the top of the post.

What is interesting about that chart is both what it tells you and what it does not tell you.

One of the most obvious things that I think some people will miss is that World of Warcraft is still a huge, thriving business.  People who pop up online and declare that Blizz should just abandon WoW are once again reminded that WoW brings in a HUGE amount of money.  Even at low ebb on that chart, 4 million subscribers still puts it outside the reach of all but one or two other subscription MMORPGs in the history of the genre.

Four million subscribers is only bad when 12 million is your benchmark.  But four million is still a lot of cash and there is no way that Blizz can willingly let go of that money.  It would be an insane business decision and nobody cares how sick YOU personally are of WoW, enough people still like it that, barring some epic bad choices, it will be going on probably for the rest of your life.

Something else that chart shows is just how much pent up demand there was for WoW Classic.  In the midst of the Battle for Azeroth nadir, subscribers jump to their peak, more than doubling in a quarter.  Yes, 8 million isn’t 12 million, but it is twice what would still be a good number.

That tapers off, but still stays well above the low water mark, as some people are reminded that Classic was perhaps better in memory than in reality.

And then we get into ambiguity, the part of the chart where you can make up any number of stories to explain what is happening.  There is a peak as Shadowlands launches, then a pretty swift decline that is not halted by the launch of Burning Crusade Classic.

Is that because people are bailing out of retail in such large numbers that Outland can’t cover those losses?  Is The Burning Crusade just not that popular?  Has the Classic era ended with vanilla?  Did the crass monetization packages annoy too many people?

I don’t know.  The numbers are not broken out so we do not know.

And what about Wrath Classic?

No big subscription bounce for Wrath Classic, arguably the most popular expansion in the history of the franchise?  Was it really not that popular?  Did Burning Crusade drive people away?  Did a lack of the dungeon finder on day one limit its popularity? (I will be completely surprised if there isn’t a WoW Factor post over at Massively OP soon making that exact case, and it will be build on a foundation of wishful thinking.)

And where does China stand in all of this?  Are these only “WoW West numbers?”  If that is the case, then the 12 million subscriber benchmark is completely bogus, as that was more than half made up by players in China.

The Burning Crusade in a black bean sauce

That would mean that WoW outside of China may have hit an absolute peak with WoW Classic, which would be amazing and an even more substantial argument in the strength of the title.

And if it does include China, then where is the big drop off when Blizz and NetEase broke up?  There were no subscribers in China for most of 2023.    That makes the peak with the launch of Season of Discovery completely stunning, because we KNOW that number includes no subscribers from China.

It is hard to know what to think.

Anyway, I am sure there will be a plethora of posts about this chart in the coming week.  I’ll start linking them below and there will probably be a follow up post if the chart is further explained.  I just wanted to get my gut reaction down before things got heated.  I wrote this with no other context, so we’ll see what else comes up.

Addendum:

There is a second chart image that has been going around that does not have numbers, but still adds some context and better markers for releases.

Warcraft Tavern presents a chart!

That does make the first chart a little more clear I suppose.

Related:

4 thoughts on “The Purloined Letter – WoW Subscriber Numbers Leak from a GDC Presentation”

  1. PCRedbeard

    Kudos for the Edgar Allan Poe reference.

    See that little uptick that began in late Spring 2021 and topped out in June-July 2021? That’s the bump from TBC Classic. People who’d dropped playing regular classic, including most of the people from my original Classic guild, came back for TBC Classic. But they were gone by September. The number of people I knew who were turned off by the go-go-go raiding push and quit TBC Classic extended well into 2022, and that corresponded with the people who abandoned the smaller servers in favor of a few megaservers instead. “This wasn’t what I hoped it would be” was a refrain I heard quite a few times when people left raiding in TBC Classic, which makes me think that the “you can’t go home again” for them was TBC. For me it was Wrath because that’s where I began playing, but for them it was TBC.

    Given the number of Classic Era Hunters late at night with Chinese named pets, I think that there are Chinese subs, just done using VPN. Still, that’s likely a small fraction of what could have potentially been there for Blizzard.

    Season of Discovery doesn’t shock me very much, given how full the megaservers are. It also tells me that there’s a pent up demand for Classic Plus that Blizzard has to navigate. Still, I’m not sure how many of those subs are driven by bots rushing to cash in on the people wanting to try something new. We don’t know if there’s an already extant decline in subs following the release of SoD, because we’re well into Phase 2 right now and what we see above is the initial subscription bump of the same. Given that a lot of people that I knew who played SoD Phase 1 with me have simply dropped SoD due to the same vibes that turned them away from Wrath Classic, I guess that the sharp peak is followed by a steady decline. What’s also missing from the lists above are the people who drove that SoD peak by playing Classic Era Hardcore, and that fed directly into SoD at the expense of Hardcore and Era.

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  2. Shintar

    I did note it in my post, but just to be clear, the numbers weren’t on the actual slides from GDC. The only thing straight from Blizz is the trend line; the numbers were extrapolated by Bellular. I think his guess makes sense and aligns with where we knew subs were at when they stopped reporting during WoD. Without knowing the scale, highs and lows might be slightly off, but I don’t think that would change the overall message of the chart and I think the estimates are quite reasonable.

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  3. heartlessgamer

    Crazy that it still holds this many players this many years later. I knew there was recent interest picking back up but seems like a revival is afoot.

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  4. Archey

    I do like knowing that the game is still heathy by any reasonable measure. Without any kind of indication till now, it could have been sub 1 million for all I knew (I’m sure someone has added up all the realm populations for a baseline somewhere, though that is logged in, not subbed).

    It’s interesting to break out some trends: the lowest pre 2016 numbers were during Mists at about 7 million. Nowadays it seems that 4 million is the baseline with a 2 million “pop” when expansions are released. There was a double pop at Classic release, which declined only by the usual 2 million when Shadowlands came out and added 2 million back. The only exception is right now where it’s like a 1.5 pop for Season of Discovery.

    4-6 million subs is still a very respectable business model. And SoD shows there is still life in Classic, though mechanically chugging through expansions doesn’t seem to do it as well as mixing things up.

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