Reports of World of Warcraft's death may have been greatly exaggerated, as Blizzard's GM proudly wheels out a graph showing it's doing really well—but no hard numbers
World of Warcraft will celebrate its 20th anniversary on November 23 this year, two decades in which it has established itself as the world's biggest and most pre-eminent MMO. WoW's refinement, scale, and endlessly absorbing mix of adventure and brilliant group mechanics has over its lifetime attracted well over 100 million sign-ups, a number that itself was revealed by Blizzard an entire decade ago in 2014. And here we run into one of the perennial frustrations with WoW: we know when it's doing well, because Blizzard tends to have a little brag about it, but we very rarely know just how well.
That's at times made it easy for people to claim that WoW is on the way out, dead game etcetera, and such chatter is often conflated with the reception to the most recent expansion, or some other expression of player discontent. In fact you could say «dead game» has become something of a meme for WoW, so often has the phrase been invoked, but the reality is that over my career I've seen WoW-killer after WoW-killer appear then disappear while the OG soldiers on.
Right now, it's doing rather better than soldiering on. Warcraft's general manager John Hight gave a talk at the recent Game Developers Conference titled «The First 30 Years of 'Warcraft': The Making of a Game Universe», a wide-ranging presentation that had one especially interesting detour into the historical patterns of subscriber numbers the game has seen (thanks, Inven).
Hight says that WoW has seen a repeated pattern in subscriptions over the game's lifespan, one that's clearly linked to the release of expansions. The straightforward version is that when a new expansion for the game releases, WoW sees a spike in subscriptions, which then slowly tails off over the following months (with occasional small bumps related to larger patches and additions). This pattern of subs gradually declining continues until the next expansion is released, at which point we repeat all the above.
Blizzard started to see the same thing
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