World of Warcraft Subscription Numbers Are Higher Now Than at Expansion Launch in a Franchise First

ign.com:

It's easy to roll your eyes and say that MMORPGs are dead if you, ya know, don't play MMORPGs. But 20-year-old World of Warcraft still seems to have plenty of spring in its step, according to Warcraft general manager John Hight. Its latest expansion, Dragonflight, has more subscribers now than it did at launch, and one intrepid content creator thinks they may have extrapolated roughly how many: over 7 million.

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference, Hight explained that World of Warcaft historically has a very predictable pattern of subscriber churn. When an expansion comes out, there's a surge in subscribers that slowly declines over the course of an expansion, with small bumps at each new patch. It hits a low point at the end of each expansion, then surges again when a new one is released. World of Warcraft: Classic disrupted the pattern somewhat by creating another series of peaks connected with its own releases. Hight described it as a "constant inflow and outflow" with "almost as many new players coming in as other players going out."

However, something changed with World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. Initially, the game saw a predictable surge of players at launch, but as time went on, the falloff became increasingly pronounced as fans expressed their dislike of the expansion story and content. Then, when Dragonflight released, the surge in players wasn't nearly as high as expected. "A lot of that was attributed to people losing their interest, and even in some cases their trust in us, during Shadowlands," Hight said.

However, he continued, Blizzard responded by reaching out to the community and sifting through feedback, and over the course of Dragonflight, was able to turn things around. It helped that Dragonflight itself was well-received and largely course corrected many of Shadowlands' biggest issues on its own. Its setting, tone, characters, and gameplay all directly addressed issues players had during Dragonflight, such as complaints about "borrowed power"