14 DAY TRIAL // Activision Blizzard has announced that its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft is down to 6.8 million subscribers, according to its internal data.
The information from the company's latest financial report points to a drop of close to 800k users since the latest posted data in March, and is showing a steady downward trajectory since the game's peak moment of 12 million active subscribers, back in 2010.
This however doesn't mean that Blizzard's game, still considered by many to be the best MMORPG in the world, is doing bad. World of Wacraft still remains the biggest subscription-based MMO out there, in spite of the fact that the genre is dominated by free-to-play titles, and that WoW is already a decade old.
Furthermore, Blizzard itself is not concerned about the latest figures and is expecting things to pick up when the next scheduled expansion, Warlords of Draenor, goes live later this year. Blizzard head Mike Morhaime has expressed his view on the matter, stating that the World of Warcraft franchise is still very healthy, with revenues up year on year.
This time around, the revenue is in a large part due to the massive registered pre-sales of Warlords of Draenor, cited at over 1.5 million, and due to sales of the newly offered character boost, which suggest that there will be a strong support for the expansion from the game's ample community.
"We anticipated fluctuation in subscribership due to seasonality and the fact that the current game content is at the end of its life cycle," Morhaime has said to Eurogamer.
"And as expected, we did see a decline in subscribers, which mostly came out of the east. This pattern is right in line, percentage-wise, with the drops that we saw at Cataclysm's cycle in Q2 2012. That drop in 2012 was followed by an uptick in subscribers just ahead of Mists of Pandaria's launch. So we're hoping to see players return once we draw closer to the release of Warlords of Draenor later this year," he has continued.
Morhaime has also pointed out that the Battle.net community is constantly soaring, being up 40 percent year on year, based on internal tracking of monthly active players.
This however is no surprise, as the company has been pretty busy lately, with its free-to-play collectible card game Hearthstone being extremely popular, especially due to the company's aggressive marketing.
In addition to this, Blizzard's action role-playing game Diablo 3, the upcoming Heroes of the Storm multiplayer online battle arena title, and the established real-time strategy game Starcraft 2 are also drawing in quite the crowd, so the company looks to be in a pretty good shape.