14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard Entertainment has revealed that World of Warcraft noticed a drop in subscribers during Q1 2015, now being down to 7.1 million users, from the 10 million subscribers it had at the end of 2014.
The Warlords of Draenor expansion helped the biggest massively multiplayer online role-playing game in the world recoup some of its lost popularity after its release in November 2014, but things are now apparently following a downward trend.
The MMO peaked in popularity in 2010, at the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, and since then gradually waning throughout the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria expansions. Before the release of Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard stated that it had little over 6 million subscribers, which was still a pretty good performance, when taking into account the fact that MoP came out at the end of 2013.
This, however, seems to mark the biggest-ever drop in subscribers in the ten-year-old role-playing game's history. At the same time, it's still the most popular in the world, with 7 million people around the globe forking over cash monthly, as MMO Champion notes.
Many think WoD was WoW's dying breath
The aging MMO has been performing pretty well, all things considered, and Activision is still happy with it, even though it now has a little fewer users than it had just ahead of Warlords of Draenor's release.
"World of Warcraft's revenue performance at constant FX has been more stable, driven by continued strong uptake on value added services, and price increases in select regions, which partially offset subscriber declines, particularly in the East. World of Warcraft remains the No. 1 subscription-based MMORPG in the world," the company stated.
However, the decline in subscribers has been pretty sharp, which might signal that World of Warcraft is in pretty big trouble in the long run. It requires a significant time investment after all, especially if you're a fervent raider, and with so many entertainment options these days, it's going to be harder and harder for the old WoW to retain its audience.
In any case, with Hearthstone recently reaching 30 million players and Heroes of the Storm 11 million in its current beta state, Blizzard has nothing to worry about, it's still got some pretty good money printing machines.