With good reason
Every three months, like clockwork, Blizzard has shared World of Warcraftsubscription statistics as part of its quarterly report. The MMO is perfectly healthy, but the fanbase isn’t at the fever pitch that it was at several years ago. Subscriptions have mostly seen a steady decline, save for when expansions release. As such, the media loves to irresponsibly run “World of Warcraftis doomed!” articles.
Blizzard’s sick of it. Following the announcement that World of Warcraftnow sits at 5.5 million subscribers (the lowest of the past nine years), the developer is done publishing subscription totals. During an earnings call, it said “Note that this is the last quarter that we plan to provide subscriber numbers. There are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance.” It wasn’t elaborated upon as to what metrics would be used.
You can hardly blame Blizzard for finally going this route. Every other MMO on the market would be drunk on euphoria if it could touch 5.5 million subscriptions. When World of Warcrafthits that, it’s supposedly bad times, ahoy. Losing players is never a good thing, but World of Warcraft‘s still in a much better position than its competitors. Now, it’s going to have to find creative ways of telling us that it’s just fine without misleading investors.
World of Warcraft Subscriber Numbers Fall to 5.5 Million [IGN]