wow World of Warcraft's Subscriber Numbers and Trends From 2016 to 2024 Revealed

[Staff 1,488]

 

Some big news came in over the weekend, as we got to see how subscriber numbers have been changing over the last 8 years! The data comes from a Games Developer Conference (GDC) presentation by Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Warcraft franchise John Hight, summarized on Korean site Inven (and first spotted by Wowhead). The talk went over many details about WoW, but we're focusing on the subscribers for now. While Hight did not share exact numbers, Bellular went over the graphs and calculated them out! 

First off, let's take a look at the graph from the presentation itself, which is referring to the Dragonflight bounce-back and the success of the yearly roadmap with more frequent patches. 

From this slide, Belluar went on to calculate the actual (rough) subscriber numbers, using some subscriber-per-pixel math and measuring, as well as comparisons to the official numbers from old expansions - putting the total today at around 7.25 million! 

Source: Belluar Warcraft

But that's not all, as the community added more on top of all this, with an all-time subscriber number graph, using both officially announced numbers and these estimated ones to create a full picture. There's two of them, starting with the one by Kamikaze4228:

Source: WoW Subscriber Timeline

And the second one by Drdoomblunt:

Source: The released sub figures roughly plotted against the old ones.

Here's Bellular's explanation of how he came to his numbers:

So, it seems the game is very much alive and doing very well recently, especially considering we're in the middle of the end of a retail expansion period. It seems the annual roadmaps, much higher frequency of patches, next expansion hype, and Season of Discovery are really working well. Let's see how it all continues with the War Within! 

[Arcling 898]

They never showed any numbers, so all of this is just speculation. Bellular just made up some numbers. They could be much higher or lower. Even then, there are bot accounts and multiboxers, which I assume would have been counted as unique users.

 

Edited March 25 by Arcling

[Dreamcatcher 66]

5 hours ago, Arcling said:

They never showed any numbers, so all of this is just speculation. Bellular just made up some numbers. They could be much higher or lower. Even then, there are bot accounts and multiboxers, which I assume would have been counted as unique users.

 

Number of bots and specially multiboxers cant even be 1% of total WoW population.

multiboxing almost died since multiboxing policy change. Bots on other hand cant be more than 70000 accounts. the thing is bots get  tagged and banned in certain intervals and botters start new accounts and rinse and repeat. the number of growth of botters of course cannot be on par with WoW actual player base growth which graphs show was consistant in past 20 years.

This numbers is not speculation either. There was official release of player count back in Wrath to Cata era. If you put those new and old graphs along side you will see there is consistant data for WoW player count which is on par with official annual earning reports and player counts stated in those reports. Thats how they analyze data. Those data indicate one thing for sure after Shadowlands there was a gap between and players and Blizzard and classic WoW and Dragonflight were successful in filling that gap. Personally i think Dragonflight is awesome expansion.

WoW right now has more than 7.2M active players. It is most popular MMORPG right now, most successful MMORPG of history and not just a game but a cultural phenomena started more than 30 years ago. second MMORPG in list can't even come close.

Edited March 25 by Dreamcatcher

[Arcling 898]

2 hours ago, Dreamcatcher said:

This numbers is not speculation either. There was official release of player count back in Wrath to Cata era. If you put those new and old graphs along side you will see there is consistant data for WoW player count which is on par with official annual earning reports and player counts stated in those reports.

But we don't know if it's the same scale. That line could start at 5 million, or it could start at 7 or 4.

[Dreamcatcher 66]

21 minutes ago, Arcling said:

But we don't know if it's the same scale. That line could start at 5 million, or it could start at 7 or 4.

Look at both graphs. Answer is there

[Arcling 898]

1 hour ago, Dreamcatcher said:

Look at both graphs. Answer is there

No numbers were given, we don't know if they are the same. Scale could be different. Would they allow for people to make such an easy guess? They don't show official numbers anymore. The best we have are estimates made by youtuber. It might look like a continuation of that chart, but we can't know for sure. 

Also the website that originally covered this info is a glorified ad space. As for Bellular, he is known for making *filtered* up just for clicks. How many times he was wrong about some "massive plans" (he likes to use such words), potential allied races being added, new lore etc.?

Edited March 26 by Arcling

[Dreamcatcher 66]

20 hours ago, Arcling said:

No numbers were given, we don't know if they are the same. Scale could be different. Would they allow for people to make such an easy guess? They don't show official numbers anymore. The best we have are estimates made by youtuber. It might look like a continuation of that chart, but we can't know for sure. 

Also the website that originally covered this info is a glorified ad space. As for Bellular, he is known for making *filtered* up just for clicks. How many times he was wrong about some "massive plans" (he likes to use such words), potential allied races being added, new lore etc.?

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/world-of-warcraft-finds-resilience-with-over-7-million-players-in-the-lead-up-to-the-the-war-within-expansion

At GDC 2024, Blizzard Entertainment discussed its long-running MMORPG. During the panel, Blizzard offered a bit of a post-mortem on the previous expansion, Shadowlands, which the firm said failed to meet player expectations. On the flip side, the most recent expansion, Dragonflight, has been well received. As a result, World of Warcraft has achieved a type of player growth not seen in years, coinciding with an analysis from BellularGaming that the game has roughly over 7.25 million active subscribers — which we can independently verify as "roughly accurate" according to our sources. 

[Brocksamsn 1]

I'm debating the validity of this information.

It all depends on how you interpret the statement the guesstimates are based on: That Legion's "overall performance was slightly better than WoD."

If you take that to mean "subs are slightly higher" (like Bellular did), you can make some pretty accurate guesstimates using the official numberless chart.

If you take it to mean they could be referencing other metrics - like perhaps total playtime of active subs over a year of Legion compared to all of WoD - you can't make any guess of sub count at all, since then there is no known official sub count for Legion, or any of the xpacs on the official chart.

If the official chart had any xpac from WoD or earlier on it, you could make guesstimates based on known subs back then (when they were still sharing that information - they stopped after WoD bombed) on the official numberless graph, and it would be nighbulletproof information.

All that can be said with 100% certainty, is that current WoW - in all its versions - has attracted sub numbers roughly equal to what Legion had by itself (since there was no Classic at the time) at launch, and that it has been a trend of growth in recent months. But still below SL at launch, although SL at launch had boosted sub #s due to the pandemic.

What *is* 100% certain, is a bunch of sites referencing a YouTuber's methods as fact, does not actually make it fact.

[Arcling 898]

6 hours ago, Dreamcatcher said:

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/world-of-warcraft-finds-resilience-with-over-7-million-players-in-the-lead-up-to-the-the-war-within-expansion

Yes, these are the site and youtuber in question. They did put rough estimates. And charts show only trends, we know there was a growth, but how much? We can only assume.

Anyway, even assuming all of their guesses are accurate, it still doesn't tell us how players are distributed between retail and various versions of classic. We would have a better picture if we knew how many players stick to one version, how many choose more etc. It's possible a lot of this growth could have been attributed solely to classic. After DF launched, there were reportedly less players returning than at Shadowlands' launch.

[Dreamcatcher 66]

7 hours ago, Arcling said:

Yes, these are the site and youtuber in question. They did put rough estimates. And charts show only trends, we know there was a growth, but how much? We can only assume.

Anyway, even assuming all of their guesses are accurate, it still doesn't tell us how players are distributed between retail and various versions of classic. We would have a better picture if we knew how many players stick to one version, how many choose more etc. It's possible a lot of this growth could have been attributed solely to classic. After DF launched, there were reportedly less players returning than at Shadowlands' launch.

There are more than 50 sites saying same thing and windowcentral one came after news broke out.

Quote

coinciding with an analysis from BellularGaming that the game has roughly over 7.25 million active subscribers — which we can independently verify as "roughly accurate" according to our sources.

And actually data indicate retail has more players than classic. i'm going to stop this argument here but i suggest you carefully read the article and analyze of data specially those from annual earning reports. what i wanted to say is that World of Warcraft indeed has more than 7M player right now and that was purpose this forum post .

[Arcling 898]

I'm not saying there wasn't any growth in subscription numbers recently, just that they are mere estimations. All they did was show a vague growth chart and then a youtuber put a numbers next to it. There are far too many variables to say with confidence that there are exactly 7.25 millions of subscribers. Graph may be not up to scale. The last time they announced any player numbers was in 2015 during WoD, this was nearly a year before Legion was released. The numbers announced were at 5.6 Million. This graph starts at Legion, so there is already an assumption that starting number was 5.8, but there was no public data about Legion's numbers released.

As was said before, he is known to pull things out of his *filtered* for clicks. We should also take anything that corpo publically shares with a grain of salt. There are reasons why they stopped sharing subscription numbers.

Edited March 27 by Arcling

[Echoz 0]

On 3/27/2024 at 1:17 AM, Dreamcatcher said:

There are more than 50 sites saying same thing and windowcentral one came after news broke out.

This is dangerously weak source evaluation. Any amount of secondary sources regurgitating information from the same source has no bearing on the validity of that one source's guesses. Credibility, no matter the abundance, also does not cause reality to bend around one's guesses.

Tabloid antics aside, the fact is that this chart begins about a year after they stopped publishing numbers, so any approximations will need to make some big assumptions about what happened during that year.

For the sake of illustrating the extremes, a pessimistic worst case would be continued churn at the same rate as what we saw in the first half of 2015, which would put the 2016 q3 player number well into the negative.

As for the optimistic best case, the blank we're speculating on follows the greatest exodus of players officially published and a swift decision to cease publishing entirely. In the event that the actual numbers exceeded the most likely held and perpetuated assumption, evidently a straight line, they'd be compelled to publish something more concrete, so this serves well as an optimistic best case.

Reality is almost certainly somewhere between these two extremes. A more realistic guess is that player numbers kept dropping throughout the lifetime of WoD in a manner similar to that of Cata and MoP, of course adjusted proportionally to fit the limited data we have on WoD, and discounting any resurgence before the next expansion, as that is conveniently included in the new graph. It's not unlikely that the numbers produced by Belluar are off by over a million.