World of Warcraft has been available to play since 2004, and it is by far and away the most successful MMO ever released. Even today, its popularity dwarfs every other MMO available on Western markets, but it is steadily losing its player base. By May this year it has already lost 1.3 million players.
While some MMOs would be happy with 600,000 subscribers, that’s the amount of players World of Warcraft managed to lose during the last quarter. Activision Blizzard stated that as part of their second quartet results, with overall subscribers falling to a still very healthy 7.7 million. That’s well below the peak of over 12 million players, though.
A steady decline should be expected, especially after 9 years of being online. Small spikes in subscriber numbers are still happening when Blizzard releases a new expansion pack, but the last one of those was Mists of Pandaria and it is nearly a year old.
The pressure will surely be on Blizzard to come up with a replacement, but there certainly won’t be any rush to turn off the WoW servers. Even as far back as 2011 we were hearing about another MMO called Titan. It was expected that would co-exist alongside World of Warcraft, and may even be free-to-play based on a job listing confirming advertising would be used in the game, but it has yet to appear.
There’s a question mark over whether Blizzard would attempt to develop a World of Warcraft 2. Would millions of players flock to the title if they did? The landscape for MMOs has certainly changed in recent years, with many games either launching or switching to a free-to-play model. Even with the popularity and reputation Blizzard holds, they may not be able to achieve the success of WoW again without embracing some form of free-to-play.
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