World of Warcraft Loses nearly 3 Million Subscribers

A bit of interesting news today; even if it doesn’t affect you much.

Anyone intersected in the health of the MMORPG probably has a vested interest in tracking how many active subscribers World of Warcraft has at any given time; for a long time now, people have been wondering just when our ten-year-old behemoth would finally fall from grace and leave an open throne, but through a mix of expansions and patches Blizzard has managed to stave off it’s decent for many, many years.

Well, now that we’re three months into the release of Warlords of Draenor, how’s World of Warcraft doing?

Not great. According to a Financial Earning Call the other day, Blizzard’s flagship game has lost nearly three million subscribers, dropping from ten million players all the way down to 7.1 million, the lowest it’s been since people got tired of Mists of Pandaria. Now, 7.1 million is still more than most MMORPG’s could dream, but it’s almost half as many players as WoW had way back in its prime.

As for what could cause this drop? It’s not much of a mystery: as the month’s pass and the content of the new expansion is explored, people start to run out of things to do. Warlords of Draenor had some pretty lackluster end-game content, from what I’ve heard, so it’s very likely they just ran out of things to do and the honeymoon ended.

Still, with new patches and the release of that new WoW Token, maybe things will pick up again?