World of Warcraft's Subscriber Count Down To 5.6 Million, Other Games Doing Fine
In an Activision-Blizzard Q2 earnings report that was published today, it was revealed that World of Warcraft is down to 5.6 million subscribers, nearly a 50% drop since November. This number is so low that a graph provided by Statista shows that similar subscriber numbers haven't been seen in ten years. Despite the harsh drop, the report states that "[Fury of Hellfire] helpted to stabilize the subscriber number towards the end of the quarter. World of Warcraft remains the No. 1 subscription-based MMORPG in the world."
A number of reasons have been brought up by fans as to why the sudden loss of subscribers is occurring. One Reddit user summed general feelings up into four bullet points: The reassigning and leaving of a large part of the staff, the failure to deliver a promised pony pet, content additions are at an all-time low and this last content patch wasn't enough to keep players playing, as well as the content that is there being poorly received, and players naturally branching out into other games. Other comments seem to imply that too much of the content being added is focused on raiding, as well as "character depth" feeling lacking, and Garrisons amounted to "horribly boring chores." No matter how you look at it, the discontent is clear. An interesting thing to note is that many subscribers are actually wishing death on the game rather than a fix for its problems.
It's not all doom and gloom at Blizzard, though. Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Activision's Destiny have raked in a combined $1.25 billion in revenue and Diablo III has broken 30 million sales worldwide. Blizzard also "achieved record revenues and [monthly active users] in China this quarter," thanks to Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm gaining popularity in China. Due to this, Blizzard's year to year revenues are up despite World of Warcraft's high loss of subscribers.
It will be interesting to see how the upcoming expansion announcement this week alters the current air of discontent surrounding World of Warcraft, if at all.
