World of Warcraft Subscribers 2005-2013 (and Beyond)

With the recent news that Activision Blizzard is buying back a controlling interest from Vivendi it was also made known that the current World of Warcraft world wide subscriber number is 7.7 million.

I came across this graphic made by redditor cat_trap who commented on this reddit thread related to the announcement.

I loved the idea of the graphic and decided to add my own graphic style. Read on past the jump for more on the graph.

I used the same data source as cat_trap for the 2005-2013 subscriber numbers.

(The gray areas inside the Wrath of the Lich King are numbers that were absent from the data. I simply continued what numbers there were across the gaps.)

I also did a bit of math to give an idea where the number could be heading if roughly the same average subscriber losses from Q3 2012 until now continued into the future (the gray area on the right).

I'm not so naive to think that a simple bit of math can predict that WoW will be down to 1M subscribers by the end of 2015 but who knows.

It seems something has to change if Blizzard want to regain (or even retain at this point) its subscribers.

Perhaps Blizzard sees this type of decline coming and that's the reason they are working to move to, if not a full-on free-to-play model, at least a subscriber + additional pet/mount/helmet revenue model.

One interesting we see from the graph is that the last time World of Warcraft had as few as 7.7 million subscribers was in 2006 right at the end of Vanilla.

I'm sure back in 2006 7 million subscribers was unheard of. A miracle even.

And the numbers continued to grow. To almost nearly double that number with 12 million subscribers at the height of Wrath of the Lich King.

Now? Blizzard is likely to catch flack for having "only" 7.7 million subscribers. Oh how times have changed.

Are the numbers down? Certainly. Will they likely continue to go down? My guess would be yes. Does that spell the "end" of World of Warcraft? I don't think so.

If any other MMORPG launched today was able to garner 7.7 million subscribers it would be heralded as a huge success.

So why don't we judge World of Warcraft by a different standard? Because its had higher subscriber numbers in the past?

That's hardly a good reason to declare World of Warcraft "dead" or even "dying".

I think World of Warcraft has a lot more life in it than most people think. (I mean you're still playing it aren't you?)

UPDATE: After posting this I forgot to mention a few other factors I think might be affecting WoW's subscriber loss namely the the rise of strong free-to-play games like League of Legends and the ascent of smartphone/table games (especially iOS) as an alternative source for people to get their gaming.

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