It’s financial report season! Hooray! I may yet have cause to don the Gordon Gekko braces. It was mixed news from Activision‘s quartlerly, though (via Forbes). While overall profit and revenue figures were stratospherically high – as you’d expect from the publisher of Hearthstone, Destiny and Heroes of the Storm – the report revealed poor old WoW is enduring its lowest subscriber base since 2006.
At an estimated 5.6 million players, it still boasts a larger population than Norway, Singapore, or New Zealand. But as recently as six months ago that number was around 10 million, bolstered by the release of the Warlords of Draenor expansion.
The 44% dropoff in subsribers since then marks the fastest decline since the game was released back in 1918. Time really flies by, doesn’t it?
Activision are unlikely to be too worried about WoW’s recent decline, though. The combined user base of their Destiny, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm active communities is around 70 million players, who have generated $1.25 billion (around £800 million) in revenue. Not bad, considering two of those three are F2P titles.
The upcoming Legion expansion may well inject a bit of life back in the old MMO, too. The beta’s due later this year – in the meantime, here’s everything we know about WoW’s Legion expansion.
Sorry, I just checked that WoW release date because it was playing on my mind and it turns out it was released in 2004, not 1918. I was thinking of World War One (WWO).