World of Warcraft subscribers have dropped to 5.6 million, and while that is still a lot of people, that is the lowest they’ve been in nine years.
You might remember that the game had 7.1 million subscribers at the end of March this year, which means that WoW has lost 1.5 million subs since then.
Even the March figure is down, as Activision reported 10 million subscribers at the end of November, due to the release of the Warlords of Draenor expansion.
It’s even possible that the figures were, for a time, lower than the ones reported here during Q2. Why do I think this? Well, my suspicion comes from this comment from Activision, which stated that the Fury of Hellfire update released on June 23 “helped stabilise the subscriber number towards the end of the quarter.”
This may be one of the reasons why Blizzard will already be teasing the next expansion at Gamescom (and probably revealing it at BlizzCon) when Warlords of Draenor has only been out for a year.
It’ll be interesting to see the response from fans, and whether or not this new expansion will drive them back. Even if it does, there’s no guarantee that’ll it’ll last, as WoD’s numbers fell off pretty quickly. I guess the old cliche applies – only time will tell.
