After more than a decade on top of the mountain, it seems as though World of Warcraft‘s iron grip on the world of online RPGs may finally be loosening. The venerable MMORPG has been gradually losing subscribers for some time, and now the game’s publisher Activision-Blizzard has announced they will no longer be revealing subscriber numbers in their financial reports. In Activision-Blizzard’s words, there are “other metrics that are better indicators of the overall business performance.”
According to Activision-Blizzard’s latest quarterly report, World of Warcraft‘s subscriber numbers dropped another 100,000 to 5.5 million. That number’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s a long way off the 10 million subscribers the game used to have. It appears as though the company believes those numbers are only going to keep falling, and has decided to no longer report that the ship is slowly sinking. In the future, rather than reporting hard subscriber numbers, Activision-Blizzard will update us on World of Warcraft‘s “key engagement metrics.” Well, alrighty then.
World of Warcraft will undoubtedly receive a boost from the upcoming Legion expansion, although we don’t know when exactly that expansion is coming out, and it probably won’t reverse the overall downward trend. But hey, the fact that players are, just now, a freakin’ decade in, getting tired of World of Warcraft is nothing to be ashamed about. It’s been a hell of a run, now bring on World of Warcraft 2.
(Via PC Gamer)