In the video game industry, they love to show off numbers. There is not a week that goes by without a company boasting about the numbers they have achieved with their latest game, or with a franchise that is celebrating some kind of anniversary. It serves to fuel investor interest, but also to create a sense of success among players. That everything is going well and that it doesn’t matter what impression it gives in another sense: the business is thriving.
Very few companies break with this narrative clearly. Microsoft is one of the most famous, as it hardly ever gives numbers. But there is another one that is even more secretive about these matters. And that is Blizzard.
World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and, twenty years later, not only is it still running, but it seems far from closing its doors. However, even though it is easy to analyze its historical and ludic importance, it is not so easy to talk about specific figures if we want to talk about its success. Blizzard has always been very secretive about the numbers behind their games, and World of Warcraft is no exception. That’s why a very attentive youtuber had to come along to make an approximation of what they might be.
During the past GDC 2024, a specialized event for video game developers, John Hight, executive producer of the Warcraft franchise, gave a postmortem of World of Warcraft. In the technological field, a postmortem is a talk where the development, launch, and success or failure of a particular software application are explained. Something that didn’t provide numbers, but did provide a graph that allowed for the necessary trick.
As Bellular Warcraft explains in a dedicated video, a particular graph shows the number of subscribers in each specific period in World of Warcraft’s history. Knowing that shortly after the release of World of Warcraft Legion the game had 5.8 million subscribers, he has been able to extrapolate that the game has around 7.2 million subscribers between the original version, Season of Discovery, WOTLK Classic, Classic, and Hardcore. An astonishing number for a game that is 20 years old.
Of course, it is necessary to take these figures with a grain of salt. We have no official confirmation and the scale of the graph does not have to be remotely perfect. But it does give us an impression of the importance that World of Warcraft has, and how even today it remains a relevant game in the world of MMOs.
