WoW - Subscriber Count Spikes Following Draenor Release

World of Warcraft, like the common cold, refuses to die. Subscriber numbers have spiked following the launch of their latest expansion.

We reported back in October that the World of Warcraft subscriber base was sitting at 7.4 million, but with the arrival of the Warlords of Draenor expansion last week that number has surpassed 10 million.

It's a familiar pattern with expansion releases: indeed, the same thing happened when Mists of Pandaria released, pointing to the logic behind Blizzard's desire to annualise expansion roll-outs. Still, the pattern indicates that World of Warcraft isn't going away any time soon. The expansion pack itself has sold a whooping 3.3 million copies already.

While the numbers are impressive, the Warlords of Draenor expansion was beset with launch difficulties fairly uncommon to Blizzard. Widespread problems accessing overcrowded servers has prompted the studio to reward players with five days of free access.

We published our Warlords of Draenor review in progress last week, with a final verdict arriving soon. I spoke to designer Ion Hazzikostas last month to coincide with the MMO's tenth anniversary. He thinks the game has another ten years in it.

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This must be the single biggest jump in subscribers after an expansion for WoW. I was expecting the number to go up but not by this much. I wonder why that is. I guess people are fed up with some new MMO that got released recently and going back to what they know best. Obviously the number will drop in 3 months but still…

Yes, it's quite surprisingly really. It might be because they see it as a "return to the roots" kind of thing - more orcs and ogres, less pandas. It will be very interesting to see how long this resurgence lasts.

they were the best of the mmorpg, no wonder. boy am i glad i'm out of that no good loop.

Originally Posted by rikus
they were the best of the mmorpg, no wonder. boy am i glad i'm out of that no good loop.

I still play WoW on and off for the last couple of years. No rush, just do what I like to do and nothing else. I have also tried almost every other MMO out there over these years and still come back to WoW as being still the best. I agree however if you are prone to addiction to these kind of games it's best to stay away

I played WoW on 2 separate occasions, each with a 10-day free trial. I have to say, the game never grabbed me. I played for about 6 of those days and just had enough.

The long runs from place to place kind of bored me, and the quests weren't exactly stellar. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was just checking off these quests on the list because they were there, rather than because they were something interesting that I really wanted to do. I guess a lot of MMOs are like this, but compared to a game like LOTRO, which I played for hundreds of hours and had a great quality level of writing, interesting quests, etc., there was no comparison for me.

But hey, apparently a lot of people like this game! More power to them

Subscriptions always spike after an expansion, that's a huge reason they've discussed doing one a year to combat the inevitable drop between them. Their last few expansions have driven down their long term subscriber numbers, we'll have to see if they can reverse that trend.