WoW Loses 600K Subscribers In Second Quarter
World of Warcraft is the worlds #1 subscription based MMORPG. That’s a fact that is not in dispute right now. But the fact is WoW has definitely seen better days, as at one point they had over 12 million subscribers, and since then that number is rapidly dwindling. Between the months of January and March, for instance, over 1.3 million subscribers cancelled their subscriptions, taking WoW from 9.6 mil to 8.3 mil.
Unfortunately for Blizzard, the numbers are still dropping. In the latest earnings report, for the 2nd quarter of the year, Blizzard revealed that there now 7.7 million subscribers to the game. That’s a loss of 600k, which while better than the 1st quarters 1.3 mil loss, still has to be a bit distressing for the company.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to WoW’s subscriber rate once Blizzard implements in-game microtransactions. After all, it’s very possible that they could end up driving the subscriber numbers down faster, but at the same time if the people who stay start buying items in-game then it’s possible that those transactions could offset the loss of revenue from the subscribers. Only time will tell.
