WoW's Post-WoD Sub Numbers

Blizzard infamously stopped publishing WoW's active subscriber numbers during Warlords of Draenor, after they had fallen to less than half of their previous peak of 12 million. Since then, there's often been speculation about how well or badly the game is doing, but ultimately we didn't have access to any real data to back this up.

Apparently this changed this week, as Franchise Manager John Hight gave a talk at the annual Game Developers Conference called "The First 30 Years of Warcraft: The Making of a Game Universe" on Wednesday. There isn't a recording available online at the time of me writing this, but apparently some photos of his presentation were leaked, revealing some surprisingly open admissions of failure in regards to Shadowlands and showing a graph of overall subscriber trends since the launch of the Legion expansion.

Now, this graph didn't include numbers, but YouTuber Bellular matched the graphic up with information from previous public earnings reports to make some pretty convincing guesses:

Screenshot from the video "Report: WoW's Actual Subscriber Count & Blizz's Official Shadowlands Post-mortem"

There are a lot of interesting tidbits to take away from these numbers:

• Even at its lowest of lows, WoW still had 4 million subscribers, easily eating any other classic MMO's lunch. The game still sporting 7 million subscribers as it's approaching its 20th anniversary is actually pretty insane.
  
• That lowest of lows happened after the launch of BfA, but subscriptions then surged again with the launch of Classic, reaching a peak of over eight million, which was the highest number they had seen since the release of Warlords of Draenor.
• Shadowlands did indeed drop off very hard (a slide in Hight's presentation specifically calls this out) and was presumably only saved from dropping even lower than BfA due to the fact that overall subscription numbers were still propped up by Classic.
• Dragonflight had an unexpectedly weak launch, but has had "record post-launch stability and growth", with current sub numbers actually exceeding the ones seen at the expansion's release. Classic is presumably still helping to some degree though, so it's hard to say how Dragonflight has performed on its own. Regardless, there's a clear recovery going on compared to the doldrums of 2022.