Activision Blizzard has announced its financial results. The subscriber count for the MMORPG WoW has never increased as much as in Q3 2019. The success of WoW Classic was crucial for this record growth.
This is the announcement from Activision Blizzard: The business report states: World of Warcraft Classic saw the largest quarterly increase in subscriber numbers in the history of the “Warcraft” brand in Q3 2019, both in the West and the East.
The reach of WoW continued to be utilized in October. It was significantly above the level of “before Classic.” There was high activity in both Classic and Retail WoW.
The exact subscription numbers for World of Warcraft have not been officially disclosed by Activision Blizzard since November 2015.
Therefore, it is unclear at what level the subscriber numbers were overall in 2019 – it is only known that they must have increased significantly.
After all, the MMORPG WoW has been around for 15 years – so every “record in the history of the franchise” is remarkable.
Player numbers at Blizzard far below the previous year
How is everything else going for Blizzard? Blizzard measures the number of active players on the scale of “Monthly Active Users,” the MAU.
Blizzard counts how many players have logged in at least once a month across all games. They calculate the numbers for all three months of the quarter and then divide them by 3. That gives them the MAU:
- This number was 33 million in Q3 2019, from July to September;
- in Q2 2019 it was 32 million;
- in Q3 2018 it was still 42 million.
So it can be said: WoW was a hit, but because there wasn’t much happening in Blizzard’s other games (Overwatch, Hearthstone), Blizzard could only maintain its overall level, but not substantially improve it.
Financially, an increase in subscriber numbers is significant. WoW is also explicitly praised in the financial report: Q3 performed better than expected for Activision Blizzard – thanks also to WoW.
Overall, Activision Blizzard lacked new releases for a “really good quarter”, in addition, the publisher lost Destiny in 2019, which negatively affects the numbers compared to the previous year.
Nostalgia wave boosts Activision Blizzard
What’s behind it: An increase in subscribers for WoW was to be expected. However, the magnitude of the increase is indeed surprising.
WoW Classic was a mainstream phenomenon in gaming in August and September 2019, especially because nothing else was happening and Twitch discovered the MMORPG.
For a month, a retro wave swept through the gaming landscape as gamers discovered or rediscovered the “WoW from 15 years ago”.
That the increase in subscriptions was even greater than during the times of “The Burning Crusade” or “Wrath of the Lich King” is already remarkable.
However, it can be doubted whether WoW Classic can maintain this hype in the long term. It should normalize quickly. The new games from BlizzCon also seem to be even further away.
