The fantasy MMORPG World of Warcraft will no longer disclose player numbers in the future, but will find other ways to communicate performance.
The 5.5 million we attributed to World of Warcraft this morning will be the last official “player numbers” released. Activision Blizzard has now announced this.
In the future, they will find “other metrics” that are better indicators of how Blizzard’s business is performing. Which indicators these will be remains open for now.
While player numbers in WoW remained relatively stable this quarter, they declined significantly in the previous quarter. At the moment, they have reached a low point.
Player numbers a sensitive topic – now the last Mohican is silent
By “paid players”, they meant both players with a subscription as well as players who played World of Warcraft by the hour in an internet cafe in Asia. In China, they have a different business model.
MMO publishers almost never disclose player numbers. Blizzard was one of the few that did. We addressed the issues of player numbers in this article:
