Hearthstone passes 70 million players

Naysayers be damned—Hearthstone is continuing to grow, and shows little signs of stopping anytime soon.

Blizzard’s online collectible card game has passed 70 million players, according to the game’s official website.

That’s almost three times the 25 million posted in February 2015, and up 30 million from February 2016.

There are, of course, some caveats. The announcement is light on detail, meaning we don’t know if the count includes duplicate accounts. We will never know how many of these players actually engage with the game on an ongoing basis, or how many simply give up at the first level of the tutorial.

In 2014, Blizzard released a table showing that 75 percent of players never even go past rank 15. The dedicated souls who hit rank five make up just two percent of the total player base.

Hearthstone has had to deal with some doom and gloom recently. A SuperData report claimed dramatically that the game was “killing itself”—though in reality what was being claimed was that revenue was way down.

Admittedly, the game has stumbled recently. Before the release of Journey to Un’Goro and the latest set rotation, many players were beginning to get very tired of the stale meta game. But since the set has come out and everything has changed, Hearthstone seems to be back on track. Un’Goro’s launch day saw the most players ever log into the game in a single day.