Since Blizzard stopped openly sharing its current number of active users, it’s become quite challenging to tell how many World of Warcraft players there are. It also doesn’t help that the number keeps changing with each expansion release.
That said, there are plenty of ways to figure out how many are playing; here’s everything we know about the current player count, account holders, and subscription history for WoW.
How many players are playing WoW?
WoW currently has 7.25 million subscribers across the WoW universe, according to a chart presented by the Blizzard MMORPG’s general manager John Hight during his most recent GDC talk.
This chart shows the repetitive rise and decline of WoW subscriptions as new DLCs or expansions were launched and then eventually dropped by players. The failure of Shadowlands, however, forced player subs to drop to an almost record-breaking low of 4.5 million in 2022, the lowest it had been since 2019, when WoW had an estimated 4.07 million subscribers.
There are around 1.31 million active daily players in WoW across all versions as of March 28, according to estimates from mmo-population.com. This is nothing to sneeze at. However, it’s nowhere near the all-time high WoW used to have, which was 12 million concurrent players in 2015.
The last time Blizzard released public reports was in 2015, when it reported about 5.5 million global active subscribers, according to statista.com. However, with each new expansion, player numbers seem to be dropping, as shown in the recently revealed chart. Blizzard’s saving grace, though, has been the launch of WoW Classic, which caused the biggest player spike—an estimated 8.27 million in 2019. These are numbers Blizzard hasn’t seen since 2015.
Blizzard boasts it has around 130 million player accounts, as reported by CNET. That number only covers registered accounts, both active and inactive, across all Blizzard games.
Is WoW really a dying game?
No, WoW is not a dying game. Like all live-service games, it has periods of high and low player counts, which largely depend on each expansion’s offerings.
For example, during Warlords of Draenor and Shadowlands, WoW’s active player counts dropped significantly because those expansions didn’t offer enough fun content to keep players coming back and renewing their subscriptions.
So, as long as Blizzard continues to release fun and immersive DLCs, expansions, and seasonal content, WoW will not die.
Can WoW survive with a mandatory subscription in the coming years?
Since Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard King in 2023, many players have hoped a WoW subscription will be included in Xbox’s PC Game Pass. The reason for this is paying a monthly subscription only to get access to a single game (no matter how great it might be) may be too expensive in this day and age, especially when compared to other services like Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, which offer many games for a single price.
While WoW still has more than a million active subscribers, those numbers will not rise much higher unless Blizzard changes its current payment system.
It will be interesting to see what the future of World of Warcraft will look like now that it is part of one of the biggest corporations in the world.
