Blizzard’s WoW player stats cause more concern about future of the game

Following Activision Blizzard’s Q2 earning call discussing the status of World of Warcraft, it’s been revealed that in four years WoW has lost almost half of it’s monthly active users.

As World of Warcraft’s future appears to hang in the balance following the lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for promoting a “pervasive frat boy culture” and harassment in the workplace, MMO enthusiasts have been flocking to the likes of Final Fantasy XIV: Online and New World.

A glance at the WoW’s official subreddit shows a mass exodus of players from the iconic Blizzard title, and they’re joined by the likes of WoW stars Preach and Nmplol.

To make matters worse, the official figures from Blizzard’s Quarter 2 earning call don’t appear to bode very well for the future of the game.

Blizzard Q2 earning call shows rapid decline in WoW

Data from Blizzard’s Q2 earnings call reveals that the current amount of WoW monthly active users (MAU) sits at around 26 million players.

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While that may sound like a lot at first glance, this means that the game has almost halved in popularity over the last four years. Reaching a peak after the release of fan-favorite expansion Legion in 2016, it’s been steadily downhill since the second quarter of 2017, where the game peaked at 46 million MAUs.

Despite the Battle for Azeroth largely failing to make the splash that Blizzard expected, the expansion still saw some success in late 2018 and 2019, remaining relatively stable. It’s a very different story for Shadowlands, which sees MAUs plummeting since release.

Considering that Shadowlands dropped right in the middle of the introduction of global restrictions that confined gamers across the globe to their homes, this is a pretty concerning statistic.

With Chains of Domination being a huge disappointment for many, we’ll need to see if the game can recover from this downward slump. However, with Amazon Games’ New World on the Horizon and FFXIV’s Endwalker expansion dropping later this year, WoW is up against some stiff competition.