Eventually, but they pushed really hard to bring in new blood with their aggressive advertising campaign and since they don’t know anything but how awful BFA was but maybe from their perspective it wasn’t so bad.
They’ll stay around for awhile if shadowlands makes enough casual content to keep them occupied long enough that activisionblizzard to sell them some store mounts.
The rest of the people still playing are those that feel like they have to because they’ve invested so much time into the game that it feels bad to just quit now otherwise all that time was a wasted investment.
I’m still subbed and derp around a little bit at a time but absolutely hate world quests and all of that garbage. I don’t like the random titanforged affixes on gear and the corruption mechanics.
I want to get gear and it just be gear. I don’t want to get a piece of gear and feel like it’s a cheap knockoff of the actual item I want. BFA has literally killed my drive to do PVE content off any kind.
In 8.2 I was raiding on 8 characters and gave up because to be optimal you had to spend stupid amounts of time grinding glyphs to attach to your glyph page to be where you’d normally be at by default by just playing the game in prior expansions.
Just linking this to prove that I’m not talking out my rear.