Mmos are dying… Honestly I think they should
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Activision Blizzard won’t use subs because MAU looks better. Remember that dude who transferred enough WoW tokens into Bnet dollars that he was able to spend like 50K just on DI? Taking into account the additional money for someone to buy a token and it was something like $65K of real life money they made.
Take into account all the money everyone spends not on a sub, divide by the amount of active users and the average per player is almost certainly more money made than what a sub offers. Things like OW skins or whatever they sell, WoW store mounts, pets and mogs, I don’t know, whatever else is on the store.
Add in D4 and soon a battle pass and shiny things people can buy, and that average $$ per user will go up. As long as the incoming revenue across all games is enough why would they advertise subs? Their shareholders only care for the end figure, cost to run the company vs income.
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Classic/Vanilla WoW was a cultural phenomenon, and lives on in the memory of all that have played it.
It’s probably not #1 anymore, but it was at a point, and no one will forget that.
It’s like Mario 64- it won’t ever die, due to people always wondering why it was so successful in the first place, so they go try it out and become addicted themselves lol.
They use it in a way that makes the game look populated to their investors, when it is just a lie to cover up how bad this game, WoW, is actually doing. They lump MAU’s from ALL of their games into one lump some to the investors. So we really do not know WoW’s numbers, but i would stake my life on, its nowhere as popular as SL, and thats saying something!
EQ1 and EVE will be the last two standing.
I honestly don’t know what this is referring to, as someone that just came back I’ve been slowly catching up on stuff I missed and my friends didn’t link me/talk to me about or in our group chats. Or meme osmosis.
They probably make a lot of money but I would be curious to see the numbers for just WoW.
I guess more for the players, they did used to advertise the numbers in quite a few places and it felt like it wasn’t always just for shareholders.
WoW might have a million players max.
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Probably - I’m not sure it matters now though.
There are enough options for games now to feel like you’re sifting through a beach to find your favorite grains of sand.
In this case, I’ve got WoW and a couple others. I don’t think I’ll have much time for anything else 
Most accurate thing I find for any mmo is ff14 census, that scans the lodestone, that shows almost 1.3 mil players have the achievement for completing the initial endwalker msq. Dunno the real number of players tho cuz ff14 has their free trial that they count and has a ton of content that ppl can spend years doing plus the game is on multiple platforms. Also achievements aren’t account wide so those that have completed the msq could be the same person and it’s a known fact that alot of endgame raiders run alts and you have to do the msq to to do endgame
Some dude literally spent ‘50 THOUSAND DOLLARS’ on Diablo Immortal.
But he spent nothing in fact, it was all tokens. Dude had enough WoW gold to buy enough tokens to convert to a Bnet balance that it cost them nothing, but was able to buy 50 grand worth of DI gems or whatever they sell on their store.
So if I buy a token for $25, drop it on the AH, I get currently what, 300,000 WoW gold and the dude who buys that token from the AH gets $15 Bnet balance. Do the maths, he brought somewhere near 3,500 tokens from the AH, it was somewhere in the vicinity of 600 MILLION WoW gold they spent just to power level their DI character.
Unless things change, they never will and have not in a very long time. Subs used to be it because that was all there was, but with the addition of store items, it just looks better to use MAU.
It never was a shareholder thing, it was “Hey we have 12 million active subscribers, come join us”, but the numbers over the years dropped, more so the number of constantly active players does not stay regular, so advertising subs means nothing these days.
Plus you add things like how WoW sold 5,000,000 copies of Shadowlands, that alone is around $10,000,000+ revenue per month for the life of SL. Add in subs, that guy who stays for 2 years, that one dude who plays 6 months and quits, work out the average and they can say “We had 32,000,000 MAU’s this month” as opposed to “Our average sub in WoW is only 1 million a month”.
1 million times a sub cost isn’t that much, 32,000,000 MAU potentially buying more than just a sub, that’s a lot.
Oh I think I vaguely remember that, just didn’t connect Diablo Immortal to it and I had no clue they used tokens to do it. That sounds insane to me. Tokens are crazy expensive, but I hear gold got super inflated over the years.
Yeah I just don’t like the MAU thing. I would prefer something like Runescape, just post active users currently online and such.
I know what you’re saying that it looks better to shareholders/investors and what not, just not what I would like is all!
It’s not what a lot of us want, because when they say 32M MAU, what does that even mean? There are 14 different Blizzard only titles that someone could log in to, be it on purpose or by accident, I opened WoW Classic once this quarter by mistake, that’s 1 MAU they got from me.
They had a Hearthstone secret not long ago that gave a WoW mount, that’s hundreds of thousands of players jumping into HS for 2 hours, that’s hundreds of thousands more MAUs.
To us it means nothing, we don’t care, we want to know how many are online, but alas those days are gone.
We’ll never know the answer to this question ever again.
The golden age of MMORPGs ended in like… 2014. No one after that is releasing sub numbers, because frankly it’s irrelevant to investors vs raw cash data and just makes the product look bad in comparison to the peaks WoW was seeing around 2009-2011.
Unless the genre sees some kind of massive resurgence to the point that WoW bounces back and beats its old records (or some other game does it), there’ll be no benefit for the companies making these games to publish sub data publicly.
So… subjectively, do I think WoW is still on top?
Yeah, I do. I don’t think it has the kind of gap it did at its peak. I think its fallen in line with the rest of the MMORPG market, but just happens to be at the top of that stack.
FFXIV had a surge because of the lawsuits at Blizzard lining up with their new expansion releasing (and big streamers switching to FFXIV as a result), but it’s pretty clear that was mostly a temporary boost rather than players permanently switching.
I think when that event was at its height, you might have been able to argue that FFXIV was the top MMORPG (especially since this went down during a WoW content lull), but that’s the only time I feel the order of things might have shifted.
They could come back. Maybe not golden-age quality, but the genre nonetheless.
Platformers came back, after being dead for a while in the early 2000’s.
They just announced like two new ones at E3 a few days ago, Super Mario Wonder, and Sonic Superstars.
And we know Riot is still working on an unnamed MMO at the moment.
Seeing as how it’s got Riot’s name on it, could be something decently big.
the StarCitizen-killer!
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On release it had almost 1million. I meant initially.
So did New World. There’s a lot of us just looking for the next thing. MMORPGs are in a lul rn
it’s not a lul. it’s the end of the genre.
this is it. minus 2-3 new releases, this is it. extinction follows.
classic WoW is still WoW…so yeah, i’d say it’s the top MMO at the moment…
i hope they make retail a thing again soon though 
Youre probably right. Best MMO nowadays is going outside.
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