Back when all the gaming sites were going on and on about how FF14 had surpassed WoW I kept saying at the time that it wasn’t a representative headline.
It’s not unexpected that when one MMO is in a content lull and the other one is hyping up a new expansion that’s the culmination of a 10 year story that the MMO that’s actually doing something will get a lot more activity. Every MMO has peaks and valleys in their sub count and you won’t get an accurate measure if you compare one game’s peak to another’s valley.
While impossible to say for sure, on average it would appear to me that WoW is still on top and always has been. MMOs in general are a much weaker force in the market than they were during WoW’s hay day.
Retail + Classic combined WoW is 100% still number 1 in population. A year ago there maybe was some question not anymore. Google Trends corroborate this.
Let us not troll so obviously in these forums now 
Please don’t tell me you’re this much of a troll to make really bad assertions on something with no actual facts to back anything up.
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FF14 competes quite well.
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WOW & FFXIV are the #1 MMORPGs,
people who play WOW claim WOW is #1,
people who prefer FFXIV claim FFXIV is #1;
the reality is they switch positions based on their most recent xpacs.
Right now, with DF out, and FFXIV not having an xpac out for a few years, WOW has a higher sub pop than FFXIV,
but that’ll switch when FFXIV launches their new xpac.
They do a dance back and forth alternating #1 slot.
Both are very close. I like both and play both.
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This is a joke right? I mean, please, post any official source to back up this claim.
Yeah, I saw the “you disagree with the post”. Nothing of mine stating anything off a disagreement.
WOW is higher because of DF and FFXIV has had a huge drop off due to content draught.
Playing both games it’s painfully obvious, look at FFXIV server status – the majority of US servers were congested meaning no new characters; now only 10% are congested
while WOW servers are booming.
PS - Ayukama (cool name btw) - please post YOUR official source to back up your claim that my post was a joke. Thank you. Level playing field.
Does it really? That’s insane. I played as a young teenager and then moved onto wow shortly after. Figured everyone else did the same. I’m now 31.
What do you think the age of the population is?
No one in here has any actual facts. However, I’d go out on a limb here and say he is correct. OSRS has way more bots than WoW. People complaining that OSRS bots are literally on the leaderboards and nothing is being done about them.
I’d also wager it’s a lot easier to create an OSRS bot to do a much higher variety of activities. However, I’m no programmer.
Nah. I play OSRS still, and there’s no shot it has 3x more players than WoW lol. Maybe if you look at every single existing account, including F2P. But that doesn’t really count.
Mostly millennials. 30+. People who played it way back when and still enjoy it today.
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Of all the MMOs I’ve ever had an overdose on Hopium for, it’s the Riot MMO.
Established universe we all know, old guard LOL players who want to get back to ‘The good Ol’ days’, exciting locales and a world to explore, Yordles to upset gamers with…
…I’d honestly say Runeterra, if Riot remembers casuals and a social scene make the MMORPG, would make for a wonderful place to adventure in. Especially since Arcane showed us there’s plenty of room for storytelling in this IP.
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Well, if it does, then it does. We can’t really confirm that though. Although Blizzard claimed to banned over 100,000 accounts alone, that doesn’t count for the total ammount of bots WoW might have, considering have to also look across classic too with the bots as well.
OSRS, could have a lot of bots, but we can’t really say they have more without any official facts to back up that claim too. All I know is that Blizzard is too slow at handling reports towards bots.
Most MMO’s that have ever existed have few or no players. Even a fair number that are still “alive” have only a few. Josh Strife Hayes played one last week where he was the only player the whole week he played.
Clearly games like these are not WoW’s competitors, but what actually do you mean when you say “most MMO’s”?
According to the chart you posted, WoW has (per their “estimate”, scare quotes intended) 120 million players. That number represents the number of players that have ever played and has zero to do with any estimate of current players. I seem to recall someone (might be them) has a current “estimate” based on extending the prior trend line for a decade. I think that’s less valid than estimates based on the numbers we do have, such as participation numbers of different sorts.
The WoW population has dropped dramatically. Far fewer copies were sold than Shadowlands. They had to admit this in their report to investors. They also said that retention of players who had purchased the expansion was up, but that’s an old number now that hasn’t been updated or confirmed to be still true. In all likelihood people are continuing to leave, as happens in every expansion as time passes.
If the population had recovered, they would definitely have made an announcement. Insider comments suggest they were surprised that sales were down, and then later that people weren’t coming back. Interest in WoW on Twitch and Youtube is down also, as fewer people are interested in watching or discussing it.
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If we are comparing wow to the likes of candy crush ? Shouldnt we also compare it to Fortnite and minecraft ?
How do you not realize OSRS is littered with bots? It’s like Lost Ark.
While we don’t have hard numbers, the ones we can access point to WoW being the most popular subscription MMO at least, going by things like google trend data. Ff14 might of briefly topped WoW during the pits of SL but since DF came out and FF14’s story ended, WoW has reclaimed its throne.
Still FFXIV for story.
GW2 also for some story and it’s laid back jump-in-out-in design.
ESO when in the mood to endure the combat.
WoW when it isn’t too depressing to play due to various reasons.
There is no data that supports this claim. The people who left for a variety of reasons over the years haven’t come back. The game is now designed for people who like pushing keys and raiding, especially raid logging. Blizzard did a bang up job of catering to these players, while figuring that others who play differently would also come back and start pushing keys and raiding, which they never did before.
Hint: people who leave the game may never come back. Often, if they do, they take off several expansions.
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