It’s padding. After two expansions that were not well received, and caused a massive drop in subscribers. They are making sure players are locked in after first month, and numbers drop again.
They have stated the subs go up at start of each new expansion, and suddenly drop after all the content is used up. Then go back up for the next patch. A full year subscription keeps those dips at lower numbers, which keeps them from loosing money.
No, it’s not, because that’s not how MAUs work, which is the metric that Blizzard uses to determine the health of their games.
MAUs are recorded every month. If you bought into this and only played 2 months out of 12, Blizzard doesn’t count you for the other 10 because you’re subbed, you actually have to play each month to be counted.
The issue is that for the execs at Blizzard, it’s not a problem that people leave if they can make up the difference with shop sales ie mounts and tokens. That’s because they’re all about short-term profits.
They are taking the numbers from how many have purchased the year subs, and making guesstimates on how much a year worth of sub subscriptions will make. They only care about play time metrics to show share holders.
There not concerned with Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users since they come and go. They know that once they have a player locked into a year subscription they will continue to make money no matter how much activity they are in. Blizzard will get a huge chunk of revenue right before next quarter, and report a huge success in player participation.
They literally do, try reading any quarterly report from the last few years since the Legion expansion launched.
That’s literally not how their quarterly reports work. Please educate yourself.
They don’t track how many people are subbed to WoW anymore. They have not used that metric since Warlords of Draenor. MAUs are what they track, and have been tracking, for many, many years now.
After WoD and the drop in sub numbers they stopped and switch to a metric that would look more positive to the public. They still keep track of subs but privately. Blizzard does not have to let everyone know about subscription numbers.