I am a casual gamer. 20 years ago I started playing World of Warcraft. Over the following years I had seen reports that Wow had acquired 11 million players. To me that sounded like Wow was the most popular game on earth. I had this impression until today.
Today I ran across an internet site that asserted that the most popular Blizzard game with the highest player count was Overwatch with a population of 35 million!
Here’s the list:
Best selling Blizzard games from video game sales wiki List:
Overwatch ( 35 million players )
Diablo III and Reaper of Souls expansion ( 30 million )
Diablo II (15 million)
World of Warcraft ( 12 million subscribers peak )
StarCraft ( 11 million )
Starcraft II ( 6 million )
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos ( 3 million )
Diablo ( 2.5 million )
So at this point I did a few more searches and found that Wow is now around 4 to 5 million players. I am a little shocked that I thought Wow has the all time highest population, but if I’m to believe what I found on the internet Wow is not the huge game I thought it was. That other games in the Blizzard stable have a much higher player population and that other company mmorpgs have even bigger populations.
I am totally crest-fallen. And a little shocked. I guess I fall into the category of ignorant fan boy? Is all this true?
Overwatch is a Free-to-play game, so what “sales” are you counting exactly?
How do you compare “buy once” games such as Diablo to a subscription MMO? Someone buys Diablo and, due to that sale having occurred, they are a “player” for life? But a WoW player is only a “player” as long as they are subscribed? You are comparing apples to oranges.
Last I checked, Blizzard still doesn’t release current subscriber numbers for WoW. All of these sites are making guesses.
Subscribers and lifetime sales are different numbers.
WoW boasted it’s current subscribers for many years (hitting the peak in WotLK)… then the constant downtrend put an end to bothering with that, as it was always compared to that one-time peak that was mostly just the hype machine at its peak.
Since then, no other MMORPG has ever posted it’s current subscriber count.
Because if it goes down relative to the all-time peak, it becomes a liability for perception.
But total sales works differently - it’s a number that can’t go down by definition, unless you take returns into account. And you have to screw up quite badly for mass returns to happen, as in the game being borderline unplayable. For WoW’s many faults, it has never fallen quite that far.
But at this point, there’s not much advantage to throwing out the total number of sales either, mostly because between the peak of 12 million… a total number of sales showing you’ve lost 80-90% of people who tried the game over the past 20 years, even if that’s reasonable, just doesn’t look good.
So you’re down to required financial reporting for investors & regulators… and even then, MAUs (monthly active users) is all about “spin” to keep those investors happy.
But for the unvarnished truth:
Sales and player numbers are meaningless in the long run.
All you need to know is this:
Are you having fun right now?
Really? Until today? GTA 5 has sold well over 200 million copies lol. Minecraft is even higher. Of course you also have Call of Duty, League of Legends, Genshin Impact, Counter Strike, etc.
Like the previous posts mentioned. Most of these sites are guessing at populations since Blizzard and other companies running MMOs dont release offcial subscription numbers.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager that the current numbers are likey lower then the 4-5 Million reference you found.
definitely the most popular game on Azeroth, though.
12 million unique subscribers is still really big to me. I think games like WOW are harder to attract even more massive numbers because of the time-investment. My hot take is that the other games listed don’t generally require that much time investment (leveling and gearing a toon, for example) and can be played closer to their fullest more casually.
Unless you’re a major MS shareholder or someone who’s intimately entwined with the company’s operations and finances, these figures are meaningless. WoW’s still around and profitable enough for Blizzard to commit to three expansions in one go. That’s good enough for me.
Keep in mind that peak subscriptions isn’t the same thing as unique copies sold. I remember hearing a long time ago that WoW has had over 100 million accounts made(which is still not a great stat cause that undoubtedly includes trial accounts).
Though Minecraft has sold 300 million copies, so I’m pretty sure that game is #1 unless you want to get into the minefield that is F2P player count reporting.
Of course so long as the game maintains enough of a playerbase to keep multi-player going, it doesn’t really matter if it’s the most popular thing on the planet or not.
