The End of Traditional MMOs: WoW Drops Below 5.5M Subs As Owner Activision Embraces Mobile Games

World of Warcraft subscribers fall to 5.5M in Blizzard's last report of this metric https://t.co/CEvDE2DCoW pic.twitter.com/zCiMAA8b9m

— GamesBeat (@GamesBeat) November 3, 2015

The MMO king is dead - or dead enough that he no longer matters: World of Warcraft was fallen to 5.5 million subscribers from a peak of 12 million. This is being announced as WoW owners Activision/Blizzard also announce the purchase of casual mobile giant and Candy Crush publisher King for $6 billion, a move which may seem odd for Activision, until you realize they're making less and less money from a hardcore MMO like WoW, and more from its own mobile game, Heartstone, which now earns the company $20 million a month. 

And as the king dies, so does any chance that other subscription-based MMOs will ever be made. The mystery is why World of Warcraft didn't go free-to-play years ago as it began hemorrhaging subscribers.

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Comments

[Kitty Revolver]

OMG, this is huge! FFXIV is about 4.5 mill accounts/subs (not sure which) with two paid options. Square will never let it go free-to-play because the level of patch content they produce for "free" is always top notch. But WoW is a victim of its times. An MMO that looks bad (for 2015) and the play is redundant and simplified to the point of banality, it was doomed as it progressed. Hopefully, the dickwads will stay there and not come over to FFXIV and start shit.

[Ciaran Laval]

"The mystery is why World of Warcraft didn't go free-to-play years ago as it began hemorrhaging subscribers.'

There are still around 5.5 millions reasons as to why that hasn't happened yet and with a movie due out in June, followed by an Autumn expansion, I don't see the model changing before 2018.