Keep in mind that this result is far better than what people expected. It's dropped merely 100,000 from Q2. Q2 was down 1.5 million on Q1, and another loss of that size would have been catastrophic.

That means that it's looking to follow Mists of Pandaria's trend, and stabilise at a bit over 5 million. (Mists stabilised at 7).

Considering all the problems Warlords of Draenor has had, that's a remarkably good result.

100000 down after such a barren, poor quarter on the title? I'd hardly call that bleeding subs.

Game is 11 years old this month. To still have 5.5 Million subscribers at that point is nothing but incredible. Long live the king.

Edit - You copy pasted from another site, shame on youuuuuu!

On the other hand, it's approaching 1 billion in annual microtransaction revenue, so they sort of have a back plan.

With the WoW tokens in play a lot of people (including myself) are now going with the gold subscriptions, ie I use gold to pay for gametime rather than money since the state the game is atm is definitely not worth a financial investment for gametime.

What that means tho is that while I'm just paying gold to pay, someone else who is more flush than I with cash and wants in game gold is buying 30 day subs for €20 rather than the €12 it should cost and selling them to me for ingame currency, the end result of which is not only are blizzard able to hold onto some players this way, but they also make €8 more from those players in a roundabout way per month, and can offer a gameplay experience right now which isn't worth a paid subscription in the eyes of a lot more players than have left.

Those WoW tokens are genius from Activision imo, useful and very profitable.

This game is extremely old, and it still manages to have 5.5 million subscribers.Anyway you look at it, its exceptional

Game released a decade ago and is still making so much money!!!

I quit about 8 months ago, my longst break ever from the game and i dont think ill ever go back. My most played character had over 160 days played (4000 hours)

The concept is hardly a Blizzard idea though. EvE Online (and Dofus, if we really go to the MMORPG underground) did that first.

It's more the timing tho which is fantastic. Player who log in and do stuff have Millions of gold now, while those who have no clue how to play but access to their mothers credit cards think that 1 gold is hard to earn and 2 gold will make them better. If they had been bought in earlier there might not be the illusion of being so far behind for new players which gold might fix.

If Activision are really that bothered about active users they could always try porting it to consoles/mobile.

Really though it is pretty amazing that decade old game still has 5.5 million subscribers, so Im sure there pretty happy about that.