World of Warcraft subscribers are at a four-year high

[Hogg]

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth launched in August, and based on the latest subscriber counts it seems that hype around the expansion has paid off in a major way. The Western version of WoW has posted its biggest subscriber counts since 2014, and the new expansion has generated some major profits for Blizzard.

WoW revenue topped $161 million in August following the Battle for Azeroth launch, and that’s not even counting months of pre-sales leading up to the proper release. That makes World of Warcraft the number two PC game for the month, just ahead of League of Legends and just behind South Korean juggernaut Dungeon Fighter Online.

That info all comes via SuperData’s August report. Activision Blizzard used to report WoW subscribers regularly, but such reports were cut off in 2015. A chart still lingering at MMO Champion shows the global subscriber counts over the game’s first ten years, which peaked around the Cataclysm launch at 12 million.

Since 2014, the highest peak was ten million following the launch of Warlords of Draenor. It bears repeating that those are the global numbers – today’s report specifies that the new four-year record is specific to WoW in the west. That means numbers in Asian territories aren’t accounted for, which could make a massive difference to the overall counts.

Battle for Azeroth had launch issues – Blizzard tells us all about them in an interview at that link – but clearly they haven’t been enough to besmirch the game’s tremendous success.