Game News World of Warcraft: 12 million players… That’s the impressive number for WoW, except it doesn’t apply to The War Within!
While The War Within has just been released, World of Warcraft is seeing record numbers of subscribers… but it’s not because of the release of this expansion. The reason is much more unexpected, but terribly logical!
Do we really need to present World of Warcraft in 2024? Launched in 2004, the Blizzard title quickly established itself as the market leader for MMORPGs and will soon celebrate its 20th anniversary this year. While the massively multiplayer role-playing game has just welcomed its tenth expansion with The War Within, the first season of this new adventure has just started today, with all the associated endgame contentAt the same time, WoW is celebrating a record number of subscribers… but that has nothing to do with this update!
A new record for WoW
For the first time in its history It seems that World of Warcraft has over 12 million concurrent subscribers. You might think that this is due to the hype surrounding The War Within, but that is not the case. The information comes from Kihra, an internet user known for creating websites like Warcraft Logs, which provide statistics on the MMORPG. So, The netizen tells us that currently the number of Chinese players playing World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic alone is the highest ever recorded in WoW since the founding of warcraftlogs.com.
For example, on September 9, 2024, there were connections for over 11 million different characters in Ulduar, the second major raid of this expansion. To this we must add the characters WoW: The War Within, Season of Discovery, WoW Classic Hardcore or even WoW Cataclysm Classic, but Kihra seems to be sure of one thing: the previous record of more than twelve million players in the last months of 2010 has been broken.
I’m pretty sure that World of Warcraft has reached a record number of players over the course of its existence.
The number of players in China playing Wrath of the Lich King is comparable to the highest retail peak we have ever seen since the launch of Warcraft Logs.
Add “Discovery” and “The War Within” to this season.
I’m pretty sure that World of Warcraft has the highest player count of all time during its entire existence.
The number of WOTLK players in China is the highest sales record we have seen since the inception of the WCL.
Then there are SoD and The War Within.
— Kihra (@KihraOfTemerity) 8 September 2024
World of Warcraft can thank China
But how can we explain the renewed interest of Chinese players in World of Warcraft, especially the classic version? Well, it’s quite simple: In November 2022, Blizzard and NetEase announced that they could not agree on a contract extensionwhich resulted in all of the publisher’s games being taken offline in China. Blizzard games were unplayable in the country for 18 months and World of Warcraft servers were not available again until August 1, 2024.
The classic version was put back online a little earlier This allowed Chinese players to catch up on the Wrath of the Lich King adventure in a heavily supported (and shortened) phase before arriving at Cataclysm Classic in due course. Imagine that it is this new version, which is currently being extremely well received by Chinese players, which explains this success. It just shows that WoW still has a bright future ahead of it.
