Activision Blizzard released its preliminary second quarter earnings results yesterday and revealed that World of Warcraft 's slow slide in subscribers is continuing as expected, down to 7.7 million active players. We've been marking the decline, it seems, every time new financial reports come out.
It's hard to find concrete numbers, but it looks like the most recent competitors to WoW were MMORPGs like Star Wars: The Old Republic and The Secret World , but both of these games had a fraction of WoW's subscribers at their peaks—and then they both went free-to-play within a year of release.
We're watching the last years of WoW's crumbling empire, and it may the last of its kind. With free-to-play MMORPGs becoming the new normal and dozens of new free-to-play shooters launching every year, it's unlikely that we'll ever see another World of Warcraft.
