For a long time, WoW’s success had been tied to its official subscriber count. After those reports stopped in 2015, players continued to speculate. They searched for every piece of information that would confirm or deny their expectations. But 10 years later, Nightstalker314 came across an unintended public statement. And Bellular delivered some extra research around this new subscriber number.
Official Numbers and Player Speculation
Ever since the massive decline in early 2015, down to 5.6 million, Blizzard has stopped reporting official subscriber numbers. Rumors and estimates based on AI calculations circulated. Some claimed it had sunk to just 1 million, perhaps for some cheap, drama-fueled attention clicks.
A GDC presentation by John Hight, shortly before his departure from Blizzard Entertainment, gave us a more recent graph, but without concrete numbers. With some calculations based on further context, Bellular managed to get a rough estimate of 7.25 million in March 2024.
An Unintended Leak That Went Unnoticed
In a strange coincidence, ten years after the last official mention, we discovered an unintended “official” subscriber number. In 2024, the year of WoW’s 20th anniversary, Blizzard started a series of concerts. It continues in 2026 with concerts in Paris and Lyon. Organizers released trailers for these events. One trailer, published July 22 and July 30, included a revealing piece of information. And I stumbled across this through a random social media post, 3 months later.
The video mentions ’20 Years of Music, 2 Concerts, and 190 Artists.’ But it also states ‘rejoignez 9 millions de joueurs‘, which translates to ‘join 9 million players’.
And this isn’t a general number for the entire IP. The concerts are based on World of Warcraft, so this figure is directly tied to its player base.
Further Research on Current Metrics
After I posted my discovery on various Discord servers, Bellular and his team picked it up. They did some additional research on metadata supporting this claim. And we will be looking at additional context for those statements.
The most important piece is, of course, the subscriber graph from GDC. The value of 7.25 million is from a point in time when Blizzard games were inaccessible in China. But this also brings up a point of criticism, which we will go into later.
Activity in China, in general, impacted most of the presented data. Bellular mentions the M+ metrics of Dragonflight S3 and The War Within S3. Despite having less bloat in key levels, data from TWW S3 easily surpasses DF S3. But now we also have full access to the Chinese Armory API. Their metrics, which represent 45-50% of all global M+ activity, are boosting these numbers.
On the other hand, they already did so during DF S3. While being unable to play WoW on their servers, a lot of Chinese players started playing on Taiwanese servers. And they brought that region’s global share from around 3% up to 18.45%. So Bellular’s argument is not as solid as it could be. RaiderIO managed to retroactively get most of the data for China in TWW S2. The total number of active characters worldwide for that season ended up being around 4.52 million.
What Is the Average Player Doing?
The number of characters must also be weighed against the average per account. On dataforazeroth.com, we can see that the 4.083 million registered characters belong to 1.358 million accounts. That gives us an average of nearly 3 characters per account, and only 54.3% of those characters are level 80.
But this page does not represent all accounts. And players who use such a leaderboard site might play more max-level characters on average. However, Ion Hazzikostas confirmed during his 2023 BlizzCon panel that the average player has more than just 1 max-level character. The number of characters in TWW S2 might already represent 3 million accounts.
Other arguments from Bellular include the benefits of delves. These offer more content to players who do not raid or participate in M+. The only thing missing here would be a tracking site for delve numbers. These are listed in the in-game achievement statistics board, which means they should be accessible through the armory.
His comparisons also list boss kill numbers from the equivalent raids of today and in early 2024. Here, we must also keep in mind that Chinese players boosted Taiwanese raid-boss kills in Amirdrassil. Despite listing more than 3,000 kills for the current first boss on normal, this data is based on raid guilds. Chinese players raid in PUGs a lot more often than players on EU and US servers.
What about Classic Players?
The video continues with metrics around activity in Classic WoW. From Ironforge.pro, we can get decent information about raid activity among max-level characters for the individual versions of Classic. Here, we also have to keep in mind that the average characters per account can vary a lot. Long-time Classic players are known for raid-logging and min/maxing their time.
Right now, between 120,000 and 180,000 characters have been raiding T14 in MoP. The weeks prior to the concert video post (July 2025), numbers for late Cataclysm dropped to 60,000 characters.
The 2nd round of Classic raid characters on the Anniversary servers decreased from a peak of 103,000 to 73,000 characters. In mid-July, their numbers were around 90,000.
SOD’s Hype and Downfall
Season of Discovery started with a phenomenal hype. Then dropped from its peak of 496,000 characters in BFD down to 75,000 at the end of May 2025. Soon after that, those servers completely died down, long before the concert video was posted.
And for activity on SOD, we also have additional metrics that put the characters per-account metric into perspective. Especially when in the early phases, players would create endless amounts of alts with a short leveling time to 25.
According to RaiderIO’s API tracking, we can see 8.8 million characters at level 10 and higher. This level is the cut-off for armory profiles. 4.4 million made it to at least level 25. Chinese players on Taiwanese servers once again increased the global share from the usual 2-3% to 9%. But less than 10% (878,000) of all created characters made it to level 60. And just above 105,000 achieved an item level higher than 80, which is somewhere around Naxxramas gear.
An honorable mention for the Hardcore crowd. 1.8 million characters reached level 10 and higher. As of writing this article, only 17,800 have made it to 60 and are still alive.
Overall, these versions of Classic – outside of China – might represent a couple of hundred thousand active accounts in mid-2025.
Are Bots Bloating the Metrics Today?
Bot activity on Retail is comparatively low. You will find a few Herbalism and Mining bots in harmless areas of the Isle of Dorn. And maybe you stumble across a 5-man bot group at a hyperspawn point in a Chromie Time shard. But this is nothing compared to the massive issue Classic developers had to deal with during the hype of Wrath and SOD. According to several Blueposts made between March 2023 and January 2024, the monthly amount of banned accounts fluctuated between 116,000 and 271,000. This was quite a step-up from just 74,000 in mid-2020.
When subscriber numbers were discussed in recent years, the impact of botting was brought up as a major factor. But, we also have to remember that ever since WoW started in 2004, bots have been beside us. We had the humble beginnings of easily tricked scripts in the farm spots in Azshara. After that, we saw constant gatherings in front of Karazhan or (ironically) BOTanica. And during BFA, we had the armies of Moonkins spamming Starfall at the border of Vol’dun and Nazmir. They have always been doing their part to increase the number of subscribed accounts.
China and the GDC Graph
After the server shut down on January 24th, 2023, some of the Chinese players rejoined on Taiwanese servers. The others were eagerly awaiting an unknown point at which their Retail and classic Wrath characters could restart again. And in this period of inactivity falls the GDC graph and the speculations around it. Chinese players have been responsible for about 50% of the global player base for a long time. Articles from late 2011 confirm this.
“China still represents more than half of our global player base and, historically, December has been a very good month for subscriber trends.”
And even today, this 50% value holds some truth to it. As mentioned above, the most recent M+ metrics from China represent 45-50% of the global numbers. This pattern should also show itself in the rest of the game.
Bellular’s early 2024 estimate might just be displaying the activity in all regions excluding China. So, while the pattern of activity might be similar across all regions, the lack of subscriber numbers makes sense. If we had all the regional data, we would see an instant sharp drop in early 2023, but it’s not there.
His estimate of 7.25 million depends on the 5.6 million given in mid-2015. If we assume a 50% share of China even back then, we get 2.8 to 3 million subscribers in the other regions in 2015. And the 7.25 million estimate of early 2024 might represent a figure between 3.5 and 4 million.
The Restart in China and the Massive Wrath Hype
In June of 2024, Chinese players rejoined the global player base. More than 2,000,000 accounts were already pre-registered in mid-April. As soon as they had access to Wrath Classic and their old accounts, 11 million characters started raiding Ulduar. If all of them participated in full-clear runs, this meant 154 million parses each week. And the head of Warcraftlogs, Kihra, confirmed around 200 million new parses within 10 days, even months after the restart.
Now we can’t really tell if those 11 million characters are just those 2 million accounts. But Chinese players are well known for their love of grinds and min/maxing, especially in Classic WoW. In the early days of Classic and TBC, they represented 60 to 70% of all progress guilds registered on Warcraftlogs.
For current metrics, Bellular mentions 8.1 million parses in ICC heroic, compared to 1.85 million in Manaforge Omega heroic. We can’t confirm this number through individual research. But at the time of comparison, Legion Remix was already active on Retail, bringing the raid metrics down a lot. In addition, these are parses across entire raids. ICC has 12 bosses, and Manaforge Omega just 8. Four times the amount of parses is now tied to 50% more bosses and a shift towards Remix.
The video ends with one major reminder: WoW used to be huge when the internet and online gaming were much smaller than today. While a peak of 12 million sounds like a lot, online gaming in this day and age produces larger metrics. Major free-to-play successes like Fortnite, Warzone, Overwatch, or Marvel Rivals capture 10s if not 100s of millions of players.
Bellular’s and My Final Thoughts
July 2025 is the time we can associate with the 9 million subscribers. WoW had been active in China for basically a year at this point. Retail, globally, was at the tail-end of its 2nd raid tier and M+ season. Classic, outside of China, was in a regular decline. And Classic Wrath in China might also have lost some steam. But after the Midnight announcement in late August, we saw a lot of new and returning players in newcomer chat. So WoW might even be experiencing an upward trend right now.
Bellular suggests the figure of 9 million excludes Chinese numbers. I disagree and claim those are included. And under these circumstances, such a high number is quite good these days. The GDC graph shows higher subscriber drop-offs after the release peak of each expansion before Dragonflight. It is still possible that 10 million might have been surpassed earlier after the TWW release.
In early 2026, the Midnight release and housing should once more reinvigorate player numbers on Retail. Classic players across the globe get a decent content cadence. Chinese players receive their extra Titanforged experience. And once general Classic enthusiasts get their Classic+ treatment, we could easily get past the magic 10 million marker.
Should we ever surpass the 12 million peak once more, Blizzard, feel free to tell us!
