The other night, while recording the WoW Insider Show podcast, we talked about the general feeling we had that subscriptions to World of Warcraft had gone up. The basic consensus was that our friend's lists were full, we were seeing lots of people online for the first time in a while, that in general WoW had almost certainly seen a sub bump. We weren't expecting a three million sub jump, though. And it seems likely that Blizzard wasn't expecting it either - while some of the launch problems were the fault of a DDoS attack, some were undoubtedly the result of this unprecedented player surge.

This got me to thinking about what it means that Warlords saw this many people come back. We've talked a lot about the plot being hard for some folks to follow, but just as clearly, that didn't stop people from coming back. WoW dropped below 10 million subs back in 2012, during the Cataclysm expansion.

I don't personally think that WoW needs 10 million subs to be viable - not even close, in fact. Even at its lowest sub numbers this year it had more than two million subs over its Burning Crusade number of 5 million subs, and more than seven times its competitors. WoW is a phenomenon, and one that will continue as long as Blizzard wants to support it. But it's interesting to see this jump - what is it about Warlords that got players to come back?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Warlords of Draenor