World of Warcraft and the active user boundary

Today I read this article in Icy Veins, which discusses the number of active subscribers in the World of Warcraft games. For the history blizzard stopped updating this number back in 2015 and since then we are only speculating, or demystifying messages that contain in a way this information.

The game had a historical peak of 12 million subscribers in Cataclysm, a number that declined rapidly during this expansion and Mists of Pandaria. After a brief relapse in Warlords of Draenor, the active subscribers number plummeted for several years around 5M.

Blizzard at some point even revealed a rolling average chart around 2024, when it announced the War Within expansion (which was really great tbh).

Of course, these numbers now includes subscribers for all the World of Warcraft instances, like Classic, Mists of Pandaria Classic and Retail.

So the article speculates that right now there are 9M subscribers (as seen in this video) and this will improve more with the upcoming expansion, reaching its previous heights.

But one thought came into my mind … Why there is this limit? It seems that the most successful MMO in history, even in his peak, could not surpass the 12M subscribers.

According to Gemini,

Long-running giants like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV maintain millions of active monthly subscribers and players. For example, World of Warcraft has over 122 million registered accounts built up over its lifetime

and concluding …

There are easily hundreds of millions of active MMO players across the globe, supporting a massive and growing market worth tens of billions of dollars.

So, what happened to all those people and why those 122 million players are not rejoining World of Warcraft?

I have found similar patterns in the past presenting “invisible boundaries” that you could not explain, but they existed.

Maybe and MMO, from its mechanics and the way it is built generates its own boundaries, one that it cannot surpass.

As Bill Gates quoted once (there are arguments that he didn’t):

640kb of RAM should be enough for anybody

But are there 12mil players enough for the most successful MMO?