World of Warcraft, Still Worth $1b A Year, Despite Decline In Subscribers

There have been many attempts to throw World of Warcraft from the #1 spot over the years, in fact, WoW has been out for so long now that I haven’t even heard about it in almost two years, having done my best to avoid it after my own little attempt at the massively popular MMORPG, which only lasted about ten hours playtime. I knew the game had always been big, but I honestly believed it had declined greatly over the last couple of years, falling into obscurity… I was wrong.

A new set of figures from SuperData Research shows that while subscriptions to online MMOs has declined over the years, WoW is still king with a 36% share of the market. Its closest competitor, Lineage 1, only has a 9% market share. WoW is still pulling in over $1 billion a year, an impressive figure compared to Lineage 1 which only draws in around $253 million.

Numbers may be dropping periodically, but steady updates and content packages have proven to keep people flocking back and while rumours of the games demise over the years have been plentiful, with many gamers that I know having long left the series, it’s clearly far from dead from a profit point of view. It’s certainly unlikely that the developers will be turning off the servers any time soon.

It seems this $1 billion is why we are yet to see anything of Blizzards Project Titan, their new subscription based MMO that was a potential replacement for World of Warcraft. Why on earth would they want to replace their own game when they’re raking in so much money… it would be financial suicide and until WoW becomes a waste of money for Blizzard, we’ll likely never see anything new from them.

Thank you Forbes for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Forbes.