“There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.”
Sherlock Holmes
BfA: The Bad Detective
So, the question everywhere seems to be if WoW is bleeding subscribers. It might be, I’d not be surprised. The stories I hear in game are of players leaving or certainly not playing every day.
Can we take a look?
The Questionable Detective visited Realm Pop US to take a look. He scrolled the slider to “all 120s”.
On the mouse over for RP/Normal, we see the number 2,275,857.
Do we assume that everyone has two 120s or that many have yet to ding 120? There is no way to fold in Alts as a factor. We could guess; maybe everyone has two 120s which would make the US population at one million subscribers and then we could guess that to double that for Europe and then, maybe, double again for Asia.
This is the Realm Pop EU link right here.
The Horrible Detective has no idea where to find Africa or Australia.
It is possible that WoW has four million active subscribers, not including China.
Or if the bulk of subs only have one 120, then the number could be up around six million!
The butler did it.
IRVINE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–When the Battle for Azeroth™ erupted worldwide last week, champions of the Alliance and the Horde around the globe were called upon to fight for their faction. Heroes everywhere turned out in force, and Blizzard Entertainment today announced that as of Battle for Azeroth’s first full day of launch on August 14, more than 3.4 million units of the latest World of Warcraft® expansion had sold through worldwide—setting a new day-one sales record for the franchise and making it one of the fastest-selling PC games of all-time. August 23, 2018.
Coffee Cakes and Crits 
I’d say at this point with digital downloads etc that the 3.4 million probably accounts for 80% or more. Now it gets difficult to figure single players with more than one account.
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Good point. Too many factors to really know or even guess, I guess.
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I would be curious to see how accurate the number of 120s is. Myself, for example – I have 7 120s on my account, and most of my guildies have multiple 120s at this point too. If there are only ~2.3 million 120s total, that might be a bad number to see if I were Blizzard!
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Totally agree!
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I wonder if a third-party tool can answer that? WoWProgress can track alts in guilds based on some kind of data (I think tracking shared acheivements) so I wonder if some sort of filter similar to that could be applied. I know on WoWProgress, it knows my alts pretty well if they’ve been scanned at current level cap, and I have to imagine that the result would look really bad if there aren’t even enough 120s to match box copies sold.
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I love looking at realmpop amd seeing these numbers. I wish they could find a way to show sub count or reduce the 120s to single accounts.
I also have more than 1 max level. I have 5 and most people I know have at least 2. I’d be curious to see the number then.
Also I believe they group Oceania servers into the NA groups.
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Eh…I struggle to say something positive about WoW these days, to be the cheerleader girl, I normally is. I wish it wasn´t so. I admire your ability to keep blogging though, keep it up – your blog is a joy to read! 🙂
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I don’t have a single 120 yet but I’m still plugging along. I do play on a very large and seemingly full RP realm, so, I haven’t noticed too many folks missing other than the ones on my list. 😦
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