World of Warcraft Drops 600K Subscribers

Another tidbit from Mike Morhaine’s conference call with investors has surfaced – it seems that after hitting a 12 million-subscriber high around the release of Cataclysm, Blizzard’s total subscriber count for World of Warcraft has dropped to 11.4 million.

During the Activision Blizzard first quarter 2011 financial results conference call today, Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime told us that as of March of this year, World of Warcraft numbers had “returned to pre-Cataclysm levels in the West,” which is a rather nice way of saying dropped considerably.

In October 2010, two months before the release of the Cataclysm expansion pack, Blizzard reported that World of Warcraft had exceeded 12 million subscribers. Today Morhaime gave a figure of 11.4 million. That’s 600,000 subscribers gone.

Morhaime said that subscriptions had returned to pre-Cataclysm levels. They’ve nearly dropped to pre-Wrath of the Lich King levels, to be accurate. A month after the second expansion pack’s November 2008 release, subscription rates hit 11.5 million. A little over two months’ prior they had just hit 11 million.

It’s still a really big number. And perhaps the downtime of SOE, which has no announced end in sight, will help them regain some users.