'World Of Warcraft' Bleeds 3M Subscribers Following 'Warlords of Draenor' Expansion

Visitors play ''Starcraft'' at the Blizzard exhibition stand during the Gamescom 2011 fair in Cologne August 18, 2011. The Gamescom convention, Europe's largest video games trade fair, runs from August 17 to August 21. Reuters/Ina Fassbender

Activision Blizzard's earnings report revealed that Blizzard's flagship PC MMORPG, "World of Warcraft," has maintained its dominant position as the top subscription-based MMO out there. That announcement still isn't anything to cheer about since the game has bled a tremendous number of subscribers over the past three months. The company revealed that the game has lost a staggering 2.9 million subscribers.

To put this into perspective, "World of Warcraft's" subscriber base has dwindled from the 10-million-subscriber peak it achieved at the end of 2014 to just 7.1 million recorded during the business quarter ending March 31. That's nearly a 30 percent reduction in subscriber base occurring over a span of just three months, as reported by Gamespot.

All things considered, the seemingly colossal drop in user base isn't entirely surprising. "World of Warcraft" is now a ten-year-old MMO game, so it's harder to retain jaded users without introducing radical new ideas through expansions. As Kotaku explains, this is exactly how the MMO saw a significant increase in subscribers following the release of the "Warlords of Draenor" expansion pack in October 2014, which propelled the subscriber base to the 10-million-mark.

Apparently, the changes brought in by the expansion pack were enough for both MMO veterans as well as newcomers to subscribe. However, "Warlords of Draenor" couldn't really manage to hold subscriber interest long enough. These retention issues resulted in the subscriber graph for the MMO resembling a bell curve around the launch period for the expansion. PC Gamer notes that fans who returned to the MMO owing to the added content didn't find it worthwhile to keep paying for the same content after a few months.

"World of Warcraft's revenue performance at constant FX has been more stable, driven by continued strong uptake on value added services, and price increases in select regions, which partially offset subscriber declines, particularly in the East," said Activision Blizzard following the earnings report. "World of Warcraft remains the No. 1 subscription-based MMORPG in the world."

Meanwhile, Blizzard attempts to put a positive spin on the news by stating that the decrease in subscriber base has been offset by price increase in certain territories and the success of value added services introduced recently into its line-up. The company continues to perform well in terms of its recent release, "Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft," managing to clock 30 million players, as reported earlier by International Business Times Australia.

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