Despite this, Blizzard has managed to maintain healthy subscriber numbers during the game's more than 12 years of existence. At its best, it held North of 12 million paying customers, equating to. Though Blizzard stopped providing subscriber numbers for World of Warcraft back in 2015, a new report has stated that the subscriber base currently stands at 1.7 million.
It’s easy to forget that there’s a cost for exploring Azeroth along with your friends, guild mates, and enemies. There are several ways you can fund your access to WoW. Some are more convenient than others. Here’s what a subscription costs and what exactly it’ll get you.
Some people might not realize that WoW is actually partially free to play. The Starter Edition lets you play the game with as many characters as you want, but you can only level them up to level 20. That’s very far away from the game’s level-120 cap, but it’s enough to get a feel for the leveling experience. At the moment, it doesn’t seem like this will include access to any form of WoW Classic.
If you want to play the full game, you’ll need to pay the $14.99-per-month subscription. This will give you access to everything but the Battle for Azeroth expansion — which is essentially stops you at level 110. To be able to progress past level 110 and receive a free boost to level 110 for any character, you need to buy the expansion for $59.99 — which can also be bought physically. If you do so, you’ll also get 30 days of game time.
When WoW Classic launches later this month, you’ll only need the same $14.99 subscription. Thankfully, you don’t need to buy the classic version of the game. That means that one subscription gets you access to almost two full games, minus the Battle For Azeroth content.
How to pay for a WoW subscription
Subscriptions can be paid in several ways, too. You can pre-pay for up to six months of game time which equates to fewer dollars per month than the monthly subscription. You can also purchase physical 60-day game time cards at some retailers for $29.99. And as a small note: If you cancel your subscription, you’ll be able to play until it runs out.
The last way people pay for game time is through WoW Tokens. These are in-game items that are sold for gold via the Auction House. You don’t need an active subscription to buy a token — it can be done from the character-selection screen — but you do need the right amount of gold. This varies every day. You can check the current prices via sites like WoW Token Info. Once you buy one, you can use it for 30 days of game time or trade it for $15 of Blizzard Balance. Likewise, if you buy a token from the Blizzard Store, you can sell it for in-game gold. The tokens are a very popular way for people to maintain their subscription to the game because it doesn’t take a lot of time to grind out the gold needed for one.
Overall, it’s a pretty simple system. You pay for a subscription and you get access to both games. If you want the latest content in the current game, you buy the expansion. All the other stuff like Appearance Changes, Character Transfers, and Faction Changes are sorted out via paid options on the Blizzard Store. If you just want to play the game, it’s pretty easy to do so.
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The enormous queues and insane numbers on Twitch were already a big indication that World of Warcraft Classic is a big success, but now it seems we have some hard data to support that claim.
Superdata, a company that analyses the gaming market, recently released a report from which we learn that Classic had climbed the ranks.
In July, World of Warcraft was ranked 7th, but in August they ranked Classic at the third spot. In their report summary, Superdata also states that World of Warcraft subscribers earnings increased by 223%. It should be noted though, that Battle for Azeroth last year, made the company more money. This isn’t that surprising though, since players had to buy the expansion and Classic was free with a subscription. BFA was a record even for the company since they sold 3.4 million copy’s on launch day.
Blizzards main income for World of Warcraft still comes from paid services like mounts and race changes. Which is also a reason why BFA scored better than Classic (Clarification below).
Getting the exact number of players is hard and people can only guess and make polls to get a number. Blizzard has decided that they won’t give information regarding subscriber counts.
Wow Subscription Numbers Chart
All we can tell is that Classic is a great success and we love that. We hope it will be successful for a long time to come!
Wow Classic Subscriber Count
Wow Subscription Numbers Bfa
We saw some questions popping up, on MMO-Champion for example, surrounding micro transactions being the biggest income for World of Warcraft. Blizzard has stated this in their earnings report, as you can read here. The quote, which was written just before BFA, reads as followed: “World of Warcraft over-performed versus the prior expansion at this point in time, with higher engagement sequentially and strong community participation with in-game purchases. Preorders for the upcoming expansion, Battle for Azeroth, are ahead of plan.