It's been long known that MMOs greatly exaggerate the number of their subscribers. Typically, they report the grand total for the lifetime of their entire game and then express it to imply that those are all current subscribers. In some cases (*cough* SOE *cough*), they may even lump multiple games together under joint subscriptions.

I'm going to brush aside the questionable ethics and focus on my curiousity of just how many customers these games retain. The percentage of players that stick with an online game says a lot about the content, as well as their competitors.

Specifically, I'm trying to answer:

How many current subscribers are there in World of Warcraft?

My guess is about 3.5 million, which is less than half of the 8.5 million Blizzard claims as their "worldwide subscriber base".

How did I come to that number? That's roughly how many copies of The Burning Crusade they have sold (TBC Sales Press Release). There are at most a small handful of players continuing to play without the expansion pack, by all reports the old zones are like ghost towns on every server. The ongoing in-game census from Warcraft Realms seems to support this as well, at the time of this writing they list 2.3 million active lvl 61-70 characters (note: one account may have multiple characters) combined for North America, Europe and Australia.

So how does the world's most successful MMORPG bleed away half its customers, when nearly all the critics have said they have no serious competitors? Hard to say. Certainly a good deal of people just don't play one game for years on end. But also I think it indicates that Blizzard's endgame content: PvE Raiding and PvP Arenas & Battlegrounds, plus the epic gear they are baited with; are just not compelling enough.

Like most every successful MMORPG before it, World of Warcraft relies on very stretched content once players run out of quests at the max level. My guess is that many players just move on at that point.