Diablo 3 #1 PC Game, Hearthstone’s Best Week Ever, and WoW Loses Subscribers

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

The quarterly Activision-Blizzard Conference Call was today and while these are really nothing more than showing off financials for the company to investors, it does have some interesting points to see how Blizzard’s games are doing. It’s also that time of the year where people will claim that WoW is dying since subscriber numbers are released.

Basic highlights of the call include:

• Diablo 3 remains the #1 PC game in dollars in North America and Europe. It has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide since 2012.
• World of Warcraft is down to 6.8 million subscribers. That’s down from 7.7 million subscribers announced in June. This seems to happen during the end of expansion lull just like what happened with Cataclysm.
• Warlords of Draenor has over 1.5 million pre-orders already.
• Curse of Naxxramas, the adventure mode for Hearthstone, has produced the “biggest week ever in terms of engagement and revenue” according to Mike Morhaime. He also said that battle.net is up 40 percent year-on-year in terms of monthly active users.

So, while WoW subscribers are down, the pre-order numbers are pretty promising. It’s also not like Blizzard is hurting anytime soon as Hearthstone has proven to be a huge success and Diablo 3 is selling extremely well with the console releases coming later this month.

Looking back, 2014 has been a pretty amazing year for Blizzard – they have released Hearthstone, a Diablo 3 expansion, a Hearthstone adventure mode expansion, and a Heroes of the Storm alpha in the first half of the year. Still to come is Diablo 3 expansion for the consoles included the next (now current?) gen and the World of Warcraft expansion.

Now just imagine what we’re going to see at BlizzCon (new game called Overwatch anyone?)