According to VG247 World of Warcraft's subscription based has been hovering at 11.5 Million and has stopped it's growth. The article states:

Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime just said that World of Warcraft’s subs base is static at 11.5 million users, at the same level it’s been since late 2008. Yep: that means it’s not going up.

The article goes on to discuss the future of WoW subscription base, so go take a look. As an affidavit WoW player myself, I see Cataclysm driving subscriptions some, but not as much as Blizzard would probably want. I think the issue with WoW is that after 5 years it's starting to lose ground to other MMOs. According to some reports , China makes up over 50% of WoW's subscription base. This was discovered in the recent issues that Blizzard had with the country of China.

Emphasizing the question mark up there, people. Several rumors hint that Blizzard's incredibly popular online game World of Warcraft might be in trouble. Unsubstantiated reports from an unknown blog claim WoW's subscriber base is down to 5 million (from almost 12 million), with Blizzard keeping this a closely guarded secret. Mind you, this is strongly designated as a rumor, without an official confirmation to back it up at this time.

Source

If Blizzard pulls out all the stops in Cataclysm, like they have with other expansions then they'll continue over the next few years, in this writer's opinion. Otherwise, they may lost a large portion of their subscriptions to some of the newer upcoming MMO's; like SW:TOR.


What are your thoughts?