Looks like people are returning to World of Warcraft: Legion en masse. According to an interview that Polish gaming magazine Pixel (via Reddit) had with game director Tom Chilton, World of Warcraft‘s subscriber numbers spiked to a massive 10 million in the wake of the launch of World of Warcraft: Legion. Given that Legion is widely being considered as one of the best expansions for World of Warcraft, and certainly the best in a very long time, that is not surprising at all.
“Currently, [the subscriber numbers are] around 10.1 million,” Chilton said (translation by NeoGAF). “You know, it’s difficult to say what the future will bring. We have an internal competitor – Overwatch but it’s possible it’ll get even higher than 12 million.”
His confidence may not be unfounded- the incredible player reception to Legion probably ensures that players will stick around, unlike what happened with Warlords of Draenor, the previous expansion which saw a similar spike after its release, followed shortly by a catastrophic decline. The decline was one of the reasons that Blizzard stopped announcing World of Warcraft numbers– a policy that they are sticking to even in the wake of Legion‘s apparent success, because they have refuted these numbers in a new report.
“This was a misquote, or some kind of misunderstanding on the part of the journalist,” Blizzard told PCGamer. “Our policy for almost a year now is that we do not talk about subscriber numbers, and Tom did not do that with this publication.”
World of Warcraft: Legion is available now on PC.