Blizz stopped releasing numbers. Now they make PR statements that are intentionally misleading. Given the popularity of addons, some addon makers have a good amount of data that reaches beyond "no idea".
Wow I didn't realize they stopped publishing sub numbers so long ago. I'm not convinced that add-ons give us great insight beyond a certain level of player who tends to use specific add-ons (e.g. DBM), but yeah it's better than nothing.
Still, historically we know that bid drama does not correlate to mass drop in sub numbers. Hell, GC just posted something about that a week or two ago[1].
>Dropping a game because of a specific design change (despite what you might read on forums / Reddit) is actually pretty rare. I know it happens, but if you’re stack ranking the reasons why people quit, those specific responses end up being so far down the list that it is hard for a development team to take actionable feedback.
WoW remains massively successful as far as I'm aware.
They used to as part of their quarterly earnings reports, if I remember correctly. They stopped during the latter part of WoD when by all accounts the subscriber numbers were very low (by WoW standards).
