World of Warcraft claws back 1m subscribers

Fantasy MMORPG World of Warcraft has surpassed ten million subscribers.

The news of the rise in subscriptions for the title, which had fallen to 9.1 million in the last year, is partly thanks to the recently released expansion Mists of Pandaria, which sold approximately 2.7 million copies in its first week.

In October 2010, World of Warcraft boasted 12 million users, but over the past two years had fallen by three million, although losses gradually slowed over the last 12 months.

In November last year, the loss of 800,000 subscribers in the space of a month caused Activision Blizzard shares to fall by almost seven per cent, so investors will likely be buoyed that the MMO has been able to claw back a number of subscribers and stop the decline.

Other subscription-based MMOs have not fared as well in the last year however, with The Secret World garnering just 200,000 sales, forcing developer Funcom into laying off 50 per cent of its staff.

EA and BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic meanwhile has also struggled to gain traction amongst consumers, with the title switching to a free-to-play model in August after a number of layoffs and attracting just 1.3 million subscribers.