It may not seem like an immediately fascinating news story to say that an MMOs subscriber numbers have stayed the same, as mentioned in Nathan’s post earlier, but I think there’s an interesting point to be made when noting that World Of Warcraft is back over 10m. While the game has previously peaked at over 12m paying subscribers, a lot of fuss and soothsaying took place over the past year, declaring the MMO’s demise as inevitable. Subs numbers dropped to 9.1m, and much of the media declared, or at least speculated, that this was it. Rather than noticing that it was just a long time since there’d been a new expansion, so as you’d expect some players would have felt they’d seen all the current content so looked elsewhere for their gaming crack. In fact, the media has been gleefully predicting the doom of WoW for years. So why isn’t anyone reporting the real story here? Why isn’t anyone spotting that this is a phenomenon?

(more…)