Is there any information for this that is actually publicly available? As far as I can tell no company is obliged to tell you their numbers, which means numbers released in press release are good for upper bounds but you'd have no idea what the lower bound is. If WoW only has 1 million subs left I see no reason why they'd ever want you to know this.
It seems to me even sites that are cited as reliable resources does nothing more than just take the amount of hours people are putting into each game and then extrapolate that to total. While it's better than nothing it's not really much better than 'my roommate's cousin who works at Blizzard told me about it.' You'd think publicly trading company should have to report their numbers since as a shareholder it can definitely matter a lot on your decision to invest in Activision/Blizzard if you know that WoW lost half of its population, but I just never heard of such information being available. I guess it doesn't really affect your enjoyment of the game, but it's pretty strange to talk about competing games without having any clue how many people are also playing.
It seems to me even sites that are cited as reliable resources does nothing more than just take the amount of hours people are putting into each game and then extrapolate that to total. While it's better than nothing it's not really much better than 'my roommate's cousin who works at Blizzard told me about it.' You'd think publicly trading company should have to report their numbers since as a shareholder it can definitely matter a lot on your decision to invest in Activision/Blizzard if you know that WoW lost half of its population, but I just never heard of such information being available. I guess it doesn't really affect your enjoyment of the game, but it's pretty strange to talk about competing games without having any clue how many people are also playing.
