Essays 08 May 2023, 11:06

What's the Most Popular Game? List of Most-played Video Games

Call of Duty, Minecraft, or Red Dead Redemption 2? The most popular games in the world are much less obvious than it might seem to regular players.

WoW

Scale of popularity:

5.5 million active subscriptions in September 2015;
according to unofficial data, the current monthly number of players ranges from 7.5 to 9.5 million; the highest daily average number of players in recent times was 853,000 (source).

Creating a uniquely popular free-to-play game is one thing. Selling tens of millions of copies of a paid production is also quite an achievement. But making millions of people pay monthly subscription fees for playing one particular game, year after year after year? Now that's the dream of every big publisher. And these dreams were exacerbated with the release of World of Warcraft – the MMORPG set in the world of Warcraft, which debuted in 2004, slammed all competitors into the ground, and caused a real boom for online gaming.

In 2008, the number of subscribers paying monthly subscription in World of Warcraft was 10 million, leaving all competition miles behind. At the same time, many MMO subscription-based games tried to jump on the bandwagon, but no one even came close to dethroning the kind, and they almost invariably ended up dead or switching to free-to-play. In 2012, another record – 12 million subscribers – was broken.

Over time, the star of World of Warcraft started to become dimmer. Changes in market trends, saturation, the ideas for DLCs that weren't always brilliant – this is only part of the reasons for which the game eventually started losing players. At the end of 2014, the number of subscribers decreased to 10 million, a year later, the subscription was regularly paid by "only" 5.5 million people. This was the last time Blizzard has officially shown these results. In October 2018, thanks to a developer error, we might have seen more up-to-date results – 1.7 million – but it is not known how reliable this leak was.

Just when it seemed that the king's end was slowly approaching, the old man showed the young who were trying to throw him off the throne that he still had a lot of strength left in him. Released in November 2020, the Shadowlands add-on brought the gaming crowd back to World of Warcraft. On its debut day, the expansion was bought by 3.7 million players, making it the best-selling PC exclusive game ever. The expansion also resulted in the most players logging into the game simultaneously in a decade. So as you can see, any rumors of WoW 's death remain greatly exaggerated. WoW Dragonflight has finally been officially announced.

DOUBT

Even if WoW is still being played by a few million people on a regular basis, it is not a result that can match the achievements of PUBG or LoL. That's why we wondered if we should definitely include the game in this list. Ultimately, however, this is a rare, subscription-based game, and also one of the greatest phenomenons of the industry.

Learn more about World of Warcraft

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WoW