WarcraftRealms.com

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/09/m ... -pandaria/
and Gamasutra shows gloom and doom with http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1753 ... GM4vFHKl6Y
Yes WoW has dropped nearly 25% from its peak of 12 million players world wide.
Oh woe the horror of it all..
On the other hand according to MMOdata.net... http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png World of Warcraft (before the XPac came out) had only four times more paying players then the next largest game (for MMORPG's) which is Axion.

It will be interesting to see what bounce WoW gets with Mists of Pandaria and how long that bounce lasts.


What is really interesting is that no one is ready to even whisper Titan, Rob Pardo of Blizzard did let out that they have moved from development to "full production mode" with over 100 people now working on Titan. I've seen a reasonable argument for release sometime around 2015. That is important as I expect WoW won't see a real major drop off in players until Titan goes online.

Even "Titan" may not have much impact as it is supposedly a different sort of game. Diablo 3 had a very limited impact on WoW... and same can be said of many, many other games... sure, some people switched to others... but there are still huge numbers of people playing WoW.

As for the bounce, it started before 25.9. already. Even though I am currently not able to upload more due to site's status, I am already almost at last month's figure updatewise and actually above the new ones of August... and that with having already suffered the loss of two computers... *sigh* More on that in it's own thread.