20 years later, World of Warcraft is still on top

GamesMMOWorld of Warcraft20 years later, World of Warcraft is still on topWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Wrath of the Lich King Classic

The internet is awash withstories of couples who met and marriedafter playing WoW, or credit WoW with keeping them alive in times of depression. A great take on this is Conan O’Brien’s interview of Robert Kazinsky, who played Fili in The Hobbit and Orgrim Doomhammer in the WoW movie. He was a Warcraft player first.

“This game suddenly became my life,” he says in the interview. “I was able to form new relationships that didn’t come with any preconceptions, and I was slowly given rewards that affected my confidence. I was able to have a little bit of self-belief again. I credit World of Warcraft with saving my life.“WoW has had more than 100 million players, who had put inalmost 9 million years of gameplay time– as of two years ago. (It’s closer to 10 now, Blizzard sources tell us.) To understand why it’s remained such a juggernaut over a mind-bending 20 years, compared with other MMOs that shuttered in a matter of months, you have to understand where it came from and where it’s headed.

Robert Kazinsky: “World Of Warcraft” Saved My Life | CONAN on TBS - YouTubeWatch On

Robert Kazinsky: “World Of Warcraft” Saved My Life | CONAN on TBS - YouTube

Robert Kazinsky:

A huge head start

(Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

WoW classic addons

Before Warcraft, the biggest MMO in the West was likely RuneScape, with about a million subscribers and more playing for free. (Old School RuneScape, or OSRS, is still a popular free-to-play retro MMO.) EverQuest was the best-known and arguably one of the more complete, with about half a million subscribers.

Before WoW, my interviews with gaming executives at the time suggested thetotalMMO market on this side of the globe was thought to measure in the low seven figures.

That was before Warcraft swept onto the scene like an army of invading orcs. From the start, the team at Blizzard focused on making gameplay easier than it ever had been in an MMO. I ran down a list in my original review of the game for the Detroit Free Press, back in 2004:

The combination of a great story, a low barrier for non-MMO players to jump in, and the addictive doling out of new stuff gave WoW an enormous boost on launch. It was a rocket ship of epic proportions that blew the lid off a 12-million-paying-player market and left its competitors in the dust. It took close to two decades for anyone else to get close.

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Multitudes of modes

An insect mount from WoW

A smart investment early on has paid huge dividends over the past 20 years. When the game first launched, it had typical PvP and PvE activities for the time: open-world PvP on designated servers, PvE questing, crafting, small dungeons, a few dungeons that allowed slightly larger raids, and full-sized raid instances of 40 players.

When the subscribers ballooned and the money started pouring in, Blizzard made the smart decision to invest in a host of new gameplay modes, a consistent trend over the years. On the PvP side, they added several flavors of arenas and battlegrounds, world free-for-alls, brawls and blitzes and solo-player shuffles. In PvE, we got varying difficulties and sizes of raids, new classes and talent loadouts, new variations of quests, dungeons with followers or solo in delves, pet battling, crafting expansions and collection enhancements.

That’s not even counting the many flavors of the game itself: modern, Classic, fresh start, hardcore, Season of Discovery, and one-off modes such as Plunderstorm and Remix. The onslaught shows no sign of stopping:recent teasessuggest a home-decor sim (AKA player housing) will be on its way in the next Midnight expansion.

The overwhelming amount of choice has kept players in Warcraft long after they might have left other games. Game executives have told me in the past that at times, no one gameplay activity commanded a majority of WoW players. Sweaty raiders who decided they didn’t have the time often didn’t leave the game, instead choosing to step down to a less difficult mode, or PvP, or just collect or fish or craft.

Many flavors of game flexibility

(Image credit: Boxxsie / Blizzard)

A World of Warcraft character flying on a firey owl mount

Warcraft has thrived on that kind of choice from the beginning. Unlike other MMOs—such as its biggest competitor, Final Fantasy 14, which puts players on rails for nearly the entire lengthy leveling process—Warcraft was always forgiving if you chose to go do PvP or explore another area rather than follow a carefully curated questline.

The original Warcraft requirement that forced players to permanently pick character talents, for example, was changed over the years to just requiring a lot of gold, to requiring a bit of gold, to requiring a rested area of the world, to requiring… well, almost nothing at all.

(Image credit: Blizzard)

Sylvanas Windrunner

Those subscriber numbers bounced back during the more-flexible Dragonflight expansion, and have continued to rise.

The expansion that most stringently applied “meaningful choices"nearly killed the game. Shadowlands admittedly had other issues, but its biggest problem was a clunky Covenants faction system that forced players to make choices and then not change them, regardless of what rewards they needed, armor they wanted to wear, spells they wanted to cast, or aesthetic they preferred.

Covenants forced some death knights to shun the gritty undead-vibing Necrolord Covenant in favor of casting spells from the pretty blue fairies of the Night Fae if they wanted to be at their most effective, for example. It was a disaster, and Warcraft subscriptionssank to nearly their lowest levels in the past 20 years, even including the boost from Warcraft Classic.Those subscriber numbers bounced back during the more-flexible Dragonflight expansion, and have continued to rise. Google Trends andplayer dungeon participation numbersboth suggest that subscribers in The War Within have approached levels not seen in years.

Things can still trip up Warcraft

(Image credit: Blizzard)

World of Warcraft The War Within screenshots

The combination of these positive factors (and 20 years of game-playing inertia) make WoW seem like an MMO juggernaut that can never be stopped. But there are plenty of things that erode its success, giving FF14 and other titles an opening:

All of that said, things look bright for the venerated MMO. Kihra, leader of the popular WoW dungeon and raid statistics-recording site Warcraft Logs,said recentlythat the site’s data suggests the game has a higher player count than it ever has in its history.

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Dragonflight got WoW back on its feet, now we get to see if Blizzard can make the Worldsoul Saga runWoW’s finally upgrading its dreaded swirlies so players can actually tell where it’s safe to stand

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Dragonflight got WoW back on its feet, now we get to see if Blizzard can make the Worldsoul Saga run

World of Warcraft

WoW’s finally upgrading its dreaded swirlies so players can actually tell where it’s safe to stand

LatestCruel is a frantic run-and-gun shooter where you boot cultists out of windows in a cursed apartment block that wants you deadSee more latest►

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Cruel is a frantic run-and-gun shooter where you boot cultists out of windows in a cursed apartment block that wants you dead

Cruel

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A huge head start#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Multitudes of modes#

Many flavors of game flexibility#

Things can still trip up Warcraft#

A huge head start

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals

Multitudes of modes

Many flavors of game flexibility

Things can still trip up Warcraft