Looking at Dragonflight as a whole, the expansion has given World of Warcraft a new lease on life, making fans fall in love with the game once again thanks to Dragonriding, new talents, and lack of time-gated content. Although players had nothing but words of praise for Blizzard Entertainment lately, fans have still been curious about the player counts since the release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic on September 26, 2022, and Dragonflight on November 28, 2022.
On Feb. 7, Blizzard Entertainment shared its quarterly reports. According to fourth-quarter financial reports from 2022, the company has managed to increase monthly active users by 14 million. In other words, the number of users increased from 31 million in the third quarter of 2022 to 42 million active monthly users.
When looking at the Dragonflight sales numbers, the new dragon-themed expansion didn’t reach the same number of sold copies as Shadowlands did back in 2020. On the flip side, Dragonflight has far better subscriber retention numbers than Shadowlands, meaning more players have continued to play the game after the dust settled on the major release.
Seeing the invested time and effort have started paying off, the company promised to continue working on follow-up content to keep the community immersed in the experience that is Dragonflight. “Blizzard has announced plans to deliver substantially more follow-on content for the expansion than in the past, and post-launch subscriber retention in the West is higher than recent expansions,” the report said.
It’s worth noting that Shadowlands is one of the most-sold games of all time with 3.7 million copies sold worldwide on the first day. But, the game was released during the Covid-19 lockdowns, when gamers had more free time to kill. So, it’s not surprising Dragonflight sales numbers haven’t reached the heights of Shadowlands.
