Wow currently counts active subs as active accounts that are on game cards, and free accounts in some parts of Asia where WOW is free to play with only the current Xpac being behind a pay wall.
Yeah I've got about 5 years of tokens worth of gold if the price stays relatively stable. The thing is, it's not us that count as subbed, it's the people BUYING the tokens with cash. And since there are more tokens being bought than used (i.e. unused tokens are available on the AH at the moment), this helps pad their sub numbers a bit. How much is hard to say; I don't think there's any way to track how many tokens are on the market, just what the current price is.
Final Fantasy XIV reported 5 million accounts earlier this year and there are certainly more players now than ever before. It's subscriber numbers are growing at quite a pace.
5 million registered accounts really doesn't mean much of anything. WoW has what over 100 million registered accounts? Also the wow token isn't included in the sub numbers.
No one is saying WOW is going away, don't worry. It has to get to the point where they are bleeding so badly there other products can no longer support it.
They might do that eventually but it is certainly further away than "last leg." They still make a killing on their subs not to mention the massive box sales when every new xpack hits. Legion definitely needs to breath new life in the game but even more of the same will result in large revenue. WoW doesn't need the other products to survive for a long time to come.
Given the lack of fluidity in the token market, I'm guessing something like 75-100k people tops. And probably half of them would stay subscribed even without tokens.
It's not going to go F2P until
It is. Sub numbers is anyone who can play "right now" in non-trial mode, regardless of what was used to pay (box purchase, game card, token, recurring sub, cancelled but still running sub). It's a bit more complicated with asia and their pay-by-hour schemes, but there's still a bit over 2 million EU/NA subs.
Lich king was a combination of probably the best expansion wow has had at a time when it was fresh and still in its strong growth stage. Still I don't see their current numbers as doom or gloom they are still raking in a ton of cash and they used the profits from wow to spin up other properties that are making very solid amounts of money that more than make up for any decline in a declining MMO. Wow is not going anywhere for a long time it may not be the 10 ton gorilla it used to be but it still will be in the top 3 most played MMO for the next few years at least and thats a hell of a lot of reoccurring revenue.
Maybe the next Candy Crush expansion, with a corruption storyline involving the cherries
