World of Warcraft will celebrate its 20th anniversary on November 23 this year, two decades in which it has established itself as the world's biggest and most pre-eminent MMO. WoW's refinement, scale, and endlessly absorbing mix of adventure and brilliant group mechanics has over its lifetime attracted well over 100 million sign-ups, a number that itself was revealed by Blizzard an entire decade ago in 2014. And here we run into one of the perennial frustrations with WoW: we know when it's doing well, because Blizzard tends to have a little brag about it, but we very rarely know just how well.
That's at times made it easy for people to claim that WoW is on the way out, dead game etcetera, and such chatter is often conflated with the reception to the most recent expansion, or some other expression of player discontent. In fact you could say "dead game" has become something of a meme for WoW, so often has the phrase been invoked, but the reality is that over my career I've seen WoW-killer after WoW-killer appear then disappear while the OG soldiers on.
