It's no secret that Blizzard game players have been dropping like flies in light of the recent discoveries about its workplace culture, but now fans know that this steady decline of a player base is really nothing new. As it happens, the company has lost almost half of its monthly active users in the last four years, and the current situation is only serving to speed up this process. These numbers are shocking, but it does reveal an underlying dissatisfaction with Blizzard games that fans have been feeling over the past four years and even beyond that.
Looking at the chart below, it becomes clear that Blizzard's monthly active users have been trending downward very heavily. Even at points when major Blizzard games release, the monthly active user count doesn't manage to tick up that high. What makes this even more shocking is the decline during the height of the pandemic, a time when most video game companies flourished as players were forced to stay home.
The peak on this chart is in 2017 Q2, during which Blizzard had a grand total of 46 million monthly active users. This number has since dropped to 26 million monthly active users as of 2021 Q2, and this will likely continue to worsen as players boycott Blizzard in favor of other developers and games. Even in the midst of major releases like World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, the monthly active users continues to drop.
In 4 years, Blizzard has lost almost half of its monthly active users (46m to 26m MAUs) reveals Activision Blizzard's latest Earning Call (Q2 2021). from wow
It should be said that this is monthly active users across all Blizzard games, not just World of Warcraft. Some fans think the sharp dives are because of a lack of support for games like Overwatch. Others attribute it to more recent failures like the disaster that was Warcraft 3: Reforged. While it's impossible to know the true reason just by looking at the chart, the numbers do certainly speak for themselves. Blizzard is going to need to step up its game if it wants to maintain its position as a major developer, both in terms of content and workplace culture.
Only time will tell what happens from here. On the one hand, it's possible that Blizzard will find a way to turn all of this around, creating a better workplace for its employees and providing quality games with good post-launch support, but it's also possible that this will continue until the developer fades into obscurity. More likely than not it will be something in between those two extremes.