World of Warcraft loses 1.3m players
The popular MMO has dropped 14 per cent of its subscribers in three months, but still boasts 8.3 million players.
In its earnings report for Q1 2013 (PDF), Activision Blizzard has admitted that World of Warcraft (WoW) has seen a downturn in subscribers over the past quarter, with 1.3 million users leaving the game.
To put this into some perspective, the new total of 8.3 million players still makes WoW the number one massively multiplayer online (MMO) game in the world.
CEO Bobby Kotick noted that its players are "mainly from the East, but in the West, as well".
The drop has led Activision to revise its broad financial forecasts for the year, despite posting a Q1 result that was better than expected:
While we have had a solid start to the year, we now believe that the risks and uncertainties in the back half of 2013 are more challenging than our earlier view, especially in the holiday quarter.
In addition to the subscriber loss, Kotick called out both "the disappointing launch of the Wii U [and] uncertainties regarding next-generation hardware" as contributing to the financial results.