Was doing some digging because I was bored and occasionally stumble back on wow classic for the pvp. The largest populated sever in all of modern wow is Area 52 which has 18k, 2nd is stormrage with 14k, third is Illidan with just under 14k population and 4th is Jubei’Thos with just over 10k per wowprogress.com, those are the only servers with over 10k active users currently there’s 3 servers with 9k, 1 with 8.8k, 2 with 7.6k. So on the top ten servers in modern there’s just under 109k active players, we can safely assume about 200k overall and being extremely generous maybe 250k.
In comparison per ironforge.pro numbers from 4/9/25 to 4/15/25, Classic SoD had 70k active users for what is basically wow vanilla plus. The 4 main servers have 24.5k, 22k, 12.5k and 10k population, again we see 4 servers with over 10k population. But that’s not all folks! WoW anniversary had 96k active users with the 4 main servers at 30k, 27.6k, 17k, and 16k, again 4 over 10k. And last but not least we have WoW classic cata which (at its lowest point currently) still has 111.7k active users. None of the servers in cata classic are over 10k however. What’s interesting is between the wow classic series there’s ~277.7k active users. Even with cross play overlap there still more activity on wow classic than current. This is even aside from Cata classic being in a lull until MoP releases in August.
There are some that are saying the total player count is around 7 million, that would be depressing if true. I assume the actual players are around 2 millions that have accounts in all versions but it does mean that Blizzard is doing extremely well financially.
Even those numbers won't be entirely accurate as there will be various private servers of varying size. Might not be much but it's still going to be something.
That’s conjecture from a paid wow vtuber using supposed numbers “leaked” to him from blizzard. It would require over 95% of all subscribers to be inactive over the course of a year. 2 million is even a stretch, if there wasn’t any crossover between wow modern and the classics it’s still under 600k active users in the past month.
One more thing to make me think that 7 milion number is fake is that when I search for the next expansion I get the first entry a video about: "Midnight Will Be The BIGGEST Expansion Ever! Old WoW Is BACK!"
You can't have Old WoW be considered good without saying current one is crap.
That sounds exactly like a Taliesin and Evitel video...the biggest Blizzard shills around. The WoW streamer/youtuber views across channels have absolutely dropped through the floorboards.
I've seen Reddit cheering about this but yea I have doubts. My WoW addict friend hasn't mentioned WoW and another who sometimes played mentioned just PvP. I think Blizzard overestimates how off-putting gay stuff is even to those that are on the left. Is one thing to virtue signal and an entire different thing to have it in the medium you consume.
One thing, I believe Ironforge.pro only takes into account raid logged individuals. If people raid without using logs or only PvP, they aren't accounted for.