Blizzard Plans to Merge WoW Servers as Player Counts Dwindle

It’s hardly any secret that while World of Warcraft is still one of the most remarkably popular games around, player counts have been taking a pretty significant hit over the last 5-6 years. Even with the resurgence seen in subscribers with the launch of WoW Classic, current estimates suggest the number of subscribers is currently around the 6.8 million mark. Undoubtedly still substantial, but already down, incidentally, by 800,000 since March.

Based on its circa 12-14 million user heydays, however, Blizzard clearly needed a lot of servers (realms) to cope with the number of gamers present. In a report via Eurogamer, however, it seems that some merging might be on the horizon for those who may be starting to notice the space!

Blizzard to Merge Low-Population WoW Realms!

In the report, Blizzard has confirmed that is has started looking into merging pretty much all of its low-population WoW servers. While they cite that this is to promote more interactions between players, the truth is, this is more of an efficiency drive with Blizzard being able to either shut down or reallocate that servers traffic.

“World of Warcraft is best when you have a community of other players around you, and while numerous ways to participate in cross-realm play have been added to the game over the years, there are still many aspects of the experience that are realm-based. From your history with your guild to your interactions with the economy around you, a realm with a healthy population provides more opportunities, and it’s been several years since we last connected some realms.

[We will perform a] comprehensive study of realm populations for every realm in the world [and will] connect the low-population realms to other existing realms until we’ve connected every low-population realm in every region to a substantially larger population of players”.

What Do We Think?

In fairness, it is an entirely logical move as World of Warcraft does lurch ever closer towards its (surely) eventual retirement. That being said though, while 6.8 million is still clearly no where near the peak player count it once saw, it’s still a pretty substantial amount of people paying £9.99 a month! Albeit, I bet most of those are probably playing WoW Classic rather than the latest expansion.

If you are on a low-population realm, however, then expect to get a notification from Blizzard in the (probably very) near future that you’re set to move house. Like it or not!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!