Although today there are games like League of Legends with close to a hundred million active players and smartphone franchises like Angry Birds that have attracted over a billion downloads, one game previously dominated the 'subscriber numbers' announcements and that was World of Warcraft.
At its peak it had over 13 million paying customers, which considering the above mentioned titles are often free to play, is an amazing achievement. Especially since those players kept paying every single month, practically bankrolling anything Blizzard could want to do without issue.
Today of course the numbers are much lower than they once were. 5.5 million at the last count. Perhaps because of that continued downturn - and perhaps the fact that the news of dwindling numbers can create a snowball effect - Blizzard has announced that it will no longer be revealing subscriber numbers to the public.
"There are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance," it said in a statement (via VG247).
Although this might sound like it looking to dodge announcing more drops in subscribers, even WoW has finally begun to drop that age old model of paying for MMO access. Many gamers now utilise free to play options with micro-transactions in order to stomp around Azeroth, which makes subscriber numbers ever more redundant.
Do you still play WoW? If so, how do you pay for it?