WoW Dragonfight player stats prove it’s been a massive success for Blizzard

Player retention rates show more players are invested in WoW Dragonflight than in any of the game’s other modern expansions.

World of Warcraft Dragonflight went live in November 2022 as the MMORPG’s ninth expansion. It added a host of new content offerings, including a deluge of fresh story content, another explorable continent, and a new race/class – the Dracthyr Evoker.

As with past expansions, Blizzard continues to update Dragonflight with improvements and the like. In fact, the next major update – 10.1.7: Fury Incarnate – will introduce noteworthy features such as Dreamsurge.

And it seems the expansion has been nothing short of a boon for Activision Blizzard, based on new information.

Dragonflight is WoW’s most popular expansion in years

Activision Blizzard‘s financial results for Q2 2023 indicate that Dragonflight has worked wonders for World of Warcraft. So far, Dragonflight is enjoying the highest retention rate of any other WoW expansion in recent memory.

The company noted as much when mentioning that “subscriber retention in the West remains higher than at the equivalent stage of recent Modern expansions.” It probably helps that WoW’s development team is “delivering more content faster than ever before.”

Blizzard Entertainment

This is a far cry from the state of things in 2021 and much of 2022. While reporting on Q4 2021 data in February 2022, Activision noted that Blizzard had shed five million users despite the 2020 and 2021 releases of WoW Shadowlands, Diablo 2 Resurrected, and WoW Burning Crusade Classic.

And though WoW Dragonflight’s number of players is impressing Activision Blizzard now, many may recall a time when Final Fantasy XIV was attracting the Warcraft community in record numbers.

Dragonflight’s early success suggests the latest expansion helped turn the tide in Blizzard’s favor.