The release of World of Warcraft‘s fifth expansion, Warlords of Draenor, has had players return to Blizzard’s seminal MMO in their droves, after the company revealed that the game’s subscriber count has eased past 10 million strong for the first time in three years.
As a matter of fact, the company sold through a staggering 3.3 million copies of Warlords of Draenor in just 24 hours — a statistic that hasn’t been met since the launch of Cataclysm back in 2010.
In response to these promising numbers, CEO and co-founder of Blizzard, Mike Morhaime, released the following message of thanks.
“We’re thrilled that so many players jumped in to play Warlords of Draenor on day one and are having a great time with the new content. We poured a lot of hard work and passion into this expansion, and we appreciate all the kind words from players and the overwhelming support they continue to show for World of Warcraft.”
By and large, it appears as though the launch day issues that affected Warlords of Draenor‘s debut didn’t impact the overall reception of the expansion. Last Friday, WoW servers were the subject of a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack that led to egregious load times and server problems. To appease those affected by the outage, Blizzard is offering subscribers five days of free game time.
World of Warcraft is fast approaching its tenth-year anniversary (it launched in North America on November 23rd, 2004). To commemorate the occasion, Blizzard has launched a special documentary of the MMO, charting its meteoric rise to the top of the genre. Whether the subscriber count remains north of 10 million once the novelty factor of Warlords of Draenor wears off, however, is another matter entirely.