Still Running — and How You Can Tell
A gold-denominated market instrument replaced the one number the company used to report, and it has been running for a decade.
7.1millionsubscribers, the last figure reported — Activision Blizzard Q1 2015 earnings call, May 2015
Read the pieceThe only public signal left on some of these games is a price or a count that moves; reading it means reading a screen like this one.
Photo: AlphaTradeZone / Pexels
Reporting on the massively multiplayer online market: what is running, what it costs and who it pays.
Player counts, concurrent-player charts, subscription silences and registered-account milestones for the games that are actually live right now.
8 piecesRevenue filings, analyst market-sizing, and the business-model shift from subscriptions to battle passes, cosmetic stores and mobile.
7 piecesLive-service games running MMO systems without the label — and what that says about what the word now means.
5 piecesNamed rulings, dated legislation and ongoing regulatory fights that have reshaped how live-service games operate commercially.
5 piecesThe incidents and decisions from MUD1 to A Realm Reborn that made the genre what it is — and what the documented record actually shows.
5 pieces
Three companies, three currencies, one pattern: a launch-quarter peak followed by decay.
Photo: Krafton Full Logo · Wikimedia Commons
Where the Money Moved
Mobile MMO revenue in Korea dwarfs Western subscription income — the public filings make the gap impossible to miss.
Read the pieceNCSoft operating profit 2023: approximately one-fifth of the 2020 level.
NCSoft company disclosures
Who publishes the numbers
Where the money moved →
The shelf — every figure attributed and dated
Four numbers the market actually publishes
World of Warcraft subscribers — the last figure Activision Blizzard reported before it stopped publishing the count.
Activision Blizzard Q1 2015 earnings call, May 2015 · the piece
Final Fantasy XIV registered accounts, lifetime rather than active — the metric Square Enix publishes instead of subscribers.
Square Enix announcement, May 2023 · the piece
Roblox daily active users for the full year, more than every western MMO combined.
Roblox Corporation full-year 2024 SEC filing · the piece
Cumulative Lineage M revenue, from a game with no western release at all.
NCSoft 2022 annual report · the piece
Also worth an hour
All 30 pieces →
Tracks Final Fantasy XIV's registered-account milestones using Square Enix's own dated announcements, set against the subscription model's broader retreat across the genre.
Compares Old School RuneScape and RuneScape 3 on concurrent-player figures and subscriber counts using Jagex's published data and Steam charts, tracing how a community-vote preservation project came to outperform the current version.
Uses Roblox Corporation's public SEC filings and DAU disclosures to set the platform's scale against the MMO genre's player counts, examining why a platform that is structurally an MMO host is rarely discussed as part of the genre.
Explains SteamDB and Steam's own charts as a public dataset — how the figures are collected, what CCU actually measures, and where the methodology breaks down for MMOs that run their own launchers or split across regions.
Rules, and how it got here
Two sections carry the documents: named rulings with the law they were decided under, and the decisions between 1978 and 2004 that set the template everything since has followed.
