World of Warcraft adds 200,000 subscribers after months of losses

The bleeding has stopped.

World of Warcraft is no longer losing monthly subscribers. The king of subscription-based online games is now holding steady at 7.8 million monthly paying members. That’s up 200,000 from the 7.6 subscribers the game boasted in November.

Blizzard’s beloved massively multiplayer online role-playing game is one of the few major subscription-based games that has millions of subscribers. Even while it is on a downward trend, the game is still one of the most successful titles on the market in terms of revenue thanks to its remaining subscribers.

In late 2010, World of Warcraft’s paying members peaked at 12 million. Since then, it has seen a steady decline.

Due to that decline, World of Warcraft’s is seeing diminished earnings for Activision’s bottom line. The publisher’s revenues through PC subscriptions, which World of Warcraft is a big chunk of, were down from $1.071 billion in 2012 to $805 million in 2013. That’s a 25 percent decrease year-over year.

Blizzard was working on an MMO successor to World of Warcraft tentatively called Titan. In May, GamesBeat reported that the company had decided to can the work it had put into the project so far and restart from scratch. The project is now not due to surface until 2016.

In the meantime, Blizzard is exploring the free-to-play sector with games like its recently launched collectible-card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and the upcoming multiplayer online battler Heroes of the Storm.