World of Warcraft stunned the international gaming community recently when they released their subscriber numbers early on in 2015. The game, which was released in 2004, had been on the decline ever since it peaked with its third expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King. Even with the slow decline, this would have made it a gigantic success in the history of video games as being one of the most long standing single video games in the history of the industry. The slow decline was seen as a standard part of the MMORPG process, which had originally been thought of as a model that will eventually die as people move on to games that have been modeled in a system that's more up to date. WoW was released way back in 2004, but development began shortly after the series' last RTS installment, Warcraft 3, making the core system a very, very old one for people to still be playing on.

This line of thinking was shot entirely out of the water as just a fiscal quarter after the release of their 10 year anniversary expansion, The Warlords of Draenor, subscriber numbers have shown to be almost what they were back in The Wrath of the Lich King era, up in the 10,000,000 active subscriber range, and it's anticipated that as more people realize just how much of a renaissance this game is currently going through with TWOD, that subscribed number can possibly even surpass where they were during Wrath.

This is a monumental accomplishment for any game, but even doubly so for a game in the MMO genre, and triply so for a game that is simply as old as WoW currently is. Without any doubt, this is one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the video game industry and one that has many, many players taking a fresh look at the Warcraft IP and wondering just how long this game is really going to be sticking around.

Gold Market Situation
The subscriber number news that's been released has been affecting many online communities as waves of past players flock back into Azeroth. One of the areas that has been particularly affected has been the real money trading sector. Many of these businesses had been attempting to move out to 'greener' pastures, so to speak, as they knew that MMORPGs decline due to the nature of the genre and wanted to be ready for the next big thing. What many of them are seeing is that the next big thing after World of Warcraft is still more Warcraft, which has been causing many older real money traders to flock back into the world and digging out those older accounts with old gold. A lot of new real money businesses have been coming in as well, which means pricing is getting more and more optimal as time moves on.

As titanic as the series is, it still has the ability to surprise people. No one foresaw back in 2004 just how huge the game is going to be, and we might be saying the same thing for the WoW renaissance period were currently living in ten years down the road when we're still playing Warcraft in 2025.