ATVI said yesterday WoW subs were stable at 5.5M. Today in the conference call they apparently said that's the last time they'll provide a quarterly update on subs. On the one hand, I agree that as Blizzard diversifies more with Hearthstone, Overwatch, etc. the WoW subs paint a less accurate picture of that business unit, however moving moving towards less transparency is very poor imo. They did similar with CoD, when it was going well they had PR's about the huge sell-through. Then it switched to PR's about sell-in. Then nothing. You can always tell when a company sees its major franchises in decline, not just by what they say, but also by what they don't say that they used to.

"There are other metrics that are better indicators of the overall Blizzard business performance."

Instead, Activision Blizzard will use other unspecified "engagement" metrics to talk about the health of WoW. These were not detailed during the earnings call where the announcement was made on November 3.

gamespot.com/ar...31943/