How popular is this game?

[Alahra]

It's difficult to know how many subscribers are paying for the game. A couple months ago, someone did a Lodestone census (compiling data from it) that suggested around 700k people were actively playing (but there may be more subscriptions current than that). In a vacuum, that number's not very useful, of course. WoW stopped providing subscription numbers as of this year, and we don't know how many of those subscriptions were active players even back when they provided them.

We can guess that the game's successful, at least, as it's the only subscription-based game in recent memory that hasn't moved to a free-to-play model that I can think of, and it's been out for 2.5 years now.

The "5 million" accounts number includes existing accounts that aren't actively paying for the game, I'm pretty sure. My guess would be that, at most, the game has between 750,000 and 1 million subscribers right now, which is fairly impressive for a subscription game in the era of free to play stuff.

[Remus]

snip

Yet from that amount of active players only 150k-200k did 3.1 story lol. I am sure it will go up when 3.2 comes out because the expert dungeon is apart of the MSQ.

[Alahra]

Yet from that amount of active players only 150k-200k did 3.1 story lol. I am sure it will go up when 3.2 comes out because the expert dungeon is apart of the MSQ.

You might be surprised at the number of players that actually don't care at all about the story. I know a number of folks that skip each and every cutscene (and they make me sad ). I suspect the 3.1 story completion is lower than normal because it didn't have any content attached to it (which is something Yoshi-P stated was done in response to player feedback).