WoW Forever: biggest launch in WoW history, says Blizzard

Blizzard says WoW Forever is the biggest launch in the history of World of Warcraft. In a post on X on 7 November, the official Warcraft account said the game set a record for peak concurrent players and also drew the highest number of returning players the game has ever seen.

Executive producer Holly Longdale added another claim about a minute later. She wrote that Blizzard is seeing the most new players for a WoW launch in 15 years, so the record is not only about old players coming back.

Neither post gives a number. Blizzard has not said how many people played at the peak, how many returned or how many are new. The closest thing so far is an add-on census of about 1.17 million players in Europe, which is an unofficial estimate and not a Blizzard figure.

The claims arrive 2 days after the game opened, following a launch that topped Twitch with over 1 million viewers. Blizzard is still working through launch problems in the meantime, including a layer change that briefly cloned NPCs and mobs.