Blizzard recently announced that they lost 2.1 million subscribers in the first quarter of 2012, and in true MMO fan fashion, hundreds of websites are posting that the game is doomed. World of Warcraft launched in 2004, and at one point, boasted a massive player base of over 12 million subscribers.

As with all MMO trends, it died down a little bit to a less impressive, but still huge in the MMO market, 9 million subscribers. Now with every negative announcement regarding World of Warcraft, WoW haters and naysayers join forces to spam the internet with doom and gloom posts. So let’s take a look at the last 3 months, and see how WoW could have possibly lost 2 million subscribers.

Well, firstly there was the beginning of the Guild Wars 2 beta weekends, a highly anticipated MMO that already has an impressive amount of pre-orders. Then in May, another highly anticipated MMO released, TERA Online followed by the recent release of The Secret World. All 3 of these MMO games had huge followings even before release, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that some of the subscribers that left WoW done so to play the newer titles.

Mists of Pandaria is on it’s way and WoW is sure to explode in popularity again. I’m not a fan of World of Warcraft, but I’m not one to scream doom and gloom just because the rest of the internet is doing so. World of Warcraft still dominates the MMO subscription market and will continue to do so for a while to come.