WoW Forever Set Records Before It Even Launched. Microsoft Says Its Beta Was the Biggest in Warcraft History, With the Full Game Arriving November 4.

What Happened

Microsoft told investors that WoW Forever ran the largest beta in Warcraft history, a week before it launches on November 4.

The earnings call

• Nadella's claim. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, which owns Blizzard, the studio behind the online world known as WoW, said on the October 28 earnings call that WoW had the largest beta in the franchise's history.
• Which beta. It was the beta for WoW Forever, Blizzard's new permanent version of original Azeroth, built alongside the live game. It ran September 17 to October 23.
• Sharma's post. Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox, Microsoft's games business, posted the same evening: "Minecraft and WoW Forever set records."
• Xbox still shrank. Her post put Xbox revenue down 2% year over year, after a 10% drop the quarter before.
• The dollars. MMOHuts, an MMO news site, reports $5.379 billion in Xbox revenue for the quarter ending September 30, against $5.508 billion a year earlier.

The beta

• A developer's view. Josh Greenfield, a developer on WoW Classic, Blizzard's re-release of the 2004 game, posted on September 18 that the beta drew the biggest numbers of his career there.
• One million characters. ClassicPlus.io, an unofficial character tracker, counted over one million characters created in the beta. Blizzard has not published its own figure.
• No player count. Microsoft has published no player count, so "records" and "largest beta" are executive claims made to investors, not audited numbers.

The launch

• Launch time. WoW Forever launches globally on November 4 at 3:00 p.m. PST.
• Names first. Early name reservations run October 27 to November 3 for pre-purchase pack buyers, on a realm ruleset Blizzard reversed itself on within a week.
• The level cap. Players level to 60 on the original continents.
• The trailer's last line. The New Horizons cinematic trailer closes at 3:21 on "Azeroth beckons us back. To home. To adventure. Forever."

The beta numbers land in a busy month for the game. Blizzard added zones Classic never had and started punishing gold routed through a third player to pay for raid carries.

What This Means for the Riot MMO

A record beta for a rebuilt 2004 world shows how much appetite there is, and how high the bar sits for Riot's MMO.

• Demand on record. Microsoft put WoW Forever in front of investors as a growth story, in a quarter when Xbox revenue still fell.
• Riot's own test. Riot co-founder Marc Merrill said in March 2024 that the MMO's first vision "just wasn't different enough from what you can play today," and Riot reset the project.
• Blizzard veterans at Riot. Several Riot MMO leads came from WoW, among them Brian Holinka, who ran WoW's PvP design and is now a principal game designer on the Riot MMO.
• Watching from inside. One Riot MMO engineer who worked on WoW has already cheered on Forever's 40-player Onyxia raid in public.
• Scope unrevealed. Riot has confirmed only that its MMO is set in Runeterra. There is no number of its own to set against these.

Our read. WoW Forever sells a familiar world that keeps changing, and Microsoft is calling the result a record. Riot reset its MMO because the first version looked too much like what players already had, and what players already have now includes this. The November 4 launch is the benchmark Riot's game will be measured against.

Your Take

Reported from Kotaku and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.