Legion was doing better than Draenor on release (over 10m subs). LK had ~12m iirc. Check your figures pal.
OK, I'll bite.
The last official published subscriber figures were 5.5 mil in September 2015.
When Legion launched Tom Chilton (game director for WoW at the time) claimed to a Polish Magazine that they had slightly more subscribers at 10.1 million than the launch of Warlords of Draenor at 10 million subs, that specifically meaning people purchased the expansion with 1 months subscription time.
Shortly after Tom Chilton gave this interview, Blizzard denied figures had reached such numbers. (
Link) citing
Blizzard Rep said:
This was a misquote, or some kind of misunderstanding on the part of the journalist
After the first month of launch during WoD it went into sharp decline as figures show above. Warlords continued to drop sharply there after to its poorest numbers ever after the heights of WotLK, which also led (in part) to Blizzards decision to cease publishing subscriber figures.
A few months ago in May, Blizzard had it's "Activision Blizzard Earnings Call" (
Link) During it's Earnings Call and regarding Legions performance it said
Blizzard Activision said:
Legion's overall performance is slightly ahead of the prior expansion.
I'll go the extra mile for you, and also inform you that after the Blizzard Earnings Call, MMO Champion pulled data from the number of players active at level 110 with some form of Artifact power.
MMO-Champion said:
This data set includes 4.5 million Level 110 characters active in the last month, across the US and EU.
I'm quite confident my figures are correct.