Hearthstone hits 20 million players in just six months

Just six months after Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft went into full release on the PC, Blizzard has announced that the free-to-play collectible card has racked up 20 million players.

"Thank you all for joining us in Hearthstone!" Blizzard tweeted earlier today. "We're going to need a bigger tavern!"

To be fair, Hearthstone was halfway to that number when it left beta testing in March, but that still represents a doubling of the audience in a remarkably short period of time. That puts it well past Blizzard's other behemoth, World of Warcraft, which had slid to less than seven million users as of August. That may not be entirely fair as a direct comparison—WoW is subscription-based and demands a far greater commitment in both time and teamwork—but it does provide some context to the scale of the achievement.

A more apt comparison might be to League of Legends, and Hearthstone still has some ground to cover to catch up with it, as Riot Games says 27 million people play LoL every day , with more than 7.5 million playing simultaneously during peak play time. It's a big gap but not insurmountable: The Android and iOS versions of Hearthstone are scheduled to come out before the end of the year. And if Blizzard can monetize Hearthstone at a better rate than League of Legends, which Teut Weidemann of Ubisoft Blue Byte said in August is actually quite low , it might actually prove to be an even more lucrative property, sooner than anyone expects.

Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.

Latest in Card Game
Hands pushing poker chips on a table
Winning $2.6 billion in this poker videogame has completely ruined fake poker for me
A pack of real life Balatro cards.
The official Balatro Timeline documents the history of 2024's biggest game as its developer went from 'obsessed' with making it to 'shocked' at the reception
Mage cards from Hearthstone's Into the Emerald Dream expansion.
Hearthstone card reveal: If it's wrong to love a magic blue owl, I don't want to be right
Characters in The Bazaar, a Hero-Builder game by Tempo, stand confidently with their weapons of choice raised.
Early backers of game decry 'bait and switch' after it backtracks on monetisation promises, dev chooses to stir the pot: 'Seeing Reddit lose it today lets me breathe a huge sigh of relief'
Yu-Gi-Oh! EARLY DAYS COLLECTION screenshot showing a character complaining about losing a battle
This Yu-Gi-Oh! retro collection transported me to a simpler time in TCGs, before Pot of Greed was banned and the Avengers were in Magic: The Gathering
A smudged joker face
Balatro finally escapes its silly 18+ age rating, PEGI promises 'a more granular set of classification criteria' for gambling-themed games in the future
Latest in News
Official artwork of Valorant showing the game's characters in a row
Valorant dev accepts there's too much random crap cluttering up the screen: 'The balance team generally agrees with this take'
Microsoft Copilot
A rather pleasing Windows 11 update bug automatically uninstalls Copilot and unpins it from the taskbar, which is jolly nice of it
Cognixion’s AI powered headset
New headset reads minds and uses AR, AI and machine learning to help people with locked-in-syndrome communicate with loved ones again
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang holding an RTX 50-series card.
92% of Nvidia users turn on DLSS... if they've been lucky enough to bag an RTX 50-series card at launch AND have the Nvidia App installed
A woman with an arcane slingshot uses it to light a distant fire
Deconstructeam's next game is about training to shoot a single fireball at an impossible target
assassin's creed shadow naoe
We asked two parkour athletes to rate the realism of Assassin's Creed's acrobatics, and a surprising 'crime against parkour' might actually be one of the most realistic things they saw