While World of Warcraft continues to be the leader among massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), there’s growing concern that the venerable game may finally be losing its luster.
Activision Blizzard reported that the game has seen a drop of 800,000 subscribers since March 31st. This is the latest decline in the game, which, at one point, peaked with a high subscriber base of 12 million users back in 2010, but has since dropped down to 6.8 million players as of this past June.
“We anticipated fluctuation in subscribership due to seasonality and the fact that the current game content is at the end of its life cycle,” explained Michael Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc and president Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. “And as expected, we did see a decline in subscribers, which mostly came out of the East. This pattern is right in line, percentage-wise, with the drops that we saw at Cataclysm‘s cycle in Q2 2012. That drop in 2012 was followed by an uptick in subscribers just ahead of Mists of Pandaria‘s launch. So we’re hoping to see players return once we draw closer to the release of Warlords of Draenor later this year.”
Activision Blizzard is putting a lot of push into the Draenor expansion, and it’s seemingly paying off, with over 1.5 million pre-orders – and counting – for it. That’s a healthy number, especially considering that the expansion doesn’t have a release date yet. If this follows the pattern of the last expansion, there will be a jump in subscriber numbers, but the effect will wear off in a few months.
It’ll be interesting to see what the publisher has up its sleeve for the forthcoming BlizzCon event, which will take place this November in Anaheim, California. Could Activision Blizzard possibly be looking at another major expansion for a 2015 release? Or will it continue to depend on smaller updates to bring the players back in to World of Warcraft? Only time will tell.
Source: Polygon
