World of Warcraft, which peaked at around 12 million subscribers during its height in 2010, is currently sitting at 6.8 million subscribers as of July, and now Blizzard has said that it doesn’t think it’s going to grow any more than that.
The decline in players has been slowly happening since 2010 and has continued unabated, despite expansions such as Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria being released in the years since.
Blizzard, unhappy with the trend, has accepted the fact that things don’t last forever and the decline doesn’t look like it’ll pick up again. Lead game designer Tom Chilton said the following in a recent interview with MCV, “We really don’t know if it (referring to World of Warcraft) will grow again… it is possible, but I wouldn’t say it’s something that we expect. Our goal is to make the most compelling content we can.”
In the past, expansion packs released for World of Warcraft would cause a spike in subscriber numbers, however Chilton is losing faith in this strategy because “By building expansions, you are effectively building up barriers to people coming back.”
He hopes to combat the aforementioned barriers by including the insta-level 90 character feature in the Warlords of Draenor expansion because he thinks “it gives people the opportunity to jump right into the new content.”
On the one hand, this new feature does indeed make it easier for older players to jump back into Azeroth without the need to tediously grind up to access the new content in the expansion. On the other hand however, it could make it more likely that players just rush through the new content and then when it’s done let their subscriptions lapse yet again. If players don’t stick around once they’ve seen the new worlds, bosses and everything else the new expansion has to offer, the P2P (Pay to Play) model probably isn’t sustainable.
Even if World of Warcraft is now in a state of decline, there is no denying how successful the game has been over the past 10 years (which is a ridiculously long life span for a MMO). Many other MMO developers can only dream of approaching World of Warcraft’s current number of subscribers, and Blizzard has managed to maintain the game as a subscription-based business even as the MMO genre is clearly shifting to the free-to-play model. And despite the drop, those 6.8 million active subscribers still means that Blizzard is earning over $60m a month from WoW subscriptions alone.
Oliver Zimmerman
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