14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has admitted that quite a lot of its fans have suspended their subscriptions to its World of Warcraft online game in favor of other titles, like the recent Star Wars: The Old Republic, but it’s confident that many will come back sooner or later.
World of Warcraft is still one of the most popular MMORPGs out there, with around 10 million monthly subscribers. Unfortunately for developer Blizzard, this number has been slowly decreasing over the years, as more and more people have suspended their accounts.
A large number of users left at the end of last year, according to Blizzard’s John Lagrave, the senior producer of World of Warcraft, right when BioWare launched its own online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Lagrave also points out that not just users but also members of his WoW team have tried out the BioWare title, but he also attributes this decrease to other things.
"We certainly do look at [where WOW players go], and we have a very smart bunch of guys who do our analytics for us," Lagrave told Eurogamer. "Of course people are trying Star Wars - our development teams are trying Star Wars! I'm one of the few people who are still playing it actually, but yeah we've seen a dip in subs.”
“It certainly has to at least be attributable to The Old Republic, but it's also attributable to people who want to wait and get Mists of Pandaria, so it's not surprising," he continued.
Lagrave admits that players aren’t tied to World of Warcraft, and emphasizes that lots of other games, not just online ones, can be appealing.
"Are they going elsewhere? Yes they are,” he admitted. “We don't have a lock on all the best games in the world - Skyrim was an amazing game."
Even with this decrease of subscribers, Lagrave is confident that the upcoming release of the newest expansion, Mists of Pandaria, will get quite a lot of fans back into World of Warcraft’s virtual world.
As of yet, however, we still don’t know when the add-on will be launched.