14 DAY TRIAL // World of Warcraft is certainly one of the biggest games out there, being the most popular MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) on the market, with over 11 million paying subscribers every month. The company responsible for this hit, Blizzard, is even happier, as the interest of the fans is growing by leaps and bounds.
The second expansion of the game, entitled Wrath of the Lich King, sold over 2.8 million units in the first 24 hours, which made it the most successful PC game in history, beating the record set by the first expansion to WoW, The Burning Crusade, which "only" sold 2.4 million copies in the first day of its launch.
Such a massive degree of popularity has certainly made quite a lot of industry analysts and critics wonder whether Blizzard will make a new WoW title, which would bring better graphics – because the original game was launched in 2004, and it isn't much to look at – and new gameplay mechanics. The company didn't make any comments at the time these questions appeared, but now it seems that one of its executive officers, Paul Sams, has talked about the sequel plans to WoW.
He went on saying that the game was a very successful title, which proved its worth even 4 years after its launch. Because of this success, Blizzard would certainly keep on developing updates and expansions, so as to quench the thirst of the big number of users for new content. He then made quite an interesting statement, saying that a sequel to WoW might kill off the franchise.
"I don't personally think that there's a requirement to do a sequel. You probably know or have heard that we have another next generation MMO that's unannounced and there's no details about it at this point, but while we're doing it that does not suggest that it has to be a sequel to World of Warcraft. As it relates to other MMOs, time will tell what we're going to do but doing a sequel can help kill off the franchise and so I think we want people to be able to focus on this and again I think that we're going to be able to provide compelling content that's going to definitely feed the needs of players."
The Blizzard executive does have a point, although a lot of fans would've wanted a game that would use the resources of the high-end technology that appeared during the four years since its launch. About the new MMO, Blizzard didn't release a lot of details, but we might get to see an official announcement in the near future. Let's just hope that the company will continue to offer the same great games as it has done over the years.