The game is drawing much fewer spectators than other, more specialized competitive titles in the company's portfolio

Sep 30, 2014 15:03 GMT  ·  By

World of Warcraft's popularity as an eSport is limited to die-hard fans only for the time being, but developer Blizzard Entertainment hopes to change this soon.

Its spectator-drawing potential drags behind other popular genres, with many first-person shooters and multiplayer online battle arenas being able to conjure up following way out of the reach of Blizzard's massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Blizzard is also well-aware of the fact that, in spite of World of Warcraft's competitive arenas being present at pretty much every major cross-genre tournament, they're not luring a massive amount of watchers.

"I can definitely say that WoW 3v3 Arena right now is kind of hard to watch, in the form that it is. And so there are things that we want to evaluate," Blizzard eSports head Kim Phan told PCGamesN at DreamHack Stockholm.

The publication reports that the European World of Warcraft Arena Tournament managed to draw very few spectators compared to other core titles featured at the venue. One of the reasons is the fact that the game was not initially designed with eSports in mind, as more recent titles are.

Warcraft did it before it was cool

Back when World of Warcraft rose to popularity, the eSports scene was nowhere the level of robustness it shows today, and the arenas ended up not very spectator-friendly.

Truth is, they're not always player-friendly either, due to the fact that players usually require add-ons to give them additional information about what's going on, because of the high complexity of the game.

The third-person view combined with the dozens of abilities that each of the game's ten classes can make use of (some of which being on very long cooldowns and having the ability to turn the fate of a match around), together with the fact that arenas are usually 2v2 or 3v3 affairs, make following what's going on difficult in most cases.

The upcoming expansion to the MMO, Warlords of Draenor, seeks to address some of the hurdles that the arena mode raises in front of eager players. One of the nice features coming in the expansion is a spectator mode that will enable players to watch other gamers compete against each other.

"It wasn't very easy before unless you were a tournament organiser in contact with Blizzard. At least with Warlords it’ll be available to everybody," Phan commented on the feature.

Blizzard doesn't want to alienate its current audience

For the time being, Blizzard has no intention of altering the game in a fundamental way, potentially ruining the experience of its existing users just to suit the tastes of a small portion of the game's audience, but the company is looking into how it can make the game more watcher-friendly.

"There's a lot of different components to World of Warcraft, and eSports are really all about how you choose to spectate the game. PvP is just one way. That's just the one that was adopted first."

"Ideas have been brought up like Battlegrounds. People enjoy watching live raids at BlizzCon. What makes something an eSport really depends on what people want to see. We are taking a close look into how we can better support eSports,” she concluded.

World of Warcraft's fifth expansion, Warlords of Draenor, is expected to come out on November 13 this year.