The game's lead designer is confident players will return after Blizzard releases more new content for them to explore

May 17, 2015 13:49 GMT  ·  By

When Activision revealed that World of Warcraft had suffered a dip of around 3 million users over the course of the last three months, many people were quick to think that the biggest MMO in existence was in its death throes.

However, that could not be farther from the truth, and as the title’s Lead Game Designer Ion Hazzikostas explained to GamesBeat, everyone fully expected this level of variation to occur.

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game had around 10 million registered users around the time of Warlords of Draenor’s launch, a significant spike from the 6.8 million users reported earlier in 2014.

The latest expansion managed to get a lot of people interested in returning to Azeroth and revisiting Draenor in all its former glory, before the cataclysmic events that led to the creation of Outland.

However, that interest seems to have waned pretty fast, and it’s definitely the biggest variation in the online game’s 10-year existence.

Gamers follow cyclical patterns

Hazzikostas mentioned that this spike and fall in registered users was due the changing lifestyle of World of Warcraft players, who aren’t seeing the game as a lifestyle anymore, but instead as a familiar place that they visit from time to time.

The game has gotten a lot more newbie-friendly throughout the years, and now there are plenty of activities that even those who aren’t into hardcore raiding can enjoy.

This means that a lot of people are now getting accustomed to jumping in, seeing what’s new, going through the available content, and then signing off and focusing on other games, for a while.

Then, after some new content packs come out, they head back in, go through what’s available, and then they go on hiatus again until Blizzard releases something new for them to do.

This leads to gamers having much more cyclical gameplay habits than before, which can be evidenced by the interest shown in Warlords of Draenor. This surge in interest can be equated to the dip experienced over the last three months, and the company is perfectly ok with that.

Granted, Blizzard has some new rising stars in the making, in the form of Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm, which will likely mirror the success of Hearthstone, the company’s insanely popular collecting card game, which just passed the 30 million registered users mark this month.