14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard Entertainment announces that subscription figures for its massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft have started going up.
The developer reports that World of Warcraft had 7.4 million subscribers at the end of September, a significant increase from the 6.8 million reported at the end of June.
The ten-year-old game is still going strong, starting the year with around 7.6 million subscribers, and is expected to gain a significant number of new players once the upcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion drops next month.
While far from the level of popularity it had a few years back, when it reached around 12 million subscribers, Blizzard Entertainment's creation, still considered one of the best MMORPGs ever made, has a lot of Steam left.
Patch 6.0.2 has just been released
The company has released the pre-expansion patch to the masses, after spending close to a year in various phases of testing. The patch notes are extensive, as the upcoming expansions will shake a lot of the game's systems up, and the spike in subscribers is most likely due to the excitement of seeing what's new.
The update delivers a ton of tweaks to the game's interface, significant changes to the classes and many of their abilities, and introduces the brand new character models, which in some cases are up to ten times more detailed than the old ones.
The patch also adds the Iron Horde Incursion preparatory event, getting people ready for Warlords of Draenor, and enables gamers to adjust to the many gameplay shifts before the expansion goes live.
World of Warcraft has a bright future ahead
Activision Blizzard attributes the spike in subscribers to the excitement generated by the pre-expansion patch, and is expecting much more players to join in November.
Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter is optimistic when it comes to the fate of Blizzard's old MMO, forecasting "at least 7.7 million subscribers" by the year's end.
It definitely seems that World of Warcraft is on the right track, and the development team is bigger than ever. The devs have mentioned that they have a lot of new ideas and have already began working on the next expansion.
However, the company's expectations regarding its subscriber base are conservative, as it is aware of the fact that the game is unlikely to ever be as popular as it was during its peak years.
Warlords of Draenor is scheduled to come out on November 13, adding another big chapter to the Warcraft universe's extensive lore, and celebrating the role-playing game's tenth anniversary.