14 DAY TRIAL // World of Warcraft is beginning to lose some of its subscribers, as Blizzard reports a drop in their number, while promising that more frequent updates are going to be made to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
World of Warcraft is the biggest online title out there, with its subscriber count being around 12 million at the end of last year, when Blizzard, its developer, released the much-awaited Cataclysm expansion, which went on to sell a record-breaking 4.7 million units in its first month.
Since then, however, Blizzard reports that the number of WoW players has "returned to pre-Cataclysm levels in the West."
The company's President and Co-Founder, Mike Morhaime, told investors during a conference call together with sister company Activision, that there are now 11.4 million World of Warcraft subscribers out there.
While that's certainly a big drop of around 600,000 subscribers, Blizzard isn't phased and promised that lots of new things are going to be added to the game in order to keep players subscribed.
Morhaime emphasized that the company is making efforts to speed up the development of new WoW content, as many gamers are going through it extremely fast, and, after they complete it, get bored quickly and might start suspending their subscriptions.
Blizzard says that while it is trying to generate content much faster, this doesn't mean that future updates will be smaller in scale or less significant than previous ones.
Up until now, World of Warcraft received three major expansions, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm, but also lots of special content through various updates to the game, with the upcoming 4.2 patch bringing a whole new boss and quest line for high-level players.
While some may say that we're nearing the peak period for World of Warcraft, it's safe to assume that Blizzard is going to make sure that the MMORPG is still popular for at least a few more years.