World-leading MMO faces new challenges as customers chew through content


Blizzard is seeking alternative means to
attract new World of Warcraft customers, as the routine money-spinner
continues to lose customers.


The MMO, which has been trailblazing in its genre since 2004, dropped around 300,000 subscribers between May and July.


That puts its worldwide subscription count at 11.1 million, and represents a loss of interest for the second successive quarter.


The developer’s CEO, Mike Morhaime (pictured), explained to investors that plans are in place to reverse the downturn.


The group recently launched the expansion pack Cataclysm in China – a region Blizzard believes offer huge growth opportunities.


Morhaime
said the staccato nature of Warcraft subscription numbers was due to
content cycles. Numbers peak with new expansions, and gradually fall, he
said.


However, Morhaime recently suggested that adding new content to an aging game becomes increasingly ineffective.


"As
our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over
many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming
content," he recently said.


"And so I think with Cataclysm they
were able to consume the content faster than with previous expansions,
but that's why we're working on developing more content."


Yesterday,
Morhaime made clear Blizzard’s response to this trend. The company
pledged to flood the game with new content as a matter of urgency.


Also
in effect is a new free-to-play scheme where any players can try the
game for as long as they wish, but must pay after they reach a certain
level of experience.




The fruits of that plan will be explained in more detail over the coming months.

WoW is just old and boring , they should just go f2p or close the entire WoW project ;) . I quited this ages ago

i never even play it hehe

Vanilla WoW was very good, for its time back then

It still was okish during burning crusade start

But past that point, it was just not the game it used to be anymore

(on 1 side it's thanks to how the internet developed over those years) where at launch there were certain sites that came with decent info but never complete info, nowdays you have wikis that literally explain every single aspect of the game up to the detail of every number and what comes close to pretty much cheating mechanics to earn gold/exp etc.

Also WoW when it was at the start of Vanilla was not flooded yet by addons which kept getting too detailed and too good making the game so that later on everything was prechewed for you.

WoW is just not a game anymore, if you play it, you don't have to actually play it, you just follow the lines set out for you.

When it was Vanilla you did stuff, you did go out to explore, you did random stuff to mess around, like climbing areas which you weren't supposed to reach, you had the Leeroy Jenkins now and then (not the noobs nowdays, but guys that made random stuff on purpose knowing you could handle it (not just random stuff because they have no clue what they'r doing))

Anyways, it's just over its best years, and it's time for a new fresh game. It was never ment to become this kind of game and it should have ended sooner.

Yep i only really enjoyed vanilla 2