Last October we heard the subscriber base of MMO juggernaut World of Warcraft had slipped some since its peak of 12 million players. In fact it lost almost a million users in less than a year. In the recent Activision-Blizzard earnings call we found out that downward trend has only continued, as WoW lost another 800,000, bringing the total to a still monstrous 10.3 million. If Blizzard is worried, they aren’t showing it, as the mega-developer believes the user base will expand again soon thanks to the magic of pandas…
In yesterday’s earnings report Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime blamed the slump on a lack of engaging casual content in the last expansion Cataclysm. That’s something the next one, Mist of Panderia, intends to fix, with plans for Pokemon-esque monster collecting and fuzzy, lovable Brewmasters. Also, there are other smaller updates coming along the way to keep the current install base happy. That’s all well and good, but what’s really annoying is they didn’t use this call to finally confirm a true Diablo III release date. Sigh…
WoW veteran says the MMO's devs had to make "ten times the amount of quests" as originally planned to sate playtesters, and now the game has 38,000 of them
World of Warcraft devs used to joke about the MMO making $1 million per month - just months before it smashed through $15 million in monthly revenue
