World of Warcraft is by far the most successful MMO ever released, and based on the performance of competitors it seems likely the only company that can emulate that success again is Blizzard itself. And it needs to do that pretty quickly as gamers are walking away from WoW by the million.
At its height, World of Warcraft boasted over 11 million subscribers and a market share above 60 percent. But in the first 3 months of this year alone, some 1.3 million gamers have left to go find their gaming entertainment elsewhere. Even so, Blizzard is still enjoying a player base that is around 8 million strong.
Bobby Kotick, president of Activision Blizzard, has admitted that such a large drop does raise concerns. He has also admitted that it doesn’t seem likely the subscriber base will grow again, even looking forward to 2014 and the potential for more new content being added. That could be in part due to Blizzard deciding that World of Warcraft isn’t right for consoles.
This is a problem most companies running an MMO probably wish they had. Losing over a million paying customers, but still having 8 million generating revenue every month means Blizzard won’t be turning the servers off anytime soon. A follow-up MMO, be that a World of Warcraft 2 or some other IP, must surely be in the forefront of both Activision’s management and Blizzard’s development team.
For the moment, expect Blizzard to keep churning out new content and for changes to be made to more easily support players returning to the game.
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