The CEO at Activision Blizzard, Mike Morhaime, announced that the number of World of Warcraft subscriptions fell by a large 300,000: that was for Q2 of 2011. Subscriptions had also fallen in Q1 of 2011 making two successive declines. However, looking at the overall numbers it was a fall from 11.4 million to 11.1 million. The blame for the decline is a lack of new content, the Cataclysm pack released in October 2010 was apparently too small and therefore consumed too quickly meaning many users got bored of the game. Mike Morhaime said this about the games decline:
“In terms of subscriber growth around the world, what I would say is what we have seen is that subscribership tends to be seasonal and driven by content updates, As we are heading further away from an expansion launch, it’s normal to seasoned declines.”
Activision Blizzard has therefore decided to change from spaced out large releases of new content to lots of small releases on a regular basis. But Activision Blizzard still has one more major content update to deliver before changing strategy and the CEO said this about the impending update to WoW:
“The next content update… will include major new raid and dungeon content, We believe that this new end-game content will keep the game fresh for current players and provide compelling reasons for lapsed players to come back.”
The new Level 20 trial edition has also apparently brought in a large number of subscribers to WoW but the CEO refused to comment on the conversion rate of the free trial to paid subscriptions. It seems that WoW is still as strong as ever, with an upcoming release and an attractive free trial it wouldn’t be surprising if figures soared back past 12 million again by the end of the year.
I miss SWG already 🙁