It seems the king of MMOs is beginning the twilight years of his reign. Speaking at the earnings conference call for Activision Blizzard's second quarter financial release, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime acknowledged that the mighty juggernaut is beginning to slow down.
“On the World of Warcraft side, we experienced a slight decrease in subscribership during Q2, closing the quarter at 11.1 million subscribers worldwide,” said Morhaime during the call. “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 and so as we are heading further away from an expansion launch, it’s normal to seasoned declines where the team is currently working on our largest content update since Cataclysm and that will hit later this year.”
The quarter closed just prior to the launch of Cataclysm in China, so Blizzard has already recovered those numbers. The developer is already building the next expansion, with a planned release date for this year. Trademarks have been registered recently by Blizzard for “Mists of Pandaria”, which points to an expansion related to the game's fan-favorite Pandaren race.
“The World of Warcraft development team is also working on the next content update, which 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 laps players to come back,” said Morhaime.
Finally, Blizzard is launching the game in Brazil later this year, with the developer pondering more markets in the future.
“We’re also looking at new markets. We had great success in Russia. We think that Brazil is really an emerging market that has a lot of potential in terms of the number of broadband users, they are a top-10 country, their economy has performed very well compared to the rest of the world during the recession and we already have some Brazilians playing in English but we think the market can be a lot bigger in Portuguese. I think that there are other countries we’re looking at beyond that as well but I don’t have anything that I can talk about,” Morhaime closed.
With Rift on the scene, Star Wars: The Old Republic coming this year, and Guild Wars 2 in the future, can WoW stay alive until “Project Titan” hits?
