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Blizzard to Speed up WoW Expansion Timetable

Blizzard has said that due to the rate of subscribers for World of Warcraft dropping off progressively more and more after each expansion, they are planning to increase the release rate, meaning that there will be less time between each one. This is perhaps showing that WoW has peaked to some extent and will gradually now peter off until Blizzard releases their next money machine MMO that loyal fans can jump to.

“What we have seen so far is that people have been consuming this content very quickly and so the subscriber levels have decreased faster than in previous expansions,” said Blizzard President Mike Morhaime, speaking about WoW’s latest expansion Cataclysm, which was released in December 2010.

He also mentioned – casually – that the company still has nearly 12 million subscribers, which still makes them the most popular MMO maker by a long shot.

“As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over the many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content. And so I think with Cataclysm, they were able to consume the content faster than with previous expansions,” Morhaime explained. “But that’s why we’re working on developing more content. We launched our first update last week and we have another update that’s already in test.”

“The response that we’ve gotten so far from players has been very positive and we really think that we need to be faster at delivering content to players. And so that’s one of the reasons why we’re looking to decrease the amount of time in between expansions.”

Morhaime noted that “we’re not ready to talk about the content expansions at this stage but we are looking at ways to speed up the development process.”

Industry