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World Of Warcraft Drops Over 500K Subscribers Post-Cataclysm
Let me start this news story out by acknowledging the stark reality of the MMO world: World of Warcraft is doing just fine. It has more than enough subscribers to make any competing MMO envious. It's exactly because that wildly high number of paying players exist that a drop of any amount -- even a fraction of the total -- is noteworthy. Following the release of the latest WoW expansion, Cataclysm, Blizzard's MMO has experienced such a drop.
During Activision's financial call earlier today, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime revealed that Blizzard's subscriber base was down to 11.4 million players as of March. This is a drop of more than 500,000 from October of last year, just before Cataclysm's release, when Blizzard announced that they had crested 12 million subscribers.
Morhaime spun the dip in subscribers by saying the game had "returned to pre-Cataclysm levels in the West," but if the latest expansion didn't have enough draw to keep some of the players it pulled back in, I've got to imagine that Blizzard is carefully considering what to do differently with the inevitable fourth World of Warcraft expansion. Any thoughts on what they should consider changing?
[via Kotaku]
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