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World of Warcraft Subscriptions Fall Again
After a drop of over 500,000 subscribers back in May following the aftermath of the Cataclysm expansion, Blizzard's MMO phenomenon World of Warcraft has experienced another significant decline.
After fall in May from a high of 12 million worldwide subscribers to 11.4 million, from May to July the game's base further declined to 11.1 million -- a loss of 300,000 subscribers.In a report on Develop, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaine attributed the loss to players getting through the Cateclysm expansion more quickly than the company expected.
Morhaine said, "As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content. I think with Cataclysm they were able to consume the content faster than with previous expansions, but that's why we're working on developing more content."
Blizzard also instituted an "unlimited free trial" for new WoW players at the end of June in an attempt to garner interest from gamers who hadn't tried an MMO before. The Unlimited Free Trial allows players to level characters until level 20, and replaced the previous 10 and 12-day trials.
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