Hovering at right around seven million subscribers, the insanely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft has stood the test of time and has been at the top of its market for nearly ten years. The first six years showed almost no sign of decline, but soon after that, almost on cue to form a nice parabola, the subscribers started dropping off. Cataclysm failed entirely in continuing an upswing, and Mists of Pandaria downright lost a couple million. Interest was again revived with Warlords of Draenor, but fell off completely soon after.
Even with the uptick in numbers with the release of WoD, a general parabolic scenario still comes into play here; by 2018 it’s likely that World of Warcraft will be a shadow of what it once was, but not without obvious impact. WoW is a great example of a game with serious longevity. Teams working on content for this game may end up literally putting half their development career into it. That’s so uncommon nowadays, what with publishers getting sequelitis and such.
That being said, do you still plan to keep playing?
Thanks to Crave’s Game Revolution for the update on WoW.
