Will Blizzard Keep Supporting It?

It’s the game that put the MMO genre on the map – sure, it may not have been the first MMO, but it was definitely the one to make the genre mainstream and turn it into an incredibly popular area of the market that companies have been trying to get into for years afterwards. But nobody seems to have come even close to the success that Blizzard saw with “WOW Gold” and now, over a decade later, the game is still running.
However, it’s not clear how much longer this is going to continue – reports about the player numbers of “WoW” keep getting worse and worse, and the title seems to be losing players at a steady pace. At some point, Blizzard are going to have to take a step back and reevaluate if it’s worth keeping it running for much longer.
The latest reports indicate that about 5.5 million players are still actively playing the game, a decline of 44% compared to the end of 2014. And some reports put that number into an even grimmer context – it’s apparently the lowest that the game has gone since 2006, and more players keep leaving it on a regular basis.
What kinds of changes could Blizzard make to reverse the situation? According to many critics and fans, there’s not a lot the studio can actually do at this point. Even if they removed the monthly subscriptions and made the game free to play, that would still not address the main issue.
And that’s accessibility and attraction to new players – right now, someone looking to get into a new MMO has absolutely no reason to go for “World of Warcraft”. The game’s mechanics have been copied and perfected over and over again in various other titles, its player numbers keep dropping as we said above, and those that remain usually have extremely well-developed characters with a lot of gear and experience.
Seeing them running around can be a bit disheartening to a new player who realizes how much time they’ll need to invest in the game before they reach that stage – and by then, who knows what else will have come out on the MMO market. It’s definitely not a game that has a lot of potential to grab the attention of newcomers to the genre, and without new players, its survival will depend solely on those that are still playing it from before.
So, according to some, Blizzard’s best strategy right now would be to focus on retaining as many of their current players as they can and pleasing their active fanbase. The studio can host various events in the game, create new content to keep players interested, and of course engage their community as much as possible. But in the end, that’s about it for their options.
Expansions are actually the studio’s best bet right now for this reason, and it’s pretty clear that they have been trying to capitalize on that fact for some time now. There’s no denying that the latest expansions for the game have been of superb quality, but some industry experts have been questioning the merit in developing them.
Because it’s obvious that a lot of work goes into creating each new content package, and if that work isn’t justified by the sales for the expansion, this creates an obvious problem for the studio. Cheap wow gold.So far, this hasn’t happened – but some players apparently feel like that moment is getting closer and closer lately.MORE:http://www.zyy.com/