Load the Game

World of Warcraft stops losing subscribers as the launch of Warlords of Draenor approaches

• Egon Kilin
• November 5th, 2014

World of Warcraft looks to be returning to its former glory bit by bit, although it definitely still has a long way to go. Blizzard announced earlier today that their popular MMORPG had more than 7.4 million subscribers at the end of the third fiscal quarter, which ended on September 30. That means that WoW is still the number one MMORPG out there when it comes to subscribers, even though their number has declined slowly but surely over the years. World of Warcraft is now making a comeback thanks to the upcoming Warlods of Draenor expansion pack which is scheduled to launch next week.

We’ve seen this phenomenon several times before where many people would subscribe to the game just to experience all the new content. Unfortunately, previous expansions haven’t managed to keep people interested and they left just as fast as they came. World of Warcraft Warlords of Draenor might be different though. Blizzard worked really hard on this one and changed the game a lot in order to make it more appealing. So, can World of Warcraft keep its subscribers interested this time around? I think so. I will even go as far as to say that Warlords of Draenor will even bring a lot more after its launch. This is looking to be the first good expansion since Wrath of the Lich King, so things look promising, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

In any case, World of Warcraft only had 6.8 million subscribers at the end of the last quarter and was thought to be “dying” with each passing month. Warlords of Draenor breaths some new life into this 10-year old MMO and Blizzard has a few other ideas that should boost its subscriber count even more. One of these ideas is to make the game more popular on the eSports scene. It’s no secret that MMORPG tournaments in general are not very enjoyable to watch and World of Warcraft is no exception. Blizzard hasn’t figured out how they’re going to do it yet, but they will definitely give it a shot.

“I can definitely say that WoW 3v3 Arena right now is kind of hard to watch, in the form that it is,” Blizzard eSports head Kim Phan said last month. “And so there are things that we want to evaluate. World of Warcraft was obviously created well before eSports blew up to the way it is now. We knew there was a competitive element to World of Warcraft, and then it just kind of blew up from there. But it is taking a game that was out before all of this happened, and then figuring out how to enhance it and support it.” He also added that “PvP is just one way. That’s just the one that was adopted first. Ideas have been brought up like Battlegrounds. People enjoy watching live raids at BlizzCon. What makes something an eSport really depends on what people want to see.”