Today Polygon published an interview with World of Warcraft executive producer J Allen Brack, who called the declining subscription rate for WoW “a difficult problem.” Subscribers have fallen to 5.5. million, down 100,000 since about three months ago.
According to Polygon, Brack believes that the lower subscription rate—which is about half of what it once was—doesn’t mean that the business is not successful. He wants the development team to ignore all the second-guessing and focus on continuing to make WoW “the best thing it can be.”
One strategy they’ve employed is to creat a level-boost option, so that players could take a character to level 90 instantly. Level boosting allows players to get to a level where they can play with their friends. In the past, it would take many hours to level a character up. In the Warlords of Draenor expansion, players are able to level-boost to level 100. Tutorials show players how to play their newly leveled character.
Level boosting has many advantages. Besides leveling quickly so you can play with friends, you can try different types of characters without investing too much time. The idea is to make it much easier for lapsed players to come back to the game.
Blizzard is also looking for ways to speed up the rate at which it adds new content to the game. It’s also giving players a new way to go back and play old content in a different way.
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that was first released in 2004. At its height in 2010, WoW had more than 12 million subscribers.
World of Warcraft is far from dead, though. At this year’s BlizzCon, the company announced a new World of Warcraft film. They also announced an approximate time for the release of the game’s sixth expansion, Legion.
