Sitting at his computer, senior Alex Nurnberg logs into his battle.net account, goes to his account page and cancels his World of Warcraft subscription.
“I started playing at launch in 2004 and just recently quit,” said Nurnberg. “It’s just not the same anymore.”
Opened in 1991, Blizzard Entertainment (then known as Silicon & Synapse) has been on the cutting edge of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing games (MMORPG). Expanding ever since, Blizzard has created numerous titles, among them, the Warcraft series. The Warcraft series started in 1994 with the first title “Warcraft: Orcs and Humans”, and has since spawned ten spin-offs including the wildly popular World of Warcraft (WoW). With its eigth anniversary coming in Nov of this year and its population being dwindled byother games like Rift, Starcraft II and Star Wars: The Old Republic, the next few years may see the end of the World of Warcraft.
“Games like Star Wars: The Old Republic are simply going to steal Blizzard’s fan base,” Nurnberg said. “Star Wars has a fan base much larger than WoW and a bunch of [WoW] players are also Star Wars fans. It’s only natural that people would jump ship.”
World of Warcraft launched in late Nov of 2004 to a wave of subscriptions and fans. So many people rushed to play the game the server capacity could not support the amount of players logging on, resulting in one to six hour long queues and frequent server crashes. Though these problems were eventually resolved, World of Warcraft received more and more members, reaching a peak subscription number of 11.4 million in Mar 2011. The game also received several awards soon after release and was given the titles “Best RPG”, “Best PC Game” and “Most Addictive Game”. Fixing and constantly adding new features, the fanbase and community remained generally happy, with no significant subscription number drops. This remained the case until mid-2011, roughly half a year after World of Warcraft’s most recent expansion, Cataclysm. The community became divided as the game was completely rerouted to cater to WoW’s more casual players, generally infuriating veteran, hardcore players and delighting newer, more causal and typically younger players. After a few months, WoW experienced a significant decrease in customer appeal and subscriptions dropped from being around 11 million to roughly 10.3 million, a fairly dramatic decrease over such a short time period. While it still currently holds around 62 percent of the MMO world’s subscriptions, the days of World of Warcraft may be numbered if its subscription rates continue their downward trend.
“To me, the decline began in 2009,” Nurnberg stated. “Nobody wanted Argent Tournament. Nobody wanted any of the rehashes. If Blizzard had listened to its community, people would have been more inclined to stay.”
Scheduled for a 2012 release date, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria will introduce one new race, the Pandaren a new continent, Pandaria, and a new class, monk. Though the fan base initially loved the idea of a panda race when they were first introduced as “Warcraft’s fifth race” as an April Fool’s joke during Warcraft III, once Blizzard revealed Pandaren as the official eleventh World of Warcraft race and the first neutral faction (not Alliance or Horde) players who had taken World of Warcraft rather seriously began to question if Blizzard was listening to their fans.
“Had the pandas come sooner, old players that shifted from Warcraft would have been able to calm community down.” Nurnberg said. “Personally, I like the pandas, but no one can really take them seriously without knowing any of their lore.”
Coming off of the semi-successful Cataclysm expansion, in which a main villain from Azeroth’s past, Neltharion, better known as Deathwing, breaks through the planet and wreaks havoc on the world, Blizzard opted to go towards something seemingly unrelated. As represented in the battle.net forums, many players felt as if Blizzard neglected their fans in regards to things players wanted to fight. Initially, when Blizzard announced that they were shortening the duration of their expansions, players generally felt that fan favorite lore items such as the Emerald Dream, the Great Dark Beyond and Sargeras the Dark Titan.
“Cataclysm was a step in the right direction, but the timing of its release was all wrong,” Nurnberg said. “[Blizzard] should have waited another year or two and made it part of a bigger expansion.”
Discontent running high among the fans, WoW’s vitality has been brought into question. Though most of World of Warcraft’s players come from far east markets (roughly 5.5 million of the 10.2 million), Blizzard’s European and American fans are dwindling.
“Honestly, WoW’s probably got one or two more expansions before it kicks the bucket,” Nurnberg said.
