Player Consequences: Slow and Steady : World of Warcraft General Discussions

Player Consequences: Slow and Steady
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Business models, Expansions, Endgame, Opinion, Player Consequences


Everyone seems to be talking about Wrath of the Lich King at the moment. It's busting sales records at the stores and seems to have attracted attention away from the other MMOs released this year. However, I'm sure most of Blizzard's competitors aren't that worried. After all World of Warcraft may be a monster, but it's one that only comes out to eat once every two years. Mythic was just unlucky enough that the schedule for Warhammer's release coincided with the monster coming up for dinner. Still even if http://www.warhammeronline.comWarhammer released further away from Wrath of the Lich King I have to wonder if the results would be any different. World of Warcraft seems to have the unusual ability to maintain a high subscription based even with a slow development cycle for its expansions. The subscription numbers do dip in between releases, but the game never really seems to lose its momentum.

I expect this can be partially explained by Blizzard's habit of holding back content from its expansions and then releasing it in later patches. This helps stretch out the expansion content over a wider time period and gives the development team a chance to work on brand new content. However, even this trick can't account for why World of Warcraft keeps its numbers in the face of multiple new MMO releases.

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Player Consequences: Slow and Steady originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

 

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Author: Gabriel Runfeldt
Category: expansionfeaturedjoystiqfeaturesplayer-consequencesworld-of-warcraftwrath-of-the-lich-king
Publish Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:30:00 EST
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