As Blizzard recently announced, player numbers for their MMORPG flagship World of Warcraft increased for the first time in a long while in Q4 2013. The number of players with an active subscription grew from 7.6 million in the fall quarter to 7.8 million in the past winter quarter.
This is surprising, as the title has been on the market for a very long time and has struggled with declining player counts in recent years. Each new low was accompanied by doomsayers claiming that WoW was nearing its end. This is admittedly a rather absurd accusation, as the number one position in player counts was never remotely threatened.
Player numbers typically only recover with the launch of a new expansion, only to decline again throughout the lifespan of an expansion. Given that the last WoW expansion Mists of Pandaria has reached the end of its lifecycle, most experts expected WoW to continuously lose players until the next expansion Warlords of Draenor launched.
Veterans Return at Max Level
The sudden recovery of the player count in the winter quarter is indeed surprising. Explanations include that competing games could not establish themselves in 2013, and that it is the calm before the storm, until later in the year titles like Wildstar or The Elder Scrolls Online hit the market.
Additionally, WoW currently offers players the chance to automatically boost a character to the maximum level of 90, allowing them to participate in the endgame immediately. Perhaps this, along with many small tweaks and fixes, has contributed to an increase in the player base. How much the online trading game Hearthstone plays a role in the current fourth spring of WoW is also not known.
Our Opinion
We at mein-mmo.de suspect that the surge of players in WoW is also due to a lull in competing games and single-player games. Furthermore, many casual players seem to have more time to play during the winter. Naturally, Blizzard’s announcements to put new character models and a highly anticipated retro expansion into the evergreen provide reassurance to players.
As long as a building is regularly repainted and renovated, there is hardly any danger of it being simply torn down. Many players in the ever-changing world of MMORPGs probably long for such a secure home!
