Activision Blizzard announced that subscriptions to their legendary PC MMO World of Warcraft have dropped by another 100,000 players to record nine-year-low of 5.5 million active users.
Game designer Brian Holinka responded to the announcement, and talked about the upcoming Legion expansion in a new interview with GameSpot at BlizzCon this year.
Although Holinka said that the World of Warcraft of today is “kind of a little different from what it was years ago,” he explained that the developers at Activision Blizzard “don’t spend a lot of time concerning [themselves] with it.”
Subscriber numbers have been known to peak and trough between expansions – 2008’s Wrath of the Lich King saw the count peak at 12 million in 2010. This fell with Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria but then surged back up to 10 million following Warlords of Draenor last year. Basically, expansions will bring back players.
Holinka went on to explain that, despite the studio wanting to release content for players more frequently, Legion won’t be landing till 2016. This is because they “want to take all the time [they] really need to make something that is up to the standards that everybody expects.” With upcoming features such as the new Demon Hunter class and Order Halls, Holinka said he believes that “Legion is shaping up to be I think probably the best expansion we’ve ever made.”
Holinka also said he thinks that releasing alongside Duncan Jones’ Warcraft movie during the Summer period will bring even more people into the game, as he believes the film “will get a lot of people excited.”
You can read the full GameSpot interview here.