It's straightforward to roll your eyes and say that MMORPGs are lifeless should you, ya know, don't play MMORPGs. But 20-year-old World of Warcraft nonetheless appears to have a lot of spring in its step, in response to Warcraft normal supervisor John Hight. Its newest enlargement, Dragonflight, has extra subscribers now than it did at launch, and one intrepid content material creator thinks they might have extrapolated roughly what number of: over 7 million.
Speaking at the Game Developers Conference, Hight defined that World of Warcaft traditionally has a very predictable sample of subscriber churn. When an enlargement comes out, there's a surge in subscribers that slowly declines over the course of an enlargement, with small bumps at every new patch. It hits a low level at the top of every enlargement, then surges again when a new one is launched. World of Warcraft: Classic disrupted the sample considerably by creating one other sequence of peaks linked with its personal releases. Hight described it as a "constant inflow and outflow" with "almost as many new players coming in as other players going out."
However, one thing modified with World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. Initially, the game noticed a predictable surge of gamers at launch, however as time went on, the falloff grew to become more and more pronounced as followers expressed their dislike of the enlargement story and content material. Then, when Dragonflight launched, the surge in gamers wasn't practically as excessive as anticipated. "A lot of that was attributed to people losing their interest, and even in some cases their trust in us, during Shadowlands," Hight stated.
However, he continued, Blizzard responded by reaching out to the group and sifting by way of suggestions, and over the course of Dragonflight, was capable of flip issues round. It helped that Dragonflight itself was well-received and largely course corrected many of Shadowlands' greatest points by itself. Its setting, tone, characters, and gameplay all immediately addressed points gamers had throughout Dragonflight, equivalent to complaints about "borrowed power" and a distancing from the precise "World" of Warcraft. But Hight stated the group took extra steps, equivalent to sharing content material roadmaps and growing the cadence of updates, that saved gamers engaged. As a consequence, subscriber numbers continued to climb all through Dragonflight fairly than dip. And now, for the primary time in World of Warcraft historical past, these numbers are larger than they had been at enlargement launch.
While Hight's visible assist, pictured above, didn’t embrace particular subscriber numbers, one content material creator thinks they've extrapolated precise tough numbers based mostly on his squiggly strains. Bellular Warcraft shared a video over the weekend cross-referencing the final precise subscriber quantity reporting Blizzard gave (back in Legion) with different disclosed monetary modifications and Hight's graph. Bellular's estimates put present World of Warcraft subscriber numbers at roughly 7.25 million, after hitting a low of 4.07 million throughout Battle for Azeroth and 4.5 million throughout Shadowlands (a bit larger, with WoW: Classic serving to out). Though none of that is precise science, it is probably not far off. And it's particularly spectacular given the game peaked in 2010 with 12 million subscribers throughout Wrath of the Lich King. For a game that's been round 20 years, that's wildly spectacular.
Hight concludes his discuss by sharing the lesson Blizzard realized from all this: it's good to let your gamers be concerned.
"These communities are deeply invested in the games, and they don't want to leave your game," he stated. "Don't give them a reason to leave. Give them a reason to stay. And community sentiment during Shadowlands was a real wake up call for us. What our players wanted had fundamentally changed, and we hadn't recognized that. So we had to throw out our old playbook that had worked for us for 18 years, at that point. And now we're crafting a new playbook, but our players are co-authoring with us."
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].