It’s been a big week for World of Warcraft. The cinematic trailer for Warlords of Dreanor went live last week, and the usual updates regarding subscription numbers and future plans that we’ve all come to expect have been circulating through our Twitter feeds. On such article by IGN featuring a spread on WoW’s traditional, pre-expansion dwindling subscriber count, Game Director Tom Chilton discusses the plans for future expansions. The interesting thing about this article (listed below) is that Chilton expresses that the plan was for expacs to be released more frequently with shorter gaps in between. We all know that for the past expacs the rollout period has been approximately every two years, with a sizeable patch in between to break up the wait.
However, when reading this article, one point that caught my attention is the fact that Chilton expresses his concern regarding one of the most sought after expansions, and one I think many of the deepest WoW fans are most desperate for, The Emerald Dream, and how it doesn’t have quite enough content to make it an expansion on its own. Wouldn’t this justify it falling directly into their plan of wanting to have more expansions released on a more regular basis? If it’s smaller in size, it wouldn’t take two years to develop, therefore, resources could be put into the development of another expansion, hence, their problem is solved. Obviously, I don’t work for Blizzard nor does anyone not working on those projects know anything about why there would be a lack of content, but I would be curious to know why this couldn’t at least be a patch if not a smaller expansion.
Gamescom 2014: World of Warcraft Admits Need For More Regular Expansions
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You raise an interesting question about expansions in general, but also expansions for long-lived, financially successful series. I wouldn’t ever claim that people haven’t gotten their money’s worth from WOW, but at what point (if any) has a game done “well enough” that rolling in content of a certain size should be seen as a free upgrade rather than paid DLC? If WOW weren’t such an impermeable barrier to entry for other MMOs to breach, I doubt we’d have seen free to play as much in that market. This also raises the question of what Blizzard might do next. WOW is a billion years old at this point – how long is it sustainable? Will they go free eventually, with free expansions?
Well the “to go free or not to go free” is definitely a topic that’s gone around the block multiple times and I believe Blizz has stated they don’t plan on “going free” any time soon. However, when has a game really done well enough? I suppose that’s an answer that varies from person to person and probably depends on whether or not the masses are willing to continue paying, which they still are. We can also look at it from the perspective of expansions versus larger patches that add content (as the article discusses) and which are free. This may raise the bigger question of “can we get more frequent larger patches and if so, will the game continue to do well if that’s substituted for less expansions that we pay for?”
It is interesting how WoW continues to be, in many ways, old fashioned about the way it conducts business, and yet relatively dominant in the MMORPG space. But for how long, I wonder?