Reddit Stole Blizzard’s Thunder
Reddit stole Blizzard’s thunder on the World of Warcraft subject. The newest World of Warcraft expansion is set to hit live servers on September 21st 2016. That is one year away from now and will most likely have a hard impact on the community. Some of us were expecting Legion to hit this year, or even in the beginning of 2016, but September 21st is a long way to go.
It all happened today when a number of Reddit users saw information about the expansion on Battle.net, stating that Legion would launch “on or before September 2016”. That is quite a lot to ask for, especially if we think about how poorly Warcraft performed in the past years. Not only does this frustrate players, but it also puts the game in a very rough position.
According to the last Activision Blizzard quarter data, World of Warcraft is now housing 5.5 million players worldwide. Again, Warcraft finds itself at a turning point, especially since it hasn’t seen such a weak player base in 10 years. World of Warcraft is now back from where it started and this means that Blizzard’s name is no longer impactful. Original content is required once more.
But the issues did not stop here. Starting with this year, Blizzard are no longer going to share subscriber info with the world. The company claims that there are better criteria to establish how good the game is or not, which is a fair point, but given that the Legion release is so late, we can see where this has been going.
World of Warcraft has been having issues for years and at the end of each quarter the world is wondering whether this game is going to die or not. People have already had enough and telling them that you are going to launch 1 year later might just top it off. The number of subscriptions might go down once again and this time it could be close to fatal.
Nevertheless, we are talking about World of Warcraft here and even if the population goes down, it is still very likely that they will recoup millions of players with Legion’s launch. Reddit stole Blizzard’s thunder with this news, but the true test that Blizzard needs to stand now is the test of time. We do not know if they are going to make it or not, but the truth is that World of Warcraft is an MMO that is pretty difficult to take down.
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