After Blizzard launched the game on November 23, 2004, the player base of World of Warcraft has been steadily rising with each new expansion, hitting its peak in 2011 towards the end of Wrath of the Lich King. With numbers reaching upwards of 12 million accounts worldwide at the release of Cataclysm, Warcraft was growing fast.
However, the story isn’t your average “happily ever after” for the developers over at Blizzard, as they encountered quite the rough patch. With subscriptions falling fast throughout Cataclysm to all the way through the release of Warlords of Draenor they needed something new and fast.
Due to its age, a drop in subscribers is nothing unexpected. However, they were not expecting quite the figures they had received. Numbers fell shockingly close to 5 million players and Blizzard needed something big to turn these numbers around and this was Legion.
As legion shaped up to be the most content filled expansion yet, both fans and developers were hoping this would be the expansion that would put Warcraft back on its pedestal as most peoples favorite MMORPG.
With Blizzard’s developers pushing forward with their newest expansion, not phased by the drop in numbers, they were focusing on expanding their game and satisfying their player base. Blizzard’s developer Brian Holinka had been quoted saying that, “We don’t spend a lot of time concerning ourselves with it (the drop in numbers), we focus mostly on just trying to make the game as good as it can be.”
Alongside everyone’s favorite lore rich characters, returning in the latest addition to the plethora of expansions already released, Blizzard was promising the “artifact weapon” system, new class, and level cap, this looked to be a whole new Warcraft.
New features and plenty of overhauls such as the near-infinitely developing weapon system that progresses as your character does and several new areas and raids for players to progress through, Blizzard was hoping that these features would be enough to bring back old players and help keep their current veterans.
As mentioned above, and arguably their biggest selling point, we have the newest “hero class” the Demon Hunter. It is a two spec melee based fighter capable of both damage dealing and tanking which is able to bring an immense amount of mobility to fights. The class was able to get right into the new content and start the expansion at level 100.
So, did the additions and re-tuning to the already solid features help?
After Blizzard’s new stance on statistics and figures being made public changed, we were only able to get certain bits of information. Blizzard themselves were being very careful on the figures and stats that were released to the public. After all, which company would want to publish anything detrimental to themselves?
Legion, as an expansion, has been a huge success in getting players to return. Ignoring the fact that, as with all new content generating hype around any game, the growth in player base is back. Numbers rose with the release of Legion to a point where Blizzard had revealed that by August 30, it had sold more than 3.3 million copies. This matches the previous records set by other expansions and made it one of the fastest selling PC expansions ever.
After all these new features and the proven success of the expansion so far, we can only hope that Blizzard is able to keep their pace in releasing new and exciting content and keep their game at the forefront of the genre. World of Warcraft is still leading the way for others to prove that MMOs are still incredibly popular and a massive part of the industry.
