There's been endless speculation since Blizzard first announced that subscriptions have fallen to 5.5 million, their lowest count since 2005. It didn't help when they added that they wouldn't be sharing subscription numbers anymore.
In an interview with Polygon, World of Warcraft executive producer J Allen Brack called it "a difficult problem." "One of the problems that we have as a team and that I think the community has as well is this perception that there's a direct relationship between the number that we announce and the health of that community, and the health of that business," he said. "That's not really true. I wouldn't say that World of Warcraft is necessarily half as successful now as in previous times."
Rather than focusing on how to make the game draw in and retain players, Brack wants his team to make the game as good as it can be. One of their goals, though, is to make the game more accessible. The upcoming Legion expansion will come with a level boost that starts players off at level 100, similar to a strategy used in Warlors of Draenor.
"Level boosts have worked out really well," said Brack. "We want to make it easier to play with your friends. We have a huge component of people who have been playing World of Warcraft for 10 years or some obscene number, and they have friends that either played a long time ago or maybe they've never played. It's easy now to just buy the box, and you're all caught up."
With that kind of forward-thinking strategy, Blizzard may just be on the right track. Even if they're not, the upcoming Warcraft movie is sure to pull in a generation of new players.
