The new MMO might have been one of the factors leading to Blizzard cutting 13% of its workforce last month. Blizzard hasn’t revealed its current active subscriber figures, but the month before The Old Republic was released, the company reported 10.3M subscribers; the year before, the figure had been at 12M.
According to senior producer John Lagrave, even he can’t resist the appeal of a Star Wars MMO. ”We certainly do look at (where WoW players migrate to), and we have a very smart bunch of guys who do our analytics for us,” he informed, then admitted, ”Of course people are trying Star Wars - our development team are trying Star Wars! I’m one of the few people who’s still playing it actually, but yeah we’ve seen a dip in subs.”
He then claimed ”it’s also attributable to people who want to wait and get Mists of Pandaria, so it’s not surprising.”
Lagrave stated that the current free trial to level 20 might not be enough, and hinted World of Warcraft might lengthen the trial, ”We can absolutely say, ‘Hey, why don’t we make it level 40?’ ‘Why don’t we make it level 60?’, do we let you at least experience the old world? It’s all possible,” but stopped short of suggesting the MMO might go free-to-play, saying ”Right now we’re very happy with the subscription system with World of Warcraft. We think it works very well.”
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to World of Warcraft when Blizzard’s other MMO, codenamed Project Titan, finally sees the light of day.
