Blizzard wants to push out World of Warcraft expansions at faster rate

Blizzard, after recently having announced the Warlords of Draenor expansion pack for its ever-popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, has stated that it wants to release new expansion packs at a faster rate. Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime told Polygon that the company has already started working on a new expansion pack planned for release after Warlords of Draenor.

Morhaime said that new content for the game is important to keep the player base engaged. The company hopes to retain more subscriptions with the higher rate of expansion packs being released. “It’s going to be on us and our development team to continually look at ways to evolve the game and keep it relevant,” Morhaime said, “and look for new ways of maintaining engagement within the game. We view expansions as a huge opportunity to do that.

A faster rate of expansion packs would help the game retain subscriptions

“We recognize that we need to release them on a faster cadence than we have in the past. So we’re investing in the team and our resources to enable us to do that,” he added. Morhaime announced last week in an earnings call that over the last three months, WoW has lost 100,000 more subscribers, which brings it to around 7.6 million total subscriptions. While not a small number by any stretch of the imagination, it still pales in comparison to the success the game saw during Wrath of the Lich King, when it soared up to more than 12 million active subscriptions.

Sadly enough, the expansion pack doesn’t have a release date, but going by how Blizzard has generally does these things, it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise to a see an early 2015 release.