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WOW Player Consequences: Slow and Steady

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Everyone seems to be talking about Wrath of the Lich King at the moment. It's busting sales records at the stores and seems to have attracted attention away from the other MMOs released this year. However, I'm sure most of Blizzard's competitors aren't that worried. After all World of Warcraft may be a monster, but it's one that only comes out to eat once every two years. Mythic was just unlucky enough that the schedule for Warhammer's release coincided with the monster coming up for dinner. Still even if Warhammer released further away from Wrath of the Lich King I have to wonder if the results would be any different. World of Warcraft seems to have the unusual ability to maintain a high subscription based even with a slow development cycle for its expansions. The subscription numbers do dip in between releases, but the game never really seems to lose its momentum.

I expect this can be partially explained by Blizzard's habit of holding back content from its expansions and then releasing it in later patches. This helps stretch out the expansion content over a wider time period and gives the development team a chance to work on brand new content. However, even this trick can't account for why World of Warcraft keeps its numbers in the face of multiple new MMO releases.

The accepted MMO practice has long been to crank out at least one expansion a year to keep your subscription base from getting bored and trying a new game. Yet World of Warcraft has maintained its 800 lb. gorilla status while taking twice as long to churn out expansions.

Then again producing expansions one after the other isn't always the best practice for a MMO to follow. The original EverQuest fell into this trap early on and suffered from a wide range of problems. The number one being that SOE wasn't giving casual players enough time to catch up to the more hardcore players before releasing the next expansion. Having a lot of high-end content only viewed by one percent of your pl