Originally Posted by
Kathranis
Obviously growth is better than decline, but decline is not the same as "death."
Moreover, to an extent, the subscriber base shrinking actually decreases Blizzard's operating costs on the technical side of things. The fewer people playing, the less expensive it is for Blizzard to maintain servers and provide support. In the past, Blizzard's revenue from WoW has even tended to increase despite subscription number falling, as a result of the premium services they offer for the game beyond the subscription fees.
And it's also extremely unlikely that they could ever fully rebound and return to a steady growth model. It's just not possible in the current market space. Even if Legion turns out to undeniably be the best expansion yet, and the following expansion is even better, do you really think that it would return to 12+ million subscribers worldwide, and resume growth? No, of course not. The best they can really hope for is that a fraction of lapsed players will return. Keep in mind that WoW is an 11-year-old game in a market filled with any number of alternatives that can individually cater to any specific niche that individual players desire (IE, at some point a player who prefers a sci-fi setting and hardcore pvp will innevitably find a hardcore sci-fi pvp game to play, making WoW obsolete).
The reality is that Blizzard can almost certainly maintain World of Warcraft as a profitable legacy service indefinitely, so long as they manage their operating costs. Even now, it's becoming an increasingly small fraction of their overall revenue. Blizzard is transitioning away from being the "World of Warcraft company" and, if you listen to some of their recent interviews, seem to be accepting of the idea that WoW will eventually become a legacy service. They're actively expanding their portfolio to include a variety of genres that are smaller in scope and target more specific groups of players, a model which will ultimately be more profitable and successful as a business than WoW ever was.
So, what does this mean for WoW? It means that Blizzard will continue working on World of Warcraft and will try to correct its course, but that we should also expect there to be an innevitable playerbase decline. We should also expect that the game will never disappear, will always be supported, and will always have a core group of players. We can expect that, in time, the game's subscription and distribution model may change; it could become B2P or F2P, expansions could become smaller digital-only updates. We could eventually see the game enter a state more like Classic, where rather than focusing on large marquee expansions, it rather exists in a perpetual state of receiving smaller content patches that introduce new content or revamp old content without adding completely new worlds or continents, with smaller storylines and more focused gameplay.
Most importantly, you can expect that in another ten years, you'll still be able to log into your character and play WoW if you're feeling nostalgic about a 20-year-old game.
As a side note, I don't think Blizzard is going to develop a wholly new MMO any time soon. They may eventually revisit the genre, but it's become such a fragmented market that they likely could never hope to repeat the success of WoW. What's more likely is that rather than trying to make "one game to rule them all" like WoW, they'll continue making a large number of smaller titles that are able to capture their respective audiences.