“You can never quit forever” – by Anderson Ofiyai

Source article: “World of Warcraft loses 1 million subscribers in three months” – by Tom Curtis, August 2, 2012

The steady wing beats of your flying mount are all to be heard, as you cross another mystic plane in the World of Warcraft. It’s quite late into the night. You look at your clock and realize you’ve spent the past 5 hours, in the pursuit of a task that you’ve yearned to complete for some time now.

 You lean back in your extra comfy, custom made, computer seat, and let out a triumphant roar as you stretch the stiffness out of your muscles. As your eyes readjust to the screen, panic grips you like an unseen phantom. With a quizzical stare you look at your screen, look at your character, look at your achievements and wonder, what is left?

Boredom is ultimately the thing that leads to the downfall of anything that was once great. People get bored of their job, their house, their car, their wife, and yes most definitely their video games. Recently World of Warcraft (WoW) hit a hiccup in their subscribers. This MMO juggernaut that houses one of the largest and loyal fan bases, has seen a shocking decline in membership re-subscription. They lost a whopping one million subscribers in the time span of three months!

Surely this couldn’t be the first time they’ve lost subscribers right? Right, it’s only normal that too much of something is no longer enjoyable. So naturally we cease coming back to it. What’s the remedy? It’s quite simply, think “out with the old and in with the new”. You need to release something that is stronger. Something new needs to be released that incorporates everything the fans loved, but improves on it. Blizzard the creators of WoW, are very good at this.

They countered their losses with the release of yet another expansion, and once again they have reached another all-time high in membership. However with that being said, the release of the latest expansion was not as successful received as its predecessor. Think about that for a moment though, and realize that it makes sense. There are only so many times you can change the same thing, and title it as something brand new.

I don’t think that anyone can quit forever. Personally I’ve come back to the game on more than one occasion but found that every time I did, they failed to impress me on a few bases. There were only so many times I can do the same thing over and over again, and still find it fun. This is why WoW will continue to lose subscribers as time and other similar game titles are released, and sadly never be that powerful MMORPG icon that they once were.