‘WORLD OF WARCRAFT’ expansions will be ARRIVING FASTER. MORE CONTENT. FOREVER.

How do you stop an admittedly still sizable, but hemorrhaging fanbase from continuing to bleed out? Or at least, slow the flow? You give them more content! Makes sense to me. And it makes sense to Blizzard, too. Despite their next expansion pack not even having dropped yet, the company is already working on the follow-up.

Blizzard Entertainment plans to release expansions to World of Warcraft more frequently than it has in the past, co-founder and president Mike Morhaime told Polygon, and is already developing an unannounced add-on for the online game.

In an interview, Morhaime said expansions like the recently unveiled Warlords of Draenor are important to keeping players engaged (and subscribed).

“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.

“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.”

World of Warcraft‘s subscriber base dipped to 7.6 million in September, Activision announced in a recent earnings statement. The MMORPG had more than 10 million subscribers last year, bolstered by the release of the expansion Mists of Pandaria.

Morhaime said Blizzard has reconsidered the way the World of Warcraft development team is organized and structured, and what amount of resources are available to it in order to succeed.

“We also have to start looking further down the road and planning further out,” he said. “We’ve already started working on the expansion after this one [Warlords of Draenor]. We’ve never done that in the past. We’ve been doing one expansion at a time, sort of a very linear content creation model, and we’ve looked at ways that we can parallelize that. So that while we’re working on this expansion we’re looking at the new one.”

[Polygon]

This all makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. Why am I so certain? Because I’m pretty sure this method will hook me. So yeah, dumb ass anecdotal evidence! Checking in, sir! It also makes sense because the company’s new MMO is languishing in reiteration/development Hell. With nothing on the Horizon, they need to keep their flagship afloat.

One idea of note however is that this sort of Content Blitz wasn’t needed back in the day. Why? ‘Cause the game was challenging. Exploration took time. Leveling took time. Dungeons took time. Raiding took a lot of time. With everything nerfed to high fucking Heaven, everyone is running through the content like shit through a cow. I think that’s a saying? My Dad said it. I think. Anyways — so yeah. It wasn’t necessary. But with candy ass gamers needing their STUFF really FAST and NOW, it isn’t like Blizzard can retreat back into a realm of challenging content.

So this?

Makes sense.

Even for me.