Blizzard are changing their game plan when it comes to future expansions to the world of Azeroth. For the first time, Blizzard are already hard at work at their next expansion for World of Warcraft, the one after the recently announced Warlords of Draenor. Understanding that they need to keep the playbase engaged and subscribed, Blizzard will be releasing these expansions on “a faster cadence”.
Speaking to Polygon in an interview, Mike Morhaime, the co-founder and president of Blizzard revealed some pretty interesting changes to the companies strategy. “It’s going to be on us and our development team to continually look at ways to evolve the game and keep it relevant,” said Morhaime, “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.”
This new tactic is already in effect. Mike also confirmed that Blizzard are already working on their next expansion, having only announced Warlords of Draenor last week.
“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.”
It’s clear that there is a surge in the numbers at each expansion pack Blizzard brings to the table, but whether they can rely on that alone will remain to be seen. If you’re late to the party on all the news from Blizzcon, you might want to check out our coverage. There’s a lot to look forward too.