Blizzard COO: Growth still important to WoW, still seeing “meaningful” subs increases

By Patrick Garratt

Blizzard COO Paul Sams said today that growth was still important to World of Warcraft, and that the game is still seeing “meaningful” increases in subscriber numbers.

“I think growing the subscribership is important,” he told VG247, speaking in London ahead of tonight’s launch of Wrath of the Lich King.

“People leave. Taking a moment to talk about things from a company business perspective, continuing to grow is important if we want to maintain our subscribership.”

Lich King would mean higher figures, the exec said, but he refused to predict how many would be added to the game’s current 11 million players.

“I don’t know where we’ll land, but I do think the subscribership will go up,” he said.

Sams went on to say that Blizzard is working on a number on plans to make WoW more attractive to new subs and those considering leaving, including major upgrades to the game’s customer services.

“Ultimately we’re trying to do a lot of different things to refine the experience.

“We have a variety of other initiatives that we’re working on, trying to evolve the service to hopefully cause people to want to stay.

“We have some big initiatives that we’re working on with customer service, to try to deliver best of class customer service as well, which I think we do pretty good today, but not anywhere near where we want to.”

The boss conceded that WoW’s growth had slowed, but was still going North. Expansion releases, he said, provided a big boost.

“We have a variety of things that we desire to do, and as it relates to growth, yeah, it isn’t growing today as fast as it was in the first year, or something, but we’re still continuing to see meaningful growth,” he said.

“When we launched Burning Crusade we saw some pretty significant amount of growth because a lot of people returned and we found that a lot of new players came as well, interestingly enough, so we continue to see growth product by product.”

Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft’s second major expansion, launches globally tonight. Keep watching for updates from the flagship London release on Britain’s happening Oxford Street.