If you use YouTube much, or if you're someone that makes videos, then you're already familiar with one of the fundamental ways YouTube is broken: it doesn't always show people the latest uploads, even if they're subscribed to someone.
Enticed by the sweet siren call of the Warlords of Draenor expansion, World of Warcraft subscriber numbers have jumped from October's 7.4 million to more than 10 million, all of them apparently on my home server of Moon Guard.
Sitting down and catching up on all the news this morning, a pair of headlines jumped out at me. Both were, in a sense, subscriber numbers. Each, by itself, is mildly interesting. Together, though, the figures paint a clear picture of why game development today is moving in a particular direction.
What does it take to lure a lapsed player back to World of Warcraft? With subscription numbers slowly-but-surely dropping, Blizzard launches the new Scroll of Resurrection program, granting returning players a free upgrade to the Cataclysm expansion and an instant jump to level 80 — they just need to be asked.
Not much, apparently, at least not in December. Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime was only able to give a vague answer to the question presented during the Q&A portion of today's Activision Blizzard financial results call, but that vagueness speaks volumes.
According to EA's third quarter financial results report, BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic has generated more than 1.7 million paying subscribers since its December launch. One wonders if that number was recorded before the game's PVP balance issues began.
In October of 2008, Blizzard proudly counted 11 million World of Warcraft subscribers worldwide. In December 2008 the number jumped to 11.5. Now Blizzard updates the count to 12 million, 22 months later. What took so long?
