"World of Warcraft" is losing players, and the players that have stuck with the video game are aging. So, just ahead of"World of Warcraft's" 15th anniversary, Activision Blizzard is going retro.
Classic WoW is no walk in the park. Players must manually search for others to team up with for massive raids that involve 40 people communicating and working together — moments that have led people to make real-life friends. Traveling from town to town will take time. The graphics are significantly pared back to resemble the original.
"World of Warcraft's" total number of players has declined over time. Although there are over 140 million accounts on"World of Warcraft," the game currently has just five million individual subscribers, data collector Statista estimates, down from the 12 million players the game had back in October 2010.
Because WoW has lost millions of subscribers, the potential market for"World of Warcraft Classic" is huge, noted Will Partin, a doctoral candidate studying the gaming industry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.