In three weeks, Shadowlands will be the next expansion for World of Warcraft. Will the addon be the most successful ever? The signs are good.
It will only take just under three weeks until the next expansion for World of Warcraft is released on November 23, 2020, and millions of players will enter the realm of the dead, the so-called Shadowlands.
At the quarterly investor call, Activision-Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick announced that the highly anticipated add-on World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has broken a record even before its official release.
Shadowlands breaks pre-order record
Since the release of World of Warcraft: Classic about a year ago, the number of subscribers to the online role-playing game has risen sharply again and has gradually doubled since then, Kotick said. The number of active subscribers is thus again at the highest level of the last ten years.
This trend is now apparently continuing with the next expansion. According to the CEO, Shadowlands is already now, a good three weeks before the final release, by far the most pre-ordered expansion ever for the now 16-year-old MMORPG:
“In World of Warcraft, for example, we’ve seen unprecedented engagement trends since the subscriber base doubled last year following the launch of Classic. The pre-sales of the upcoming Shadowlands expansion is the highest we’ve ever seen at this time before a release.
At Blizzard, MAUs (monthly active users) in the third quarter were 30 million. World of Warcraft’s MAUs were stable year-over-year and increased structurally in the last quarter following the launch of Classic. The anticipation for the Shadowlands expansion continues to grow ahead of the November 23rd launch. The franchise commitment in this pre-expansion phase is at its highest level for a decade, with pre-sales well ahead of any previous expansion”.
Why re-entering now is worthwhile
Given the ongoing corona pandemic, the significantly higher player numbers and pre-sales are not surprising – after all, people around the world are forced to spend more time in their own homes.
Mary explains in her article why this is the perfect time to start playing WoW again or even start from scratch:
In addition, the MMORPG is celebrating its 16th birthday and is distributing gifts in the form of bonus XP: It is currently even possible to level a character up to the maximum level 50 within a few hours with our level guide.
