World of Warcraft Expansion Coming

World of Warcraft Expansion Coming
Posted :: Jun 24, 2005 by Haggs

Blizzard Entertainment’s lead producer of the World of Warcraft (WoW) development team, Shane Dabiri, recently posted on the official forums that an expansion for WoW “is in the works, and [Blizzard] will release details as soon as [it] can.” Currently World of Warcraft is the world’s most successful MMORPG, with over two million subscriptions. Players pay Blizzard Entertainment a monthly subscription fee to keep their accounts active. Currently it costs $14.99 for 1 month, $41.97 for 3 months, or $77.94 for 6 months.

According to Blizzard Entertainment, the monthly subscription fees cover the costs of regular expansive content updates from the ongoing live development team, dedicated server infrastructure, and internal support staff. Since the entire game takes place online, in a persistent, ever-changing game world that can host hundreds of thousands of players at any given time of the day it requires much higher levels of support, maintenance, and network bandwidth than our other games do.

There has been no word yet whether the expansion will come in the form of a large patch or it will be available for purchase at local game retailers. Judging by the information provided on Blizzard’s subscription page, players should not be obligated to pay an additional fee for an expansion, as it should be covered under the “regular expansive content updates” section. However, nearly every other MMORPG in history has had an expansion or two at some point that required additional purchase.