Blizzard: Yup, SWTOR impacted WOW subscriptions

BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG may not have blown the sales charts off the table, but it has managed to smuggle in a large part of the World of Warcraft subscribers. These are not our worlds (we would never claim so blatantly unless paid), but of WoW producer John Lagrave.

Blizzard has lost about 100,000 subscribers since November 2011, he confirmed.

“We certainly do look at [where WoW players go], and we have a very smart bunch of guys who do our analytics for us,” Lagrave told Eurogamer. “Of course people are trying Star Wars; our development team are trying Star Wars! I’m one of the few people who’s still playing it, actually. But yeah, we’ve seen a dip in subs. It certainly has to at least be attributable to The Old Republic, but it’s also attributable to people who want to wait and get Mists of Pandaria, so it’s not surprising.”

Interestingly, Lagrave revealed, Skyrim was a major distraction for WoW players when the Bethesda’s RPG released back in November, but it didn’t cause too many subscriptions loses.

As for the current lvl20 free-to-play cap, Blizzard does have plans to raise that bar slightly higher but not “right now”.

“Right now we’re very happy with the subscription system with World of Warcraft,” he said. “We think it works very well.”

Blizzard is now prepping Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft. There is no release date for it yet, however.