English
Gamereactor
news
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Coincidence? I think not...

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ

The battle has begun...in a few days Warhammer Online will launch properly, and it is hardly a coincidence that this week also saw Blizzard announcing the release date for Wrath of the Lich King. I always assumed that they would wait until Blizzcon, but I was underestimating how sneaky the folks at Blizz's marketing department could be. World of Warcraft's Patch 3.0.2 has just hit the test server and I doubt we'll have to wait for very long until that hits the regular servers as well.

So, what does all of this mean? Wouldn't it be better for Blizzard to launch either closer to WAR or delay Wrath until say next year, when the initial buzz for Mythic's potential MMO-juggernaut has died down a bit? No, I don't think so. This is all part of a sneaky and quite wellcrafted plan, meant to totally undermine WAR's march into the marketplace.

By deploying 3.0.2 this close to WAR's launch Blizzard make sure that a lot of people will keep their World of Warcraft accounts running even when they pick up a copy of Warhammer on Thursday. After all, there's a lot of changes coming in that patch and many players will want to check them out straight away. By adding the launch date for Wrath of the Lich King into the mix, they make sure that people will keep their account active even longer, and also get a lot of people that defect to WAR now into planning their playtime around the fact that they will drop the new game for the next WoW expansion come November.

If there was no expansion on the horizon, Blizzard would probably lose a lot more players than they will now. And by keeping interest high they can maintain their grip around the ones that have started to doubt if World of Warcraft really is their main MMO. I would not be surprised if Blizzard brings out the big guns at Blizzcon and announces some really big new feature coming in Wrath of the Lich King, something so far kept a secret. It's like the rumors that the Republicans were waiting to capture Osama bin Laden until right before the last election - to be able to use that as a way to completely shoot the democrats out of the water.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Related texts



Loading next content