As subscribers sink, Blizzard searches for ways to make World of Warcraft grow

World of Warcraft needs help. The world’s most lucrative online game of the past decade lost 1.3 million paying subscribers in the first quarter this year. And publisher Activision Blizzard, the newly independent parent of Blizzard Entertainment, said last night that WoW’s subscribers declined by another 600,000 users in the second quarter to 7.7 million.

The job of helping stave off that decline belongs to the gentlemen in the picture, game director Tom Chilton and production director J. Allen Brack. I visited them this week at the headquarters of Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine, Calif. They’re wrapping the Patch 5.4 update for World of Warcraft’s Mists of Pandaria expansion pack. The content is done. The game systems are up. They’re in the final iteration and refinement. And this version has a lot of thought in it about how to keep fans in the game for a longer time or bring them back when possible.