Posted on February 10, 2013, Ian Miles Cheong World of Warcraft Popularity Dips, Blizzard To Focus On Diablo 3

As World of Warcraft‘s popularity is on the wane, Blizzard intends to support its burgeoning Diablo community with more updates for Diablo 3, and expansions to the franchise.

Speaking at Activision-Blizzard’s most recent conference call, Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime was on hand to share the news that the subscriber base of World of Warcraft, which once sat at a record high of 12 million players in 2010, has since dropped to 9.6 million. Despite the release of the game’s recent Mists of Pandaria expansion, the number remains on the decline. (via BlizzPlanet)

Morhaime stated that Diablo 3 sold more than 12 million copies worldwide by the end of 2012 and continues to sell, breaking PC games sales records. As such, the studio intends to pursue its development of the franchise to ride on the momentum.

“The development teams have worked aggressively to update the games since the launch, adding new content, game systems, features and other improvements,” he said. “A new update is in testing now, which will add dueling and other new content. Diablo is extremely important to Blizzard and we’ll continue to invest aggressively to support the franchise and its community.”

Blizzard is currently developing a new update which adds player-versus-player brawling, in addition to a host of changes to improve class balance and reward higher level players who pursue different styles of play with improvements to many unpopular skills.