WoW's new arena season delayed to hold off AoC?

by Chris Chester Mar 6th 2008 at 10:00PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Business models, MMO industry, Patches, PvP

Timing the release of popular content to coincide with the release of competitors' products is a time-honored practice in the game industry. Hell, it's a time-honored practice in ANY industry. You steal some of their thunder in terms of headlines, community buzz, and most importantly, player dollars. In a recent blog post, Relmstein questions Blizzard's logic in delaying the start of World of Warcraft's PvP Season 4 for at least another patch. He speculates their they're doing this to coincide the start of Season 4 with the release of Age of Conan. The logic goes, because Age of Conan is such a PvP focused game, they have to do their best to retain the PvP players they already have with more content aimed in their direction.

As Relmstein points out however, this might be something of a folly on Blizzard's part. It makes it seem like they're just stringing out content to subsist players until the expansion. Such a narrow band of new content is hardly going to stop players from trying new games, especially ones as high-profile as Age of Conan (or even WAR, slightly further down the road). Of course, this is all assuming that we're wise to Blizzard's motives. As one astute commenter pointed out, if Season 4 follows the same scheduling as the last two, it would end in April or May anyway. So who really knows!

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, delay, pvp, release, season-4, WAR, world-of-warcraft, wow

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jeni said on 6:58AM 3-07-2008

As already stated by developers, season 4 will coincide with the opening of the new raid content. Arena gear is meant to be on par with the current high level raiding stuff to allow for casuals to obtain gear without having to raid. As the new 6.5 tiered gear is dependant upon each server unlocking the bosses that drop that gear, Blizzard said that they will drop season 4 when the majority of the servers have unlocked the 6.5 content so as to make sure that they are released more or less at the same time.