World of Warcraft hits slump

In the earnings call yesterday, Activision Blizzard mentioned that World of Warcraft currently has 11,4 million players - which is 600,000 less than last year, when the game hit record numbers of 12 million.

"What we have seen in the past is, we tend to see our players leave for some period of time, perhaps try out the new MMOs, and then good percentage of them historically have returned to World of Warcraft," Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said. With the game's latest expansion, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, not yet out in China, the developer claims to still feel optimistic about the game's future.

"So what we have seen so far is that people have been consuming this content very quickly and so the subscriber levels have decreased faster than in previous expansions," Morhaime said about Cataclysm's run so far.

If you want to read the full transcript of the earnings call, it's available over on Seeking Alpha.