Blizzard's Project Titan now "unlikely" to be a subscription MMO

Last night, Activision Blizzard reported their second quarter financial earnings. The majority of the conference call focused on the publisher's ongoing split with Vivendi , and just how rich the Call of Duties have made everyone. But, during the Blizzard section, Mike Morhaime revealed some brief information about their still-unannounced project, codenamed Project Titan. He also gave a fuller picture of World of Warcraft's recent subscriber decline .

As PCGamesN note, Morhaime hinted at a new direction for the mysterious project, suggesting that it was unlikely to arrive as a subscription based MMORPG. Morhaime reassured that the iterations Titan had undergone mirrored the development process of Blizzard's other games. He finished by confirming that no official release date had been announced, despite recent reports suggesting the game is on hold until 2016.

For World of Warcraft, Morhaime noted a "relatively quiet quarter", confirming the reduced 7.7 million subscriber figure as of June 30th, and saying that the drop was evenly split between East and Western markets. He did, however, reveal that the decline had slowed over the first quarter, something attributed to the last content update of May. With the Siege of Orgrimmar update due in the next few weeks, Blizzard hope to attract more returning players.

As for Blizzard's other projects, Morhaime said the free-to-play CCG Hearthstone was due to begin external testing "very soon", and claimed that lane pusher Blizzard All-Stars would "put our own spin on this genre, and challenge some existing design paradigms." Because that's the sort of thing that people say in a quarterly conference call.

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Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.