I’m genuinely curious here, from a lore perspective, how many more meaningful expansions can Blizzard make? What would the story of these expansions be?
I doubt Blizzard will be releasing a new expansion every 2 years for the next 100, 200 or 500 years. So when will WoWs end be?
Infinite expansions of course! But Blizz is pretty creative with story ideas, I’m sure they have a list of concepts set away for the future. They plan everything two expansions in advance and there’s a lot of room to expand on the world and story further.
It’s just now we’re starting to move away from the old established things we already knew about and going into new territory, like Shadowlands and the Jailor. So it’s very difficult to predict what’ll happen from here on out.
But we’re only going into the 8th expansion here, it’s not ending any time soon. Everquest has I think 26 expansions and that’s still going strong.
There are 23 expansions left.
A lot more than most of this forum wants to believe, OP. It’s safe to say this game isn’t going anywhere for a very long time.
Anywhere between 1 and 1 billion.
I really doubt it will end, at least “abruptly”. I mean, look at Pokémon - still offering the same stuff after almost 25 years and still being one of the most popular franchises in the videogame industry. The same could be said about The Sims, although TS4 is not really as successful as previous versions, but it’s still there, with many players buying expansions.
So, if anything, WoW will go through important changes, but I doubt it will simply “end” and gameover. Stop worrying about WoW’s end and simply enjoy the game while it lasts. 
it all depends how fast they want to push the story.
BfAs story could’ve ended after n’zoth was free and sylvanas ran away. (adding a new content patch somewhere to compensate for theoretically cut 8.3)
then next expansion could’ve been “world of warcraft: black empire”, giving nzoth and the other old gods the attention they deserve
and then shadowlands could happen after we finished nzoth, this would slow down the story quite a bit, and the story really does need to be slowed down imo.
at the rate we’re currently going, I’d expect we’ll have killed the void lords an expansion or two after shadowlands.
People said story was done after wotlk, and here we are.
Look at Everquest’s number of expansions, then look at Wow. We will reach 20+ eventually.
As many as they can sell and make enough money off of to make the next one worth developing.
As many stories as Blizzard wants to tell.
10 to 15 more years of expansion…or until VR really takes off whatever comes 1st
As many as the game stays profitable.
WoW is Blizzard’s hallmark. Consider it less like a box game and more like how professional esports operate. Shadowlands allows the game writers to create new stories in the Warcraft Universe, WoW is not going to “stop” and there is not going to be a “World of Warcraft 2” they will just keep patching/fixing the game. That is the best financial decision for Blizzard and what will happen.
Although common forum goers always like to talk about how WoW has been “dying” for the past 15 years, there is an extremely non vocal playerbase (the majority) that will continue to pay a subscription.
Also, Blizzard (as a company) is doing fine. It is extremely profitable and mostly due to World of Warcraft.
WoW is Profitable that’s for sure but not extremely…
Now call of duty is extremely Profitable as far as net income
Check out Activision Blizzard’s revenue metrics for World of Warcraft
It’s not anywhere near “net” profit as call of duty…
Top 2
10char
But look at gross then net…wow is expensive to upkeep…
Now I am not saying it’s not Profitable but it’s not extremely profitable
Expansions or, like, GOOD expansions? Because they could shove out fifty more expacs reusing assets and having mission tables and bar-filling progression grinds.