In an interview with Blizzard chief operating officer Paul Sams last week, Sams said he's confident that Blizzard's new, upcoming MMO won't "cannibalize" WoW's player base.

As we mentioned earlier this week, Blizzard is making an appearance at Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) this weekend, to showcase more WoW: Cataclysm content, as well as new Diablo III and StarCraft II demos and news. We can hope for some new screenshots, videos and news about the upcoming WoW expansion to come out of PAX this year, but at the very least, we should get a better look at the Goblin and Worgen starting zones and gameplay.

Blizzard's appearance at PAX will provide the first round of new World of Warcraft news and info since BlizzCon 2009, when it officially announced Cataclysm. It's probably too much to hope that the company might finally reveal a teaser about its top-secret, "next-gen" MMO; a subject that made the news earlier this week in a Wired.com interview with Blizzard's chief operating officer, Paul Sams.

In the interview, Sams told Wired's Tracey John that the new MMO will be "significantly different" from WoW, and that it won't be something Warcraft fans will feel like they will have to choose between. WoW's life expectancy is also brought up; it's an old topic receiving new attention after the game-changing details of Cataclysm broke. Will the upcoming expansion prove to be the key to WoW's continued survival? And as Wired's interview points out, will Blizzard's secret MMO "cannibalize" WoW's player base when it finally hits the shelves?

World of Warcraft's viable lifespan is an issue that's been in the back of many fans' minds recently. Even though it's still the world's most successful and popular MMO, WoW is aging quickly in a market of ever-evolving games. It's had to compete to stay alive; modern-day WoW looks and feels much different than the original, released back in 2004. Patches and expansions have made drastic changes to the way we play, and new zones and content have kept the MMO chugging along, offering even old-school players new experiences and fresh encounters.

Still, how long can a game survive on new content alone? We're still looking at most of the same graphics from 2004, traversing the same beaten paths and fighting the same familiar battles while we level up alts. As early as 2006, players began wondering if we would ever see a World of Warcraft sequel, or some sort of"WoW 2.0." Especially during the last couple years, players have wondered if new-content expansions like The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King might be the extent of WoW's "adulthood."

Blizzard can keep adding more content and zones to explore, with new dungeons to crawl through and unique bosses to fight; but at the end of the day, it's still just adding material to an old product. And that's why the developers haven't stopped at new content; they've tinkered and tweaked the game's fundamental gameplay mechanics throughout the past five years, via patches and expansions. To stay alive, WoW has to continually fight for its top spot on the scoreboard, often succumbing to hotly-debated player requests and innovative ideas.

Before the rumors of Cataclysm hit the scene, the concept of WoW's lifespan was still being discussed in forums and blogs, with no real answer of what might be the game's saving grace. After news of the expansion was confirmed, it seemed obvious to many players that Cataclysm might just be the fountain of youth that WoW desperately needed. Most of the original content from 2004 is finally being revisited, and drastic changes are coming to the world of Azeroth. Blizzard announced the Old World would be retro-fitted to allow flying mounts, as well as many other changes and improvements to the game's deepest-grown roots.

Almost everything about this expansion seems as if it were designed for the sole purpose of responding to five years' worth of feedback and player experience, and to breathe new life into a game that might have otherwise had just one or two years left to really shine. In the Wired.com interview with Paul Sams, Blizzard's chief operating officer told the publication that it wasn't planning to abandon WoW anytime soon:

We're going to continue to support this game. You can't go and make this game available and get this many people interested and excited about it, and then say, "You know, I guess we're all done." Because they've made a commitment to us and we've made a commitment to them, and we intend on fulfilling our commitment, which is to keep making this game bigger and better. So long as people continue to be interested. There are no indications whatsoever that suggests that they're not still interested. It's quite the contrary, you saw through the opening ceremonies, and there were a few people that were enthusiastic. So we're going to continue to go after it. Now I really feel like this new expansion is going to set the universe on its ear, literally and figuratively. It's going to be quite fun.

But another question about WoW's future remains; how will Blizzard's upcoming, "next-gen" MMO impact WoW's subscriber base? Ironically, is Blizzard a threat to itself? Is its own, upcoming MMO the only thing that could possibly dethrone its flagship title? Sams doesn't think so. According to the interview, he's confident that Blizzard's upcoming MMO will be so unique that it won't "cannibalize" the WoW player base, as Wired.com puts it:

[…] what I could tell you is that we're intending to create a game experience that is unlike anything that has ever been done before. Something that I think takes things far beyond what anyone has imagined and certainly anything anyone has executed. I think a lot of people love this product, WoW, and anticipate that they'll continue to love it and continue to want to play it. When you think about another MMO, if you look at it and say, "Well, you have this game and it's this amount of money, and you have this game and it's this amount of money and you have this amount of time, how do those co-exist?" My feeling is, on the business side, there's always a way to make things co-exist because you know you start looking at, "I want you to be in the Blizzard universe of games." So you can look at it from the perspective of, "Oh maybe there are different programs where you can have access to all of the things or a certain amount of things." You just don't know, and we don't either.

These are brainstorming types of conversations because we anticipate the question, and we're concerned about it. Is it going to cannibalize or not? And the good news is, I think the game is going to be significantly differentiated enough. Such that, you're not going to feel like they're one in the same resulting in that you have to pick or choose. My feeling is that they're distinct enough to where you're going to say, "Okay, I have all my friends over here. I dig this, I have a lot of time and energy in this, I've got these characters and my guild, and this that and the other." So I have connectivity there, and I want to continue that connectivity. But man, I think, "Well, this is awesome, and I want to go check this out too."

Sams adds that even if players do end up choosing between the two MMOs, there are much worse problems for a company to face. I suppose he's right; as long as players are sticking with Blizzard instead of abandoning the company's products altogether, it's a win-win scenario. But ideally, I don't think Blizzard is alone in hoping that players get enough value out of its games to subscribe to them all. Personally, I'd much rather keep paying a subscription for a game that the company is continually devoted to. If Blizzard manages to keep WoW innovative and fun for another five years, I don't think the majority of players will have a problem subscribing to both of its MMOs at once.

"We have very loyal following of gamers that have been with us for a long time," Sams told Wired, toward the end of the interview. "They love this franchise and they love this company because, I like to believe, we haven't let them down."