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World of Warcraft: 8 Million Players Now Online
GFulls
Member Posts: 478
World of Warcraft passes 8 million player mark worldwide. Read the official press release here.
Player population in North America now exceeds 2 million, while Europe and China pass the 1.5 million player and 3.5 million player marks, respectively.
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that World of Warcraft®, its subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), is now played by more than 8 million gamers around the world. World of Warcraft has also achieved new regional subscriber milestones, with more than 2 million players in North America, more than 1.5 million players in Europe, and more than 3.5 million players in China.
"We're ecstatic that the World of Warcraft community has continued to grow steadily since we launched the game," said Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment®. "This milestone wouldn't have been possible for us to achieve without the incredible support of our players. With the release of our expansion pack, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, coming next week, we're looking forward to welcoming more players to Azeroth and offering even more quality content for our community to enjoy."
Since debuting in North America on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft has become the most popular MMORPG around the world. Today, World of Warcraft is available in seven different languages and is played in North America, Europe, mainland China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
World of Warcraft will soon see the launch of its first expansion, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, which will be available in North America and Europe on January 16, 2007. The expansion will be available in Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Thailand the same week, with availability in mainland China and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau to be announced at a later date. The Burning Crusade will add a tremendous amount of new content to the game, including an entire new continent to explore; an increase in the level cap up to 70, complete with new talents and abilities; flying mounts; new quests, creatures, and items; new dungeons; two new playable races; a new profession; and more.
Read more about World of Warcraft here.
Comments
I dunno 6 million in China and the rest are spread throughout the rest of the world somehow doesn't impress me. Specially when you consider that the North American customers bring in as much as ALL of the China customers.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
With the expansion bringing back a lot of canceled accounts, they could conceivably top 10 million before summer...
How do you kill that which has no life?
Fuzzy math for the win!
"player", not "subscriber". Note a complete abstention of directly tieing in numbers to subscribers.
But who's kidding, good job Blizzard!
This equates to a modest estimate of 1.2billion US Dollars a year in subscription revenue. Doesn't anyone think there would be more attention on a single product that alledgedly brings in more then 15% of the projected global revenue from video games?
When a single product generates this type of revenue there's legistlature written due to it. Has anyone seen anything in the US that relates to or names World of Warcraft?
p.s. May 2005 Nancy McIntre (sp) from Lucas Arts announced in front of a packed audience that Star Wars Galaxies has sold over a million copies!
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
IronOre - Forging the Future
Blizzard is the only MMORPG company that actually the gives the formula of how they count. Here it is, it was buried deep in todays release article;
World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
That seems to be pretty clear what they count. Active accounts paid for within 30 days, new retail accounts still within their first thirty days, and pay as you go internet cafe accounts that have been logged in/used within the past thirty days. They do not count expired cancelled or banned accounts. They do not count inactive internet cafe accounts, they do not count free trial accounts. Overall it looks like a pretty good formula to get a reflection of the active playerbase.
Yes and No. WoW in China is leased to a Chinese game running company. Blizzard takes an upfront fee, plus a smaller portion of the subscription fees. The Chinese operator sets the end user fees and handles the billing.
In China WoW's payment model is not a flat fee subscription like in the US. It is a metered time model. Players pay x amount per minute/hour/whatever the agreed apon time unit is. This means that depending on the gamers playstyle they will either be paying substantially less than an American (the more casual or balanced players) or substantially more (The true Hardcore addicts). I think I read somewhere that it takes 5 days a week at roughly 8 hours a day to hit the NA monthly price in China.
The western world still has a "lead" though when you compare players in relation to a countries population size. 3.5 million out of 1+ billion people in China play compared to 2 million out of 300 million in the US.
Frostreaver Clan
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=The best bash.org quote ever=
Curt teh Juggler: our graduation ceremony was today, and right when some gamer nerd got his diploma, someone in the audience played the zelda "get item" music and he did the zelda spin-hold-out-item stance
Curt teh Juggler: it was quite possibly the most amazing thing ever.
That total isn't 8 million either. The point of my post was that with the majority of them reside in China and yet all of NA brings in more than that entire area. If fact the last financials that were posted about a month or so ago was saying they were losing money in China.
How much do they charge them anyway?
I still want to know if they got all these accounts and income why the heck do they have the slowest development of any MMO in existance? Don't tell me it's because they have "polished" software cause that isn't true. We waited 2 years for a LFG system that you can't even see everyone that is LFG or sort said list by class and level.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
Pwned.
Grats Blizzard!
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currentlyplaying:
age of conan
Maple Story claim 50 million too - helps if the game doesn't cost anything to buy or to play. If WoW was free to d/l and play, how many people do you think would play it?
That total isn't 8 million either. The point of my post was that with the majority of them reside in China and yet all of NA brings in more than that entire area. If fact the last financials that were posted about a month or so ago was saying they were losing money in China.
How much do they charge them anyway?
I still want to know if they got all these accounts and income why the heck do they have the slowest development of any MMO in existance? Don't tell me it's because they have "polished" software cause that isn't true. We waited 2 years for a LFG system that you can't even see everyone that is LFG or sort said list by class and level.
Your forgeting population numbers.
China = 1.3 Billion (3.5million subs)
North america = 0.5 Billion (2 million subs)
Europe = 0.7 Billion (1.5 million subs)
So if you factor in Population numbers you'll see why china has amost double the subs of north america and europe. Obviously a country with more population is goona have more players.
Yet together in a West vs China situation (WW3?) they are even. The other 1 million is spread around Australia/Newzealand and other Asia and african countries.
As to slow expansions, even blizz admit they were slow in bringing the expansion and said the next expansion wont take that long, the problem with blizzard is they dont rush things and wont realse products unless they are 100% happy, the expansion was put back twice becuase blizz wanted to work on it more, sign a good compnay if you ask me.
As to the new LFG system it sucks, no 1 I know uses it, bring back LFG channel pls, I will never use the system because i want to chose who to group with. and saying WoW is not polished... u crazy in the coconut, it the most bug free MMO out there.
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Blizz are prob the #1 in game quality, not 1 naff game (there will be haters) ever relased form them, then have a huge rep to live up to.
WoW's appeal is based on its bland perfection, not lots of features. Lots of features make the game hard to balance and polish, technically more demanding, both server side and importantly client side, and more difficult to learn. They decided to try to keep the game simple and its worked.
For example, the game doesn't have player housing, not even instanced housing. Personally, I consider that feature essential to being a complete or full MMORPG. But it has drawback, the client has to load those features everytime it passes by or all of your items furniture when you walk in. This is difficult for older / slower systems to do. Just ask anyone that tried to play SWG back in the day with less than a gig of ram. (when a gig was quite a bit).
Another feature I consider necessary to be a true MMORPG is extensive customization. Customization is another area WoW gets an F on. But its intentional. If each human could be a different size shape etc. that's more database information to store and hard for each client to each time you pass a character. If you have a slow as dirt computer your glad old Sticky the Orc is the exact same proportions that every other one them.
WoW doesn't have many features, but what little it does, it does very well.
To give a food analogy, WoW is like the perfect soda cracker. Full featured MMORPGs are like any delicousm, persishable, and exocitc food.