WoW Reaches 1.5 Million Subscribers

Alarash writes "Blizzard just announced that its latest video game (and first MMO), World of Warcraft reached 1.5 millions of subscribers world-wide. Blizzard is now second only to NCSoft (over 5 millions users spread on Lineage, Lineage II and City of Heroes) according to the MMOG Chart."

Comments

No wonder every developer wants an MMO

[SmallFurryCreature]

Imagine if you can manage to keep a million+ people pay you 10 bucks each and every month. Yes MMO games are big and expensive to develop AND they have recurring cost in hardware/net/support but WOW. That is some serious cash blizzard has coming in. 1.5 million boxes plus a couple of months subscription.

Will it last? Who knows. Sad fact is that lineage 1-2 has so far been the only one who could measure its audience in the millions. None of the big western ones have passed a million before. I know only 1 person who plays it and he already seems to be getting bored with it. Also the promised but delayed content seems an all to well known mantra from other hyped but ultimately disappointing games.

A lot of people who never wanted to touch an MMO game before are playing WoW but is this going to last? Every month the bill will be coming in and when most players are already at the top level what else are they going to do?

Can someone answer me this? Is it possible to play without having a credit card? Sony has global collect for us europeans wich works very well but all other MMO games I looked at seem convinced the entire world has credit cards.

Excuse me?

[Inoshiro]

"But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc."

I've been playing it for over a week. Seriously (I have a couple of characters, the highest of which is level 20). In that time I've not had maintenance done on my realm, any unexplained lag surges, client crash bugs. The only thing I did get was a bugged node where looting something (I kept being attacked while trying to loot, causing a dialog to come up, then be dismissed immediately) which led to me being locked in loot mode once I did get into it, but a quick logout/in fixed that. There was no damage done.

In terms of new content, I've already spend a good 30 some hours playing it this week. I've not gotten into very much of the content. I've never raided an instanced dugeon, for example. With the constant number of quests I have in my quest queue (whose max size is 20, and whose load seems to remain around 16-18), there's always something more to do. To really experience all the content in the game, you'd have to play through on both Alliance and Horde sides with a couple of characters all the way to 60, and that's probably an entire's year's worth of content (considering what you need to level as you get higher). I think complaints about content would be valid in a year, not a couple of months after its launch.

Most of your complaints seem pretty cookie-cutter. Yea, Blizzard didn't anticipate the demand that they received, but I haven't had any problems recently, nor have any of my friends who've played right from the beginning.

Re:Excuse me?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been playing for just over a week? Sorry, but you're in no position to make any meaningful argument one way or the other.

So you haven't seen any maintenance downtime or lag? Well, the extent of those problems is very server-specific. Some servers seem to have extensive issues, while others are relatively problem-free. So maybe you were one of the lucky ones. But I think it's even too soon to say that. If your server would go down for an entire day every 2 weeks, I'd consider that extremely unacceptable. The fact that you could play on that server for over a week at a time without downtime would be little consolation. The point is, come back when you've played long enough to experience the issues over the long haul, not just when you've had one good week.

As for content, I've played numerous MMOGs and they always seem to have huge worlds and tons of content when you first start; that's why you're playing the game to being with. So it's no big surprise that from your perspective as a new player the content seems almost endless. What the parent poster was saying is that once you play it for awhile, you start to realize that the world is pretty small and the content is fairly shallow. Many people, even relatively casual MMO players, have already reached level 60, so I disagree with your statement that complaints about lack of content aren't valid for a year. People have already seen and done everything! And once you play for awhile longer, you'll realize that just because there may be different quests for alliance and horde and different quests for level 20 and level 50 characters, doesn't mean that you're really enjoying vastly different content. The quests are very repetitive and very cookie-cutter. What I've realized after building an alliance character to level 60 and a horde character to level 43 is that by the time you reach level 30 on one character, you've really seen everything. After that is just more of the same. Sure the names change, the scenery changes, the levels change, but you're not doing much different. Not that this is any different from any other MMOG, but WoW is not nearly as revolutionary as some people make it out to be.

I think it's impressive that they've built such a large customer base so quickly, and it is a decent game for awhile, but I just don't see it having any real staying power. If they don't start adding more content real quick, I think they'll start seeing a huge decline very soon. Every day more people are reaching level 60 and more people are coming to the same conclusion as me. However great the game is, if people don't have anything left to do, they'll leave.

Lineage

[Lord_Dweomer]

Can someone please explain the appeal of Lineage to me? I played the original, and while I liked the anime style graphics, there was zero variety between characters, no customization really, it was laggy as hell, and not very exciting. Yet it has a MASSIVE subscriber base.

Why does it do so well overseas as opposed to other games? Is the new Lineage that much better than the old one?