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

Character transfers

[Lobishomen]

Blizzard also recently started offering the first batch of selective server transfers.

Blizzard Character Transfer FAQ.

People from high population servers are being given the option of a transfer to a Blizzard selected lower population server free with gear. This isn't the "Pick any server" transfer people were hoping for, but it should help ease out the congestion on the high load servers.

That and there's a huge new content patch coming off the test server in a few days. Things in the game are looking good. Good news for those of us still hopelessly addicted.

flash-bang

[blunte]

1.5 million players is impressive.

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.

WoW may grow more, but I believe it will retract in subscriber numbers within the year. While the game world seems large at first, it really is fairly small. There are only so many places to go and things to kill. Ultimately you end up with a server full of level 60 players who are bored out of their minds. Sure they can roll another char and play it up, but even that gets old.

WoW promised to offer new content frequently, but that's not been delivered. Whether the content has gotten delayed due to constant server/network issues is not known to the public, but what is known is that features that were promised long ago have yet to appear in the game. But of course, great things are Coming Soon!

WoW will be a success overall, but the first year will remain bumpy. Us early adopters didn't begin to get what we expected, so many of us have already left.

And for any people who reply to this with comments about "every other game has had launch issues", save it. I've played a good many of other MMORPGs, and most of them from the day they opened (or the beta before). WoW's rocky start (server/network problems) is unacceptable.

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.