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5.5 Million WoW Players, Lunar Festival

Posted by Zonk on from the that's-a-lot-of-orc-killing-europeans dept.

Gamasutra reports that World of Warcraft has hit another milestone in subscribers, with One Million European players and 5.5 Million players worldwide. From the article: "The figure of 1 million customers is more than four times the previously estimated size of the entire European MMORPG market. According to data from Media Control and GFK panels, plus internal studies and account data from Blizzard itself, the company is also claiming that World of WarCraft was the best selling full price PC game in Europe last year." All those players will have a new world event to look forward to at the end of the month, as RPG Vault gives a preview on the Lunar Festival due to be released on January 27th.

3 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Number of unsubscribers? by bradbeattie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd be interested in seeing statistics on the number of people that have unsubscribed from WoW as well. I doubt Blizzard would be willing to share that information, but it would certainly satisfy my statistical curiosities.

  2. Slightly bothered by this by falcon5768 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Despite playing the game myself I cant help but be slightly bothered by the potential dumbing down of the MMO market this could possibly cause. One of the reasons I loved UO and play FFXI now is because its NOT easy, its infact somewhat hard to play. WoW though I just jumped in and without much effort make a lot of gold and have really nice equips to the point there is really nothing seperating me from the rest of the 5 mil.

    WoW did a lot to make MMO's accessable to the masses, but Im starting to wonder, do we really want L337 Sp34k asshats and just about everyone getting the best armor possible with little to no effort? A great example of this is SWG. Even SE is making its next expansion much more accessable to the masses after making what I thought was the best expansion to a MMO, one where you actually had to put a little effort into playing it to get the most out of it.

    Maybe Im just too oldschool I guess, I miss the days of when you died it really ment you where dead, your body was looted and you started from scratch.

    --

    "Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."

    1. Re:Slightly bothered by this by bradbeattie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That's why I'd like Blizzard to make a few "hardcore" servers. If you die, you're dead. Make a new character. Instead of seeing about half of the population at level 60, we'd see fewer and fewer high level characters. Travelling alone or unprepared would be death. Just one or two servers like that. Please?