World of Warcraft Hits 10 Million Subscribers

technirvana writes "Blizzard Entertainment, owners of World of Warcraft, announced today that the game now has more than 10 million paying subscribers around the world. Online gameplay costs an average of $15 USD per month. Those 10 million paying subscribers include 5.5 million players in Asia, 2.5 million in the US and 2 million in Europe. The Warcraft brand was first introduced in 1994 and World of Warcraft was launched in 2001."

Comments

I wonder

[AndGodSed]

If they have stats as to operating systems used for gameplay... Would be interesting to see how many of those 10mil actually use Vista, XP, MacOS and Linux etc...

Re:I wonder

[klngarthur]

i would imagine yes. Warden (wow's anti-cheat spyware) has been known to flag players running wine as exploiters/botters. I don't believe blizzard intends to shut out linux users. At one point, i believe, there was a sticky on the forums detailing how to use wow with linux. Rather that flags go off when warden sets off alarms because it doesn't recognize its surroundings in linux. I have no idea if blizzard has rectified the issue, but i'm sure if they had the desire they could find out how many linux machines were running wow. Additionally i would be absolutely shocked if they didn't know the ratios of win xp/2k/vista and mac os machines running, that'd just be bad business.

I'm happy for Blizzard..

[bleh-of-the-huns]

However I am still not going back to the game.. I quit the game a while ago.... cold turkey... I played the game from day 1 in beta, I however quit just before the first expansion came out, I was done, as were many of my guild mates, raiding the same high end content week after week after week just became too much of a chore.

The same can be said for Everquest (I did not really get into eq2). The problem as I see it, is that they develop a game, in the lifecycle plan for the game, I am almost positive they already have a project plan for the expansion before the game is even initially released. And they release the game, with the mechanics that are designed to hopefully satisfy people till the expansion comes out. But they under estimate the users every time, within the first few months, possibly even weeks, you have groups of users that have maxed out their character level, and sure it fun getting shiny new toys for the first year, but it then becomes a chore, and is tedious, and at that point is where the game developer has failed. This is of course my opinion, but having played both everquest, and then wow, for many years (same high end raiding guild for both games), I believe I have some insight into the problems that can occur over time.

Returning players

[realsilly]

There is this massive influx of returning players. I can tell you that from seeing it happen in my own guild. At least 10 accounts have been re-activated in the last month. I can't explain why, other than people missed the friendships that have been made.

This is quite possibly a good reason for the 10 million mark reached.

Cha-Ching!

[Lally Singh]

Quick Math:
10 million * 15.00 * 12 = 1.8 billion a year
+ 10 million * 30 = 300 million a year for the box + expansions (I'm eyeballing this one, but Blizzard did say they wanted an expansion a year)

$2.1 billion. Not bad for a single game! Maybe someone more in-tune with the WoW world can tighten up my estimate of the price of the box + expansions. How much up front? How much for expansions? How frequently?

Frankly, WoW's success shows beyond /. and Kotaku: WoW is nearly a household name now. Congrats to Blizzard for bringing MMOGs to the mainstream.

Also,I love that Shatner commercial.

Re:Cha-Ching!

[paitre]

I would, personally, halve the monthly subscription cost to account for the somewhat lower amount paid by the Asian players.
I fully admit that it probably under-estimates Blizzard's income from WoW by doing that, tho. (IMO, the most realistic number is probably around 10/mo or so).

Still - they're pulling down over a billion a year between box sales and monthly fees.
*drool*

Re:So What?

[paitre]

Because in this case it's true.
Asian players -do- typically have a preference towards grind games (or more specifically - games where the time/reward ratio is -heavily- in favor of time). FFXI, for example, has a very large Asian (Japanese, specifically) playerbase. There are a lot of EU/NA players, as well, but the majority (IIRC) are JP. NOONE is going to contradict the statement that FFXI is anything but a huge grindfest and time sink (it takes literally a year or more to 'earn' the Epic weapons for each job if you don't purchase currency in quantity from other players running Dynamis).

I played FFXI for 3 years. I still twitch.

Re:How about taking some of that subscription mone

[Atomic6]

You'll definitely notice. The reduced amount of XP needed to level along with all the new mid-range quests makes hitting Outlands so much easier. Whatever you do, make sure to give Duskwallow a second chance. There is an exciting new questchain in Theramore that I won't spoil, and they even added roads to Tabetha's house, so she isn't so much of a pain-in-the-ass to find.

Population Perspective....

[HomeySmurf]

I was curious how this compared to various national populations, and this data may be a bit old, but... Countries by Sorted by Population This means that WoW has more players than 112 countries have people. Ten million is of course much larger than the populations of Vatican City, Tuvalu, Monaco, Luxembourg, etc. But also bigger than Uruguay, Costa Rica, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Austria, Laos, and many more.