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World of Warcraft Hits 10 Million Subscribers

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that's-a-lotta-bored-paladins dept.

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."

4 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I wonder by klngarthur · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Returning players by realsilly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
  3. Cha-Ching! by Lally+Singh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  4. Re:So What? by paitre · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.