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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."
I've noticed a direct correlation with the amount of WoW subscribers and the amount I get laid.
Less competition for me? Let them play, boys, let them play!
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
2004.
..and making the game more interesting.
Once I hit 70, my desire to grind for 20 hours to get that shiny new +1 Int cloak gets a little tedious.
The Warcraft brand was first introduced in 1994 and World of Warcraft was launched in 2001.
World of Warcraft was announced in 2001, but was launched on November 23, 2004.
see The wikipedia entry.
And they said zombies weren't real!
There's one Asian player with 5.5 million gold farming accounts.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Only accounts for North America and European servers pay the regular subscription price. Blizzard licenses out WoW to local companies in the Asian markets. Typical subscription plans there are for X amount of hours per month, and in the case of China the average price is $3-4 USD/month. Of which I assume Blizzard only sees a small royalty from.
Ragnarok Online has 25+ million subscriber worldwide with 24 million being in asia(Gold farming is impossible so no farmers either...)
Blizzard is constantly rolling out new content for free - new dungeons, new raid zones, new quests, new factions... All sorts of new stuff. Compare this to something like old-school EverQuest where your money just kind of vanished and every single new addition was through a paid expansion pack.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
...there are going to be dozens of posts about how WoW sucks, and (game x) is so much better.
Maybe (game x) is better by some specific subjective metric, but in terms of the overall 'package', I'd have to say that in this case Adam Smith's measurement is the best objective general measure of value.
I think WoW is particularly strong in terms of ease-of-play, progression speed, reward vs. time, variety of experience, replayability, and yes, even balance. Other games might have advantages such as a better crafting system, better pvp, and better graphics but each of these involves a tradeoff that Blizzard has perhaps deliberately accepted in favor of more mass-market acceptance (in the above examples, I'd say the tradeoffs are learning curve, playability, and system requirements, respectively).
There are LOTS of specific things to complain about WoW, but commercial success on this scale is hard to dispute. They had no particular advantage in the marketplace compared to other developers (aside from a well-earned reputation), but they have come to utterly dominate the MMOG market to the extent that their 'ownership' of that market space has leaked into popular culture.
Now that WoW is so dominant, it has become the benchmark in ways nobody could have anticipated 5 years ago. They not only pull in more subscribers, they've transformed the "computer gaming" activity almost singlehandedly from nerdville to nearly-mainstream, particularly with 20-somethings and under.
Unfortunately that means they are also able to exert an influence (large, although I'd hesitate to say disproportionate) on other games - I for one believe that WotLK (the next expansion) has been done or nearly done since before the end of the year, and that they are waiting to unleash it a month or so before the 'next big competitor' (I believe Age of Conan) is released.
-Styopa
World of Warcraft Hits 10 Million Subscribers
That must hurt...
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 am a little curious about those numbers.
From what I have seen, the use of multiple accounts by single users is not all that uncommon. Blizzard doesn't seem to actually delete accounts after they've been deactivated. If someone cancels their subscription, their account name, their toons, everything remains (much like AOL's method of fudging their numbers). So of those 10m subscribers, I'd be curious to find out if those are individuals, or simply active subscribers, or in fact accounts created but not currently subscribed counted in that total.
Blizzard is constantly rolling out new content for free
I'm so tired of people making such statements. You get ZERO new content for FREE. You pay a monthly subscription which funds new development, among other things. You PAID for the new content. It is not free!
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.
To be honest, the current end-game isn't bad. They've got enough avenues in there to suit most degrees of committment to the game and general temperaments, even if some of these are more developed than others.
For the casual players, there are the five-man instances - first the regular versions and then, when you've got your gear from those, the heroics. Heroics are an interesting twist; they aren't, as I was expecting, just tuned-up versions of the regular instances. In many cases, despite the superficial similarities, they need very different tactics. There's also a nice progression here; a group in all blues wouldn't have too many problems with Botanica or Black Morass, while even full-epic groups can find Durnholde Keep or Arcatraz tricky.
Battlegrounds are a popular way of killing time for the casual PvPers. Even if you have awful gear and suck at them, you will still get your rewards - it'll just take a bit longer. The relative ease with which you can get your PvP rewards, combined with the low time input required, has led to them being branded "welfare epics". Of course, they don't really stand up against the high-end raiding or arena epics, but I know plenty of casuals who are content with this. Over time, the lower end arena drops get pushed down into Battleground rewards anyway.
The hardcore PvPers have Arena, which really is a cut-throat environment (and is the only form of PvP in the game where getting killed is any more than a momentary annoyance). Ironically, it doesn't actually take particularly long each week - the main challenge here is putting in the time to get the gear so you can participate effectively. The top end season 3 arena gear is almost on a par with the top-end raiding epics, although with the new personal rating requirements for some pieces, it isn't necessarily easy to get.
Finally, you have raiding, which is the favorite hardcore PvE end-game activity. This is where, to my mind, Blizzard have really made strides since the Burning Crusade hit. Rather than having a 40 man raid as the entry-level point, a la Molten Core, Karazhan was a nice, relatively easy 10 man raid, which many non-hardcore guilds were able to switch to quite quickly at level 70. With the addition of Zul'Aman in the 2.3 patch, you can more or less work your way through about 2/3rds of the end-game gear progression without ever setting foot in a 25-man raid. For the genuinely hardcore who do push into the 25 man raiding scene, there's a definite progression tree with 6 different instances to work through. The difference from most of the pre-expansion end-game is dramatic and impressive.
In short, Blizzard have delivered as reasonable an end-game experience as could reasonably be expected and continue to add new content at a decent pace. At the same time, they've refined the experience for lower level players and those levelling up alts, with the new Dustwallow Marsh quests and the dramatic reduction of the amount of xp needed to level up (you can level 1-60 in WoW now faster than you can in the fully-offline Final Fantasy XII). Of course, things are far from perfect, and I can see a few dark clouds on the horizon.
The most significant of these is that, as a former Final Fantasy XI player (where the level cap never went above 75), I must confess to being a bit worried by Blizzard's intention to slam the level cap up with 10 with every new expansion. What this essentially means is that any end-game gear you acquired before the expansion hit is immediately obsolete. Green is suddenly the new Purple. Effectively, this amounts to a complete end-game reboot every 12-18 months. While beneficial in some respects (shaking up the scene, letting newcomers get a foot on the ladder), in the long term it is just going to drive people away and kill the end-game scene for a few months before an expansion hits.
"The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards."
What part of "excludes expired or cancelled subscriptions" don't you understand? Subscribers are people who are currently paid up to play the game, or just bought it and are in the free month.
People keep spewing off this nonsense about how the numbers are fake with absolutely no evidence to back it up. The game really is as popular as they say it is. Anybody hitting a queue while trying to login in the last month despite there being something like 200 servers in the US alone.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
It's not really a good idea to just up and abandon an old MMO to go create a new one thereby invalidating 10 million subscribers hard work and effort. Anywyas both WoW and Eve (The biggegst MMOs I know of) are hardly the game they were when they were first released and are constantly changing and expanding.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Quick Math:
/. and Kotaku: WoW is nearly a household name now. Congrats to Blizzard for bringing MMOGs to the mainstream.
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
Also,I love that Shatner commercial.
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Title should read:
Games: World of Warcraft Hits 10 Million Virgins
WoW is a friggin' phenomenon that crosses so many demographics unlike any other game I've played over my 25 years as a consumer. My guilds have had husbands and wives playing together, parents and children, mothers playing with babies on their laps (hi Bitters!), and even grandparents. I'm a lifelong addict and I had to FORCE myself to cancel my account to focus on renovating my house.
Yet, there's still some confusingly high number of negative posts on Slashdot from people slamming the game. Yes, it has flaws, but nothing even close to other games I've played. My BF2142 installation crashes with BS memory and driver errors about 1/4 rounds. As a software engineer, I appreciate the design behind the game; efficient bandwidth usage, very few bugs which are addressed very quickly for a game, the well thought-out UI design and API, efficient code, a user-friendly interface. Blizzard has done a remarkable job on so many levels.
Maybe they're pissed that no one wants to play D&D anymore, who knows? But, please, at least concede that WoW is a GREAT game!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!