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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
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.
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
World of Warcraft Hits 10 Million Subscribers
That must hurt...
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!
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.
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
...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.
maybe as a commercial model, but not as gaming experience. Using the same logic windows is the best operating system around Best music in late 90s and early 2000s was performed by Brittney Spears.
WoW has hit critical mass, and new players are not joining it because it's still the best game around, but because they want to know what's all the fuss about. If you never played an MMORPG, and you wanted to play one, which one would you pick? WoW, of course. But not because it IS the best game around but because it's the most played game around. You would use the 'well 10 million people can't be wrong' logic, in picking your first MMORPG.
That's classic example of herd mentality, not quality.
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!