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World of Warcraft hits 11 million subscribers worldwide
Even in the middle of zombies, nerfs, and Death Knights, World of Warcraft has continued to grow. Blizzard announced today that World of Warcraft has achieved 11 million subscribers. To help with perspective, that's as many people as had been employed by the construction industry last year, or just slightly under the population of Greece. When WoW hit 10 million back in January, Blizzard acknowledged how big the holiday season had been for them. Now consider that we're going into a new holiday season with a brand new expansion on the way. Even if other games are looking to get a piece of the action, we should expect Blizzard to keep steamrolling with their great success. Word of mouth from the recent zombie event might be exciting older players to return, and programs like Recruit-a-Friend will keep growing their active base. We should expect to see the 12 million landmark sometime in 2009. WoW had hit 9 million subscribers back in July of 2007. Like we said, 10 million subscribers was reached in January of 2008. It took a little longer to grow from 10 to 11 than it did to get from 9 to 10, but if they keep up this rate, we should see the 12 million announcement around February or March.
WoW and the PC gaming market
With over 10 million subscribers, World of Warcraft commands a pretty hefty chunk of the PC gaming market. Stopping by my local Best Buy, I asked their Geek Squad members to simply: "Show me the machines for WoW." One guy smiled, nodded, and took me to what he called "the WoW rack.""These are the machines," he promised me, "that'll get you through the game." According to my Geek Squad advisor, there's been more than a few memos in the store about which machines to recommend for World of Warcraft. "Corporate wants to be sure," Brian told me, "that you people can get Warcraft machines right out of the box."Best Buy isn't alone in this preparedness. AMD Game! is a branding label that, in theory, recommends the best-of-the-best, all according AMD. They prescribe a set of base, minimum requirements for a computer, and then run that box through a series of games to be sure the game plays the way it's supposed to play. If the system passes muster, then the system is allowed to stamp itself with the coveted AMD Game! label. And, yup: World of Warcraft is certainly on that list.And since the World of Warcraft XPS sports an nVidia card -- you can be pretty tootin' sure that gets tested as well. While the XPS still costs a little more than most might pay, it's branded, toyed-out the wazoo, and all about WoW. WoW: Im in ur PC market, designin' ur boxes.[Via Gamers Hell]
Hardcore Casual on (un)reasonable expectations
There's a good post over on Hardcore Casual concerning the use of World of Warcraft as a yardstick of success in the MMO industry. While we generally agree that using a game like WoW -- which by no means was expected to get this big -- as your goal for success is a bit of a pipe dream. We have to disagree with the post's claim that the movie and music industry doesn't try to do this as well.Movie studios try to recreate the Harry Potter movies' success all the time and the music industry has also been busy trying to recreate the popularity of various bands for a while now. We guess our point is that this sort of behavior isn't just in the massively game industry, it's in pretty much every industry. It's human nature, really.
World of Warcraft hits 10 million subscribers
Well it didn't happen within 2007 as quite a few people predicted, but World of Warcraft has done it-- Blizzard has announced that their massively multiplayer game has hit ten million subscribers worldwide. Asia is the biggest market at the moment, with more than 5.5 million players, as compared to North America's 2.5 million and 2 million subscribers in Europe. Blizzard also says the past holiday season was a big one for them-- they picked up "thousands of new and returning players" in the past few months.Here's a world population chart for comparison-- for perspective, Blizzard's game currently has a (paying) population about half the size of Australia. While 10 million is impressive to say the least (this game has already cemented itself a place in history as one of the most popular games ever made), just how far can they go from here? Will Wrath of the Lich King be able to bring more players out of the woodwork, or is Blizzard reaching critical mass in terms of how much attention they can attract? Will we be posting in another year that they've broken 11 million, or more?
