World of Warcraft Hits 7 Million Subscribers
by Elizabeth Harper 
Sep 7th 2006 at 8:30AM
Wednesday morning at the Austin Game Conference it was announced that World of Warcraft has hit 7 million active subscribers world-wide. And while the number doesn't surprise me - as we've yet to see an MMO present a serious challenge to WoW's dominance of the genre - such large figures are rather staggering. Despite all of the technical issues and player complaints, the game's popularity has continued to grow on a large scale. (The game only announced it hit 6 million active subscribers at the beginning of March, this year.) So congratulations, Blizzard, on another million players!
Filed under: Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
synack Sep 7th 2006 9:33AM
This is good news. Yes there have been performance issues and complaints abound, but to think that Blizzard is doing nothing about this is silly.
Blizzard has said on many occasions that the popularity of WoW surprised even them. They didn't plan to grow so quickly and are experiencing major growing pains and the end result is spotty performance of an otherwise amazing product.
In the coming months all of these performance issues will be a thing of the past as they continue to build out and upgrade more and more hardware.
ILT @ ShadowSong-EU Sep 9th 2006 5:16AM
Oh yes, getting disconnected every few minutes in AV/WSG/AB and dozens a times per day just while standing in IronForge is something we have to be "patient" as Blizzard uses in every answer to complain.
7M subscribers paying monthly fee makes them company capable of buying all needed - from infrastructure to competent ppl. Seems they lack both.
As of current it seems that EU servers are again going down - not possible to login anymore.
Rockman Sep 7th 2006 6:23PM
they need to fix the oceania servers badly! they are over crowded and maint falls in our prime time, there are alot of other problems, see the wow forums for our thread.(it links to an Australian pc mag which wrote an article on all the problems for oceania players)
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17502187&sid=1
pot Sep 7th 2006 11:18AM
its neat to think that out of 7 million people, i'm the best frost mage of them all.
shawiiing Sep 7th 2006 1:02PM
i wish my gross income was that much each month.... 7mil * 14.95= 104,650,000.00 from subscriptions alone o.O
Swiftlydead Sep 7th 2006 1:11PM
man that picture is so retarded -- alliance folk are really, really nubbish. You'd NEVER see that crap hordeside.
Baranokc Sep 7th 2006 1:54PM
Thank you Swiftlydead ... and amen.
Relik Sep 7th 2006 3:14PM
shawiiing, don't forget that some other countries pay different amounts to play. I believe that Canada pay's something like 19.99 / mo.
Truth Sep 7th 2006 3:04PM
I have seen that picture on the horde side as well. Go Druids!
Scott Sep 7th 2006 4:22PM
relik wtf are you smoking lol in canada we pay 14.95 usd
Bobbo Sep 7th 2006 4:27PM
Most of the Chinese subscribers pay at a much lower hourly rate (about 5-6 cents per hour) instead of monthly, so the gross income number doesn't quite hold up, but it's still a bunch.
alex_n Sep 7th 2006 5:16PM
Roughly 16.6456 cad. Dollar sure done fell or the Canadian whatsis sure done rose.
Chronos Sep 8th 2006 2:24AM
I've played and seen MMOs that were hyped up so much not even scratch the surface of what WoW has so it doesnt surprise me one bit that they have 7 million players. And the great thing is that its Blizzards first attempt at a game like this (although stuff like online starcraft, WC and Diablo 2 helped alot).
The Matrix Online for example had a huge amount of potential. Had 3 movies to back it up with a interesting and action filled story and even offered up a ton of new idea's for gameplay and storytelling. Fell flat on its face because it was rushed out of beta, Horrible(in such a way that it blows away any problem WoW has)server quality, Lag out the the ears when there are only about 10 people in a zone, crashes left and right, Zones completely closing down for no reason at all, boring repeditive leveling, poor (and repeditive) production and combat systems. Warner Bros had to sell it to sony just to break somewhere close to even on it and its still a horrible game.
FFXI was a great game and a great challange and is still going really strong but it felt so LOOOOONNNNGGGG to really get any where of worth with almost no story or interesting events to really take part in unless you were capped.. If I was still playing that game i would still probably be no where near capp and in a constant never-ending grind to get a quarter of a level.
Theres been others, but those are the only 2 of worth to comment on.. Grats to Blizzard on the 7 mill mark