World of Warcraft hits 10 million subscribers
by Mike Schramm 
Jan 22nd 2008 at 1:30PM
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?
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?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items, Economy, Wrath of the Lich King
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
JR Jan 23rd 2008 1:16PM
I wonder how many of these are from Latin America. I see a lot of them playing in the US servers.
kevan Jan 22nd 2008 1:42PM
Honestly, the best thing they can do is keep rolling out the expansions and milk the heck out of this thing!
I'd be pretty happy with 10 million people paying me 14.99 a month(roughly.)
I mean...that's only 150,000,000....every....month...
And I'm sure that figure is a little high.
makishima Jan 22nd 2008 2:01PM
Yes they make a ton of money off of the game, but how much do you think they pay each month out of that money for the games bandwidth, server maintenance, and employees who continue to work on new content and fix/balance current content? Yes they still make a healthy profit, but they also shell out quite a bit each month to ensure that those 10+ million subscribers have a smooth and reliable experience.
kevan Jan 22nd 2008 2:34PM
Of course they do, there will always be overhead. Remember this is Blizzard though. They've had more then a few hit titles which has most likely landed them a few good connections in the world. There is no way of us knowing what they have to account for each month or year, but I'm betting it's no where near the roughly 2 billion dollars they pull in each year from subscriptions alone. That's not even accounting for merchandise or other misc income.
Liel Jan 22nd 2008 2:46PM
Barely a third of that number pay 15 dollars a month, Blizzard has already said a big if not half of the player population is from Asia who can use prepaid time cards that count down on a credit system
I wish we had something like that in the US but that would kill profits since a large portion of the wow community does not play a lot.
Slarti Jan 22nd 2008 2:55PM
Well, those in china pay like 0.06 $ per hour for WoW, and they only pay for the time they actually play. And since those are a big slice of the 10 million playerbase, the actual income is way lower for Blizzard.
Nevertheless, there's still a 40% profit from WoW (at least that's the figure I remember...)
faradhim Jan 22nd 2008 1:49PM
In Asia the subscription of WOW is by game card so they have to pay by the hour! Ouch!
===================
Read my wow blog: http://doctorsofphilosophy.blogspot.com/
supun Jan 22nd 2008 1:50PM
How about a free month to celebrate it? =p
Razhlok Jan 22nd 2008 1:49PM
I'd like to think that WoW has reached its limit, but, who knows. Look at the rest of the MMO market, before and after WoW. Most MMOs who could hold on to 100K-200K subscribers was deemed a success. It also appeared that most MMOs would plateau one year into their life and kind of maintain for a long peroid of time. WoW has just kept on rising and growing; adding new subscribers and retaining its current subscribers.
Perderedeus Jan 22nd 2008 6:40PM
They should indeed start kicking something back to their players. A month of free game time would be an amazing gesture. Or, at the very least reward some of the early adopters who picked up the game at launch and around the 2004/2005 holiday season. Perhaps a piece of loot akin to the items acquired via the trading card game... fun 'toys' or costumes or even mounts that have no real impact on the game beyond being cosmetic.
matt Jan 22nd 2008 2:55PM
if you look at these numbers it does show what many of us have thought for a long time numbers are going down, but mostly in the US 2.5 million seems like its way down. Not that there is anything else out there but Asia cares a lot more about this games than we do
George M. Jan 22nd 2008 2:04PM
More good news. Age of Conan Delayed (Again)
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, has been pushed back to a different launch date, yet again. Previously slated to hit stores on March 5, Age of Conan is now arriving in May this year. Here's the word from Funcom:
The highly anticipated MMO receives 8 more weeks of development, allowing Funcom to deliver a more polished MMO experience when the game launches on the 20th of May 2008. Despite great feedback on vital aspects like immersion, fun factor and the exciting combat system, the management of Funcom has decided to polish the game even more. Eight weeks of development work is therefore added to stress game systems and polish the game further leading up to launch.
We may get WoTLK and AoC at the same time this year.
niko Jan 22nd 2008 2:29PM
Honestly, if Blizz wanted to just about kill AoC from the start, they'd have Wrath done at the same time AoC is released.
Expansions have a way of bringing back old players, and while AoC is really, really pretty, WoW is quite polished. New content brings all the boys to the yard, and I think Blizz is like, "damn right, it's better than ya'lls".
Corrine Jan 22nd 2008 2:39PM
I imagine the release of WoW Russia later this year will be quite the population boost. The run to 11 million might be short.
Mark Kemperman Jan 22nd 2008 4:27PM
A chance for the Russian mob to try gold farming ventures :)
Liel Jan 22nd 2008 2:48PM
Expansions are a good way to get a lot of old players back though, I quit a few months ago and a few guys at work did also recently
Pingmeister Jan 22nd 2008 3:07PM
Looking forward to see how WoW does against some upcoming MMORPGs.
I think the key will not be better graphics but innovative gameplay. Perhaps Conan's new combat style will be the thing to do it. We'll see.
Regardless, even if a WoW-killer DOES show up it will be a long while before folks start abandoning their hard-earned levels in any great numbers.
Dave Jan 22nd 2008 3:30PM
Statistics are a fine art of interpretation for some, and literal truth for others.
You're clearly looking at the literal "numbers are up, that must equal success!" view of things, which in some cases is good enough, but in practice is a very bad thing to do when you're attempting to accurately predict future success.
Yes, the game has 5.5 million people in Asia playing now, but against what competition and how has their playtime been correlating to the releases of other games, and how do they count those 5.5 million people when accounts aren't monthly subscriptions? Is that 5.5 million people have created accounts, 5.5 million have played within the last month or last year or what metric exactly is that covering? Asian games are on a pre-paid per-hour schedule, not a monthly recurring fee. Clearly, people in monthly fee land aren't terribly interested in keeping an active account that they're not playing with, but an hourly pre-paid service costs you nothing to keep alive forever and ever if you want. Asian totals can go up to some magically infinite number if you don't discount people who aren't actually playing.
I'm of the opinion that compared to other games out right now and historically, WoW isn't exactly as good as some people want to think as far as the amount of players in the US/Europe. I'm willing to bet that the numbers are on the decline in the US, but hit a nice rebound with 2.3 and/or the holidays where people may have been bored and picked it back up or got a gamecard/expansion for xmas, whatever.
Further, 5.5 million in Asia isn't THAT impressive considering Lineage had 3 million subs before WoW was out at all. (2003) That was miles and miles above the average MMO population in the US, so there was clearly a very very large gaming population in Asia already. Give it some more years and with the expanding economy in China... you have to figure that the potential numbers are way higher. The comparatives in the US would be that the most popular game in the same time frame was Everquest with 500,000, and 2 years later WoW had several million. Has the Asian gaming populace picked up on WoW as quickly as the US population did? Not exactly, otherwise we'd be seeing a 15mil+ worldwide figure, even if the numbers are padded a bit by the difference in subscription models.
So again, WoW is the big dog... but is the population really healthy or has significant churn set in? I personally think it's the latter, but of course Blizzard doesn't have any interest in releasing numbers that can't be easily interpreted as anything other than "everything's awesome, nothing bad here, no sir!".
Eternalpayn Jan 22nd 2008 4:15PM
Just like with US timecards, it's people who have played within 30 days.
Tiago Magalhães Jan 23rd 2008 6:07AM
If you care to read the press release you'll see that the metric used in Asia is people that have logged on in the last 30 days.
And you go on trying to make a point on how big the mmo population was in Asia compared to the United State's in 2003. Only thing it says is Asia discovered mmos before the US. Big Woop.
You're really grasping at straws if that's the best you can come up with to downplay this milestone.
Then again, what would a wow comment thread would be without someone annoucing the End of the World is uppon us? ;)