It says 12 million current subscribers, meaning that 1 person with 5 accounts still counts as 5 subscribers to the count.

What that means is that there is currently 12 million accounts with an active game-time, using credit card, or game time cards.



Looks like WotLK in China is a good thing

I think they mean individuals. To head off any comments about their definition of subscriber, here it is, directly from the press announcement:

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.

@mingdi9 - That's true, but it doesn't say anything about one valid subscriber with multiple accounts. So, people who dual box or even 5-box, and pay for 5 separate subscriptions would count as five accounts.

There's not that many people out there that can afford/want to do that though, so a large proportion of the 12 million should still be individuals.

It's probably by Battle.net account (at least over here). So if you keep all your WoW accounts on separate Battle.net accounts - which is doable - you'd be 5 'people'.

Anyways, glad to see this number out, can bring a bit of a hush to all the "Oh the 11 million number is old people are quitting left and right and the game is dying" whining. Not sure why anyone would take the time to whine about that, but sadly they do.

@Saeadame

It doesn't say they are counting the number of separate subscriptions. The description says "individuals who have paid a subscription fee," which, logically, should also include individuals who pay five subscription fees. Admittedly I have never tried to do this, so I wouldn't know if it's standard practice to pretend you're five different people in Blizzard's internal systems, each paying one subscription fee, when you're multiboxing.