WoW hits 1.5 million subscribers

Back home from my trip to the US, I arrive in the middle of the scheduled server maintenance. So I still can't get my WoW fix, and read the game news instead. There is a Blizzard press release announcing that World of Warcraft has now passed the 1.5 million subscribers mark. 800k in the US, 500k in Europe, and the rest in Korea, although the numbers there are murky as usual, because online games are nearly exclusively played in internet cafes over there, so the "subscribers" are the internet game room owners, and the players buy slices of time from them.

If we just look at North America and Europe, WoW is the single most successful game by a wide margin in both continents. Not bad for a first try at doing MMORPG from Blizzard. Although the experience with single-player games and Battle.net certainly helped.

This is going to cause some profound changes in the MMORPG industry. You don't need much math skill to multiply 1.5 million with the price of the box, or the cost of the monthly subscription, and see that World of Warcraft is a gold mine. And although the first wave of "EQ clones" wasn't always successful, the second wave of "WoW clones" is sure to hit us in two or three years. Even if not all of these games will be good, they will at least provide us players with more choice. The success of WoW will also affect games already in development. Game developers will try to analyze what it is that makes WoW such a bestseller, and then try to incorporate these features into their own games. Look forward to a lot of quest-based games, and more "accessibility", however you want to define that.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:00 AM Permanent Link