World of Warcraft surpasses 11M subscribers

[Lilithia]

And still it takes them 5 days to get all servers up and running after applying a new patch.

And 13 days+ to fix arena servers, still counting.

Maybe they should invest some more money into their servers.

[tortillariot]

Blizzard: We had no queues on lots of European servers, but suddenly we do. This is no indication that lots of people re-subscribed for the latest patch, and we're massaging these figures to reach an estimate of 11 million players when infact no new players have actually subscribed, or maybe a few 100k and most will lose interest by February 2009!

Oooo I'm such a cynic (sorry but such a cynical US marketing ploy deserves some constructive criticism)

Try some other games FFS stop being so Brand-loyal. Yes Warcraft is fun, but if you've played since 2004 I'm sure other games will float your boat for a few months: Conan, WAR, www.tcos.com.

PS 30 minute Queues on Al'AKir, arena that has 5 second delay on spells for 2 weeks. Lovin it.

[rrb]

Good for Blizzard, dominating the MMORPG market. But to those who say "Where is WAR, the WoW Killer? roflawlol", you just can't compare 750k subscriptions which has only been alive for about a month compared to the giant that is WoW that has over 4 years experience. And don't start giving crap about WAR not being balanced and that WoW is the most class balanced game, once again, WoW has been live alot longer. Overall, WAR is a better game and will take time to have better balance but it all comes down to loyalty, and most users loyalty is with Blizzard.

What pisses me off is with all that revenue and profit they are making from their financial reports, they won't even set up Oceanic Servers in Aus/NZ. Curse you 350ms+!

[Tryss]

Good job blizzard... You are the game compagny that every others could envie.

Starcraft: 10 years
Diablo 2: 8 years
Warcraft 3: 6 years
World of Warcraft: 4 years

And they still selling these games

[stupid11]

Anyone who isn't a retard knows that the 11 million number isn't the actual number of active accounts, regardless of what Blizzard says. The real number is somewhere in the 7 million area. Still impressive, though.

wrong.

They've always released ONLY the active number of subscribers, minus trial accounts, canceled, etc...

[Karpalo]

Good job blizzard... You are the game compagny that every others could envie.

Starcraft: 10 years
Diablo 2: 8 years
Warcraft 3: 6 years
World of Warcraft: 4 years

And they still selling these games

If I`m not totally mistaken Diablo 1,2 and lod actually weren`t blizzard entertainments products but Blizzard North`s but it`s kind a same thing now :>

[Battlecry]

definatly wanna say gz to blizzard on making one of the best games in history . The numbers jus prove to me that i started playing the game, i thought was great , and still do because so . congratulations . also many famous ppl play it and support it , even the non fat , good looking ones lol . so we arnt losers =D ( unless they r too =P)

[Battlecry]

Good for Blizzard, dominating the MMORPG market. But to those who say "Where is WAR, the WoW Killer? roflawlol", you just can't compare 750k subscriptions which has only been alive for about a month compared to the giant that is WoW that has over 4 years experience. And don't start giving crap about WAR not being balanced and that WoW is the most class balanced game, once again, WoW has been live alot longer. Overall, WAR is a better game and will take time to have better balance but it all comes down to loyalty, and most users loyalty is with Blizzard.

What pisses me off is with all that revenue and profit they are making from their financial reports, they won't even set up Oceanic Servers in Aus/NZ. Curse you 350ms+!

agreed , kinda, but WAR could get worse , WOW at least has served the mmo market and still top , but again wow could fall as AOC , maybe they could make a come back . The battle is still on . Only time will tell but as of now WOW rules and u cant deny it =D

[Sushiac]

First: Congratulations Blizzard to the 11 million number

Second: The TCG is just another way to make more Money. I really dont understand what it has to do with the game itself.

[Disturbed]

i am laughing at the thought of them trying to balance mana burn. they cant fix mana burn. it has to stay powerful vs high regen classes like druids. if they make mana burn % based the druids will just laugh as they regen the % lost, while a pally would be better off, it doesnt fix the entire problem. maybe if they gave pallies 50% immunity to all incoming mana burns..

idk. but theres no way im gonna listen to blues talk about waiting til 80 to see how skill and gear works out. ret doesnt wear int. period. gear is irrelivent when it comes to the cost of spells. and yea they say we shouldnt heal or bless or cleanse or aoe... well if they want us to just judge, cs, auto attack... thats boring and the dps is gonna suck so nobody is gonna want to invite them over a raw dps class if they dont have mana to use their utilities...

wake up blizzard... what they need to do is lower stun duration on hoj to fix pvp burst, and if we cant use our other spells in pve we better get another single target buton to smash or like they said, lower the cd on judge... but still im laughing at how they feel ret isnt gonna fall off the list of classes to invite, for pvp and pve. 1 per raid but only because holy sucks and the dps might be better than shadow priest but not hunter. ret doesnt bring kings either so thats one less reason to invite.

[Gigikent]

Many have said WoW would not last more than 3 years or things like that, even more said that AoC will kill WoW, then WAR will do the same and guess what: they actually helped WoW (sadly the moral here would be: "learn to make a complete and playable game before you release it").
I'm not some Blizz fan or WoW enthuziast, I've tried my fair share of MMO's including the two stated above but in the end I had to admit that, for the time being, WoW is the best there is in this category of PC games and I will continue playing it untill there is something better to be played.

Congrats to them for the number of active accounts, hopefully they will not rest on their laurels and keep improving the game experience for the active players they now have.

[Alltat]

I wonder how many of them are multiboxers account, inactive and dead ones.... :

It includes multiboxers, but realistically that number is fairly minimal. The random lowbies you run into in Orgrimmar or the welfare scrubs you meet in BGs don't bother with double accounts, and those make up the vast majority of the player base. Even most people in endgame raiding guilds don't bother with double accounts, so the number will be small. Shouldn't be even remotely close to a million.

Inactive accounts aren't included, so unless you could log in right this very second, your account isn't included. Gold farmers and spammers are a disappearingly small number. How many people do you think actually buy gold in WoW? How many people do you know who have? Not even close to one percent. How many gold buyers do you think it takes to sustain a gold farmer, taking into account that they have to pay the monthly fee, rebuy the game when banned, pay for computers, Internet access, someone to actually farm (or watch over the bots), etc. Realistically, all their accounts combined won't exceed 10k, you just notice them a lot because their business is based on being noticed.


That doesn't mean Blizzard actually ends up with all that much money. Most people don't pay for one month at a time. A lot of people get free months from recruiting friends and using scrolls of resurrection. The free days they hand out when servers are down or unstable will cut into profits, and I've gotten more than a month worth of one day exempts since I started playing. That's a disgusting amount of money worth of play time given away for free, and they still have to pay for the servers and service during that time. In addition to keeping realms up and going, they also have to pay the whole development team working on patches and bug fixes and such. They need to pay for PTR servers, forum servers, armory servers, etc along with people to code and maintain these.

[bbr]

Those cards were already posted a week or two ago weren't they?

[Ilyawen]

The number is, indeed, impressive. And, even under "conservative" consideration, it seems quite realistic to me. Only taking into account the ammount of players I know, the places they live, their age, jobs, families etc., I can (not scientifically, but at least personally) see how WoW has become such a huge game - people playing it are practically everywhere. While it might still be rare to find a 50 year old housewive or an investment broker (might see some more of those trying to escape reality in the last few weeks, though ^^) playing, it HAS happened. Apart from the vast majority of students arround 16-25, I also happen to know younger kids playing the game (quite sucessfully so), mid-30s construction-workers, 40+year-old network-admins, independent gaming girls aged 16-25 and also girlfriends or wives of pretty much every male gaming group there is. A few people in the raid I lead actually have asked me to rezz them rather than walking after a wipe so they get a few minutes to look after the kids (angry wives can be more painful to gaming then angry raidleaders, I guess ^^).
Every sort of gender, age, education or lifestyle is gathering. And even though the majority of players still belongs to the "core"-group of gaming, this core-group has expanded quite a lot since videogaming started to become interessting during the 1980s.

The "art" of WoW is to make a product that does cater to ALL these people. That is something NO other product so far has managed. Its comparable in this respect only to the Sims, which, for different reasons, obviously, has managed to attract customers far beyond the definition of a classic player base. Achieving this task is much more impressive with a game that brought with it a whole new set of problems that were, at least in this dimension, unforseeable. The ammount of development Blizzard has put in making a (generally) stable, balanced, secure, hardly-ever-bugging game for many million people playing is not to be underestimated. As always, they didn't invent the wheel - they never did, neither with Warcraft, nor with Diablo, nor with WoW. They just took a lot of old wheels, looked at them, and made them so much BETTER then before, that only now one notices how bumpy wheels had been before, and how smooth WoW really is.

People criticising this game generally fail to see how much they already have grown accustomed to this "smootheness", and how they take it for granted now. They think that, since they are getting bored, Blizzard should take a 4 year old game and suddenly turn it from a wheel into a hovercraft. But thats not gonna happen. No one is forced to stay with the game, and people can be expected to leave; still, as long as it works, there are still lots of people having TONS of fun with it, and blizzard is bringing in a massive ammount of interessting features about every patch.

WAR and Conan failed to make a game as smooth or as fun as WoW. They failed because they pushed out unfinished and buggy products into a market where they already stood up against the competition of the rather close-to-perfect WoW. They failed because they promised to be the next big thing, but in the end lacked the vision and novelty that WoW had, and still has. If there is to be a WoW-killer, it will have to be a game that is so well rounded, so perfect that about everything you do as a WoW-veteran will make you say: "Geez, of course! Why didn't WoW have that?" That was about the feeling I had when playing Diablo 2, where I wondered how much more one could get out of the fun but old concept of Diablo. It was the same with Warcraft 3. And it will be the same neither with WAR, nor Conan, and most likely not Aion. It will be the same with the next MMO Blizzard decides to push out. Because no matter how many greedy capitalist arses run that company: They STILL make fantastic games.

[kodynn2001]

11 million really? that's fairly impressive. And I don't doubt it really.

The world's population is estimated at 7 billion. If the 11 million is true, then that means 1 in every 1571 people play world of warcraft.

That's pretty hardcore. Thing I'm wondering is why blizzard hasn't already bought a country or something.

[sinnheart]

<pshhh hey blizzard want more money??? GET MORE C.E. SO ME AND THE REST WHO COULNT GET ONE BUY ONE>

[infernalx]

And I still can't believe people so many people are playing/buying this game. It is in fact...Leading me to believe that WoW is full of subliminal messages and that is why so many people get addicted or keep playing for so long.

Perhaps there's hidden messages in the spells and every time you use them, your mind absorbs the messages without you realizing it. Maybe there's messages everywhere you go, who knows.

And perhaps, WoW isn't the only game that has subliminal messages, maybe Wc3, SC, Diablo also have them.

Let's be realistic people, there IS subliminal messages in these games, don't deny it, don't lie to yourself!

[Zokten]

Love all the tools in this topic, sucking on Blizzard's 11mil tit.

Ilyawen is really sucking on it.

[Amgyn]

And I still can't believe people so many people are playing/buying this game. It is in fact...Leading me to believe that WoW is full of subliminal messages and that is why so many people get addicted or keep playing for so long.

Perhaps there's hidden messages in the spells and every time you use them, your mind absorbs the messages without you realizing it. Maybe there's messages everywhere you go, who knows.

And perhaps, WoW isn't the only game that has subliminal messages, maybe Wc3, SC, Diablo also have them.

Let's be realistic people, there IS subliminal messages in these games, don't deny it, don't lie to yourself!

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...tinfoilhat.xml

[stupid11]

WAR and Conan failed to make a game as smooth or as fun as WoW. They failed because they pushed out unfinished and buggy products into a market where they already stood up against the competition of the rather close-to-perfect WoW. They failed because they promised to be the next big thing, but in the end lacked the vision and novelty that WoW had, and still has.

This. I played Conan. The biggest problem was the bugs, the crashes, the 25 gigs of hard drive space, the 2 gigs of ram it needs, and the lack of content.

Gear also didn't matter, and it sucked.

You know what the WoW killer is going to be? Another Blizzard game.

Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, this un-announced MMO. All these games will take massive chunks from WoW's population. Why? Because they will be quality, polished, finished games.

And Diablo 3 is going to be fucking epic.