Gaming powerhouse Blizzard Entertainment has issued a press release announcing that the number of subscribers for World Of Warcraft has surpassed the 11 million mark.
For the record: 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.
The milestone for the popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) represents a 10% growth in 10 months and shows signs of slowing. If you consider the fact that the online game debuted in November 2004 and took only six months to go from 9 million to 10 million subscribers, you can conclude that it took Blizzard much longer to add this last million subscribers to its user base than in the past (the company announced it reached the 10 million mark in January 2008, up from 9 million in July, 2007).
On the other hand, WoW was estimated to hold an impressive 62% of the massively multiplayer online game market back in April.
On 13 November, the second expansion of WoW, dubbed “Wrath of the Lich King”, will launch in several regions around the world. Maybe that will help reignite growth, or at least help it hold onto its massive lead in market share.
More revenue in a month than Facebook in a year.
Don´t quite see the connection between Facebook an WoW, two completely different consepts are they not? Interesting though, that several social websites are becoming so huge!
Blizzard does have over 6 times the number of employees that Facebook has (somewhere over 3,000), so you’d expect higher revenue.
damn i didnt know they had over 3000 employees
They started in 2004, had the idea, conquered the mmorpg, they lead. Facebook isn’t that original.
Do you imply that WoW was original? As far as I remember Ultima Online was among the firsts MMORPG, not WoW. It might be original as aa game but not as MMORPG.
I think the slow in growth is partly due to the fact that there has been no major update to the game since the Burning Crusades expansion pack was released. With the advent of the ‘Wrath of the Lich King’ on November 13th, I think numbers will grow significantly over the next few months.
As an avid player of the game, I started growing tired once I’d reached the peak of the gaming leveling / raids etc – partly due to not being able to commit huge amounts of time to the game to advance – however, once the new expansion is released, I’ll certainly be back into gaming mode again.
“World of Warcraft” slowing on growth? I don’t think so…lol
Blizzard has saturated the market at this point, but with that said WOTLK in November and the upcoming Holiday Season will result in another spike.
I’d like Blizzard to embrace this opportunity to do innovative things in this space. Yes I can Armory my character and see the in-game items he’s wearing, or d/l a wallpaper for my cell phone but none of that is groundbreaking.
Let me Text Message Trade Chat or check my Auctions on a 3G phone.
Face it people are addicts, and more hooks into your game will result in players being engaged even when they aren’t playing.
Your subscriber base is unparalleled; take advantage of it before the next big thing comes along.
excellent points. i see that there is now an in game calendar, however we are still without a lot of useful add ons. with the huge base, personalization could really take the game to the next level. i admit getting bored now that i’m 70. you can only do so many raids.
Sorry, couldn’t resist, but…
http://uk.youtu...h?v=GdD8dVph5o8
“This could very well lead to the end of the World…of Warcraft”
These guys are wielding the end all be all of cash cow biz models. Sigh only 11 million peeps helplessly addicted to our game paying 12-25 bucks a month to play it… they can take a bit of slow down and still run rings around just about anything else on the scene. I think Carl is right about what affected the slow down. The cycle of newness is back with Lich King and its an impressive expansion. Make no mistake Blizzard knows it customer well and will continue to dominate.
11M?? And other online games as..Hattrick?
I agree with the author. I think Warcraft is slowing. The new expansions rely on acquiring things, armor and weapons, rather than innovations in the game. The new achievement system in Lich King just tries to motivate people to hang in there to reach from level one to level eighty.
The original game is what spurred the growth, and then they took it from there into a mostly shooter or pvp game. To get people quickly to level 60 they made the lower quests easier. That change has weakened the lower level game. How totally new players will react to such a changed game remains to be seen.
very very impressive
By releasing a series of patches and adding more content and functionality, they’ve significantly enhanced the experience for new players. I bought wow a couple of months after it was released, and despite trying to like it, I never really gelled with it.
However, last week I thought I’d give it another go. There’s so much more to the game now, and it seems much more friendly to newbies like myself.
I’m actually enjoying it, and it doesn’t feel like a long dull slog to get anywhere like it used to. I do wonder how many psychologists are consulted to get the game so addictive..
I am waiting for the Diablo 3 which is long due from them for various reasons. WoW still holds the most players in the MMORPG genre of games and i don’t see that dwindling unless Blizzard makes any wrong moves.
re: stock price…they must have massive overhead
My wife and I have been playing since beta, always something new. I have grown bored a few times, but not much longer there is some new aspect I get excited about (or a patch/expansion).
One reason they have seen growth this year is their recruit a friend program which allows people special items and faster leveling if they have a friend sign up. Many people simply created multiple accounts (and pay for them). I even read about one many who has 32 accounts and plays all the characters at the same time.
I think the slownewss is due to the era of the die hard fan is over. Most of the die hard fan 5 years ago, is already working full times and don’t have the luxury time as student to play the game.
world of warcraft i never played it but i might pick up one of these days to see what is the big fuzz. Michael Morhaime even if growth has stalled is still making a killing. i think the reason growth has stalled is more hardcore pc gamers are leaving the pc for the consoles now.
Hardcore PC gamers leaving for consoles? I don’t think so. A casual PC gamer may be spending more time on consoles, but believe me, hardcore PC gamers could care less whether they even own any of the new consoles or not. Remember, the best consoles are only a snapshot of what the best PCs can do at that point in time. A PC can progress, whereas you are stuck with the same processor, RAM, and GPU on your console for the next 5 years. Until we see interchangeable hardware on consoles, the PC will always at least have that advantage.
Hattrick yes ?
http://www.egitimbilgisi.tr.gg
All the talk about the “slowing” of WoW in these comments is hilarious. It’s the equivalent of… actually I can’t THINK of another equiv. in any other industry, because nowhere else does a single entity dominate a space as completely as WoW does.
Let me put it this way: before WoW, a big, profitable, hit MMO would have about ~500,000 subscribers. 500K would represent a big hit – maybe something like Everquest.
Now, compare that to Warcraft’s ELEVEN MILLION subscribers. It’s 10-15x bigger than it’s closest competition – the #2 game in the genre! Let alone how much bigger it is than a typical MMORPG.
It’s slowing because there’s nowhere else for it to go. The added more subscribers in 10 months (1 million) than many successful, profitable MMOs EVER have.
i agree, i bet that every game company will be happy to have this kind of a “problem”
>I can’t THINK of another equiv. in any other industry, because
>nowhere else does a single entity dominate a space as
>completely as WoW does.
Errrrrr. Google.
WoW, a big, profitable, hit MMOG I play at http://playum.com
It’s a good enough cash cow – why so much noise about its’ slowing down? Just keep it going and enjoy the cash!
$15 * 11,000,000 — not bad monthly revenue…
It’s not $15 * 11million, Ian.
It’s $15 * ~4 or 4.5 million since that’s about the size of their Western market. Chinese players, which make up a huge portion of their playerbase, pay far less, and Blizzard doesn’t run WoW there themselves – they license it to Chinese publisher The9 and get royalty payments off it.
No doubt it’s an immense amount of money but $15*11 million does not give you the correct answer.
WoW brought in $1.2 BILLION in revenue in 2007. Who cares if they have ZERO growth in WoW…
It is still the biggest game in China
Your web is great, I learned something about WOW here.
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