Blizzard Entertainment, owners of World of Warcraft, announced on Jan 22 that the game now has more than 10 million paying subscribers around the world. Online gameplay costs an average of $15 USD per month or about 12 pounds in the UK. That’s a huge amount to make each month in subscriptions. Blizzard is hiring by the way.

Blizzard said today that those 10 million paying subscribers include 5.5 million players in Asia, 2.5 million in the US and 2 million in Europe. They said this number only includes active players but I think the internet cafe users, especially in Asia would tend to skew that figure considerably. Not to mention the fact that Chinese Gold farms primarily exist not for game play but to feed the lack of patience for US players who buy in game gold from them. Due to the economics of buying in game gold in real life its now a necessity to keep up with the inflation. Thus continuing to feed the Chinese gold farmers. So its like 5 million players supporting the other 5 million players.

For readers unfamiliar with WoW, there’s a lot of video on YouTube, including the following parody of Weird Al’s “That’s Your Horoscope Today”. It’s not the catchiest tune but it’s a good tour of what goes on in the game and it’s been viewed more than 4 million times. When you build software that becomes a platform for user generated content all about your software – then you’re in a pretty sweet spot.

View it here

Ok the scoop on the guild. It cost 10 silver to get a charter. We need 10 unique players. So I am taking that as 1 real person’s account and not including alts.

Then it costs 10gold for the guild tabard design. I am thinking blue design on a white tabard. Maybe red on white. I think they will look sharp. Then it costs 90 silver per tabard. I guess we will try the “Knights of Druidia” as our first choice.

Our Characters have to be in the same proximity in order to sign the charter. So we will have to travel and be together to do this. Joy! One tactic we can employ if we are short is to get a noob to sign the charter and we bribe him with money or goodies. He can then choose to stay in or leave after the guild is formed.

I think the first 98 slots in the guild bank are free. Then we have to pay extra gold to unlock each of 5 more 98 slot banks. If its like regular bank then it goes 10g then 25 gold +++ etc. so everyone save up.

Well we have 5 players now and expecting two more to sign up and join our WOW campaign. If we create 1 main and 1 alt character each then we can meet the minimum requirement for a guild by having ten members. We have also been shooting emails back and forth trying to think of a name for our guild. Many good names like; The Knights who say Ni have already been taken. The name at the top if the list so far is; The Knights of Druida. From spaceballs fame. I have a female Mage character. I guess she would be a Druish princess. LOL