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.