New WoW Numbers...

[Twiz]

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?loadNews=3487

Says over 1 million in North America, 4 million worldwide...however no mention of whether those are boxes sold or recurring montly payers. My guess it is the former and 1 million boxes in almost a year is great...but not quite the same as regular subscribers...wheee the "spin" continues...

[Ijs]

Companies always turn on the spin, very true. But it's very, very, very easy to believe 1 million N.A. subscribers. There are currently more than 100 servers (more servers still being added) and avg 10,000 per server... yep, easily 1 million.

(Actually, to be more acurate, it's probably only 999,999 -- I cancelled my account )

What's misleading is mmorpg.com trying to translate total subscribers into monthly revenue for Blizzard Entertainment. That's just a load of crap. Half of the subscribers are in China, and its an entirely different business model in that country -- Chinese WoW players do not pay the same rate. It was a contract guarantees $50 million, or something like that. I'll have to look up the link, it was from a June article I think.

EDIT2: Pretty sure Bizzard is implying "CURRENT PAYING CUSTOMERS." Not sure how you could infer otherwise.

"This brings the total population for Blizzard's critically acclaimed game, the largest MMORPG in the world, to more than four million paying customers."
How they can claim largest MMORPG in the world, I have no idea. Obviously, someone's ignoring China when they make a ludicrous statement like that. So if they're BSing about one thing, maybe they're spreading the manure on the other?

EDIT: Found the info.
First, some numbers. In June (just before WoW release) there were apparently 100-140 million online subscribers in China, including 20 million subscribers for Legend2 (which charges an equivalent of $4 per month).
WoW China beta signed up 2+ million accounts, and had more than 500k on-line concurrently during beta.

Back in 2004, The9 (9city?) committed $74.1m to Bizzard/Vivendi.
First, they paid an initial non-refundable licence fee of $3 million to Vivendi Universal in February 2005. The9 also guaranteed approximately $51.3m in royalties, consisting of quarterly payments from $1.6m to $3.7m over a four year period. The company further promised to spend $13m for marketing and promotions of WoW, apart from $6.8m for pre-launch events.

Vivendi will receive 22 per cent of the face value of sold WoW China pre-paid cards sold as royalties.

In China, 9city is selling game time (by the score), instead of selling subscriptions by the month.
Chinese gamers purchase cards for ($3.64) worth "600 scores". Nine scores are worth one hour of gameplay, so each card is worth 66 hours 40 minutes.

Still, 4,000,000 subscribers sounds impressive, doesn't it.

[Twiz]

LoL..interesting numbers...even defeats my "boxes sold" theory. I am starting to think there should be some type of control on the numbers released for mmorpgs, though I doubt it's doable with worldwide players and different national laws.

I do think players should be able to access exactly how many players are on any given server at any given time. When EQ1 first launched, they used to have that number right next to the name of the server...then as a few more mmorpgs were released, they went to the light, moderate, heavy system...but without a range of what those words mean, it's really useless.

I don't doubt WoW is very popular...but I wonder if their need to release artificially inflated numbers indicates they are starting to lose subscribers.

Shrug...I'll likely just keep trying them all as they come out and stay longer in the ones that have the things I like...anxiously awaiting Vanguard!!!

[xenogears77]

This was taken from rpgamer.com:

Today Blizzard Entertainment announced that the total worldwide count of the paying customers for its popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, has reached and surpassed four million. Incidentally, over one millon of those paying players reside in North America. According to Blizzard Entertainment, paying customer include, "...individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players having accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers." This does not include players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards.

That should explain where they get thier numbers. And not a single one of those numbers is me.

[RedMan]

Its all promotional, where the promotions is normally seperate from the game. Sounds good enough for a party anyway!

From all appearances from in the game all is well, no sudden population drops, queues when I've seen them on my servers (normally Sat and Sun arvos) haven't dropped nor gone up. So, from my perspective, all is peachy

[corpex]

I don't think you can ever get an accurate figure but it would be noticeable to see population drops like what I saw in SWG. The first signs is the basic economy ie less items being traded.