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WORLD OF WARCRAFT® SURPASSES FIVE MILLION CUSTOMERS WORLDWIDE (http://www.blizzard.com/press/051219.shtml)

Customer base reaches new heights as Blizzard Entertainment®'s MMORPG continues its growth in North America, Europe, and Asia

IRVINE, California - December 19, 2005 - Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced that World of Warcraft®, its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has surpassed five million customers worldwide. The subscription-based MMORPG launched approximately one year ago in North America, Australia, and New Zealand and has since released in multiple countries throughout Europe and Asia. This latest milestone comes on the heels of Blizzard Entertainment®'s recent announcement of a World of Warcraft expansion, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade™, which will push the boundaries of the game and offer even more content and features for players.

"World of Warcraft's growth continues to exceed all our expectations," said Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We want to reiterate our thanks to the millions of players worldwide and to all the retailers who have enthusiastically supported the game over the past year. Our commitment to continue growing World of Warcraft is stronger than ever, with development on future content patches and on our 2006 expansion, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, well underway. We look forward to offering even more content for current customers in the months ahead and welcoming new players into the world this holiday season."

With a strong presence across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, World of Warcraft has quickly become the world's most popular MMORPG. Most recently, the game was launched in the regions of Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong on November 8, 2005.

As World of Warcraft's population grows, Blizzard continues to support the game with additional content through regular patches and a planned expansion pack, set to release in 2006. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will add new lands, quests, monsters, magic items, spells and abilities, two new player races, a new player profession, 10 new levels of power for players to achieve, and much more. Additional information on the expansion and the game's regular content updates can be found at the official World of Warcraft website.

World of Warcraft's Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers 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 that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.

About Blizzard Entertainment®, Inc.
Best known for blockbuster hits including the Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® series, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. (www.blizzard.com), a division of Vivendi Universal Games, is a premier developer and publisher of entertainment software renowned for creating many of the industry's most critically acclaimed games. Blizzard's track record includes nine #1-selling games and multiple Game of the Year awards. The company's free Internet gaming service, Battle.net®, reigns as the largest in the world, with millions of active users.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT® SURPASSES FIVE MILLION CUSTOMERS WORLDWIDE (http://www.blizzard.com/press/051219.shtml)

World of Warcraft's Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers 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 that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.

Someone's been reading our forums. 

Alkiera

World of Warcraft's Customer Definition
... The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.

Aren't you like an indy rock star or something though?  Your like O'Reiley + Facts or you were before you sold out.   :-P

No offense to you guys (or myself) but I can personally attest that most Blizzard developers have no idea who I am, or any "Diaspora of Lum". They generally keep to their own forums, and don't usually attend trade shows (when they do, it's very much in packs, surrounded by frenzied prospective employees brandishing resumes).

Bravo to Blizzard for not only kicking the ass of everyone else out there, but also "Affleck-ing"* any of these idiotic furry fuckheads by stating exactly what counts as sub so they can put it in their chart and suck it.

*Affleck-ing: To surreptitiously place one's testicles, junk or genitalia on or near someone's face, usually on the shoulder of your director while he's otherwise engaged.

No offense to you guys (or myself) but I can personally attest that most Blizzard developers have no idea who I am, or any "Diaspora of Lum". They generally keep to their own forums, and don't usually attend trade shows (when they do, it's very much in packs, surrounded by frenzied prospective employees brandishing resumes). Blizzard is very much the "rock stars" of the gaming community, for good or ill.

I suspect that PR was aimed at industry analysts who continue to quibble over what a "customer" is defined as, especially in Asia. FF11's reports have much the same verbiage.

Doesn't shed any light on the size of any (if any) flood of cancelled accounts though.  And it has the neat-o property of never going down.

And if there is a lot of cancelled subs, then where did they go?  Are there (say) a million players out there who just disappeared, choosing not to play any other MMO at all?

I dunno.. I'd rather interpret it as, "Hey Sony, here's exactly what we're counting. We know how you're fudging numbers. Fuck you."

In my interpretation this means nothing other than that expired accounts or pre-paid cards are not counted as customers. So those 5.000.000 are the people actually playing and not the ones who have been subscribed to the game at some time in the past.

It doesn't tell much anymore since we have no clue about how the subscription numbers are divided between the zones.

Really depends on the server I think. Icecrown doesn't have anywhere near the population in newbie areas as some of the newest servers have. This is due to some players being directed away from the launch servers, and everyone else being 60 :)

Last time I ran census, 55% of alliance icecrown was 60. half of those were night elves. fucking elves.

So the rise from 4.5 to 5 million could still be just the consequence of the latest launched. Imho WoW is still growing in NA. The box is still in the top ten sales.

Strange thing is, all of a sudden all MMOGs seem to be growing.

Strange thing is, all of a sudden all MMOGs seem to be growing.

But I still have to see a concrete proof that this isn't just a myth.

I AM... in a world... of shit.

I AM... in a world... of shit.

You'd have to assume that every player that went to WoW and GW, even just in the U.S. alone, abandoned their existing game entirely to assume the genre hasn't enjoyed growth in 2005.

MMOGs meanwhile are still mostly planned-purchase, as in, someone hears about it goes to the store (or Amazon, or eBay, or wherever) to buy it. The genre itself is still hardcore enough by requiring a credit card just to start and a dedicated internet connection to play. This is long been my reason for not linking MMOGs to holiday sales. All the growth that successful games have enjoyed over the years has been through incremental account establishment over that year. There's occasional spikes, specifically at launch, but (and again, unlike CoH), MMOGs are games people purposely go get.

Someone here used that avatar for a long time, that's all. There's no hate. If it hadn't caught on so fast, I'd have used the O RLY owl as an avatar. It cracks me up.

Lol, internet.

Wasn't there an interview, just post-Christmas 2004 that blamed slow overall PC game sales on the success of WoW, that people weren't buying their regular incemental EA shit that year because they were spending all their PC game time playing WoW instead? Anything like that happen this year?

What we don't know is whether the playerbase of a specific game is increasing or decreasing. Eve seems growing up steadily but it's also an exception. DAoC players went down, EQ players, probably, went down, SWG players went down, CoH's players went down, Shadowbane doesn't seem growing. All the other smaller worlds lost players overall (AC2 closed, AC1 lost quite a bit).

No offense to you guys (or myself) but I can personally attest that most Blizzard developers have no idea who I am, or any "Diaspora of Lum". They generally keep to their own forums, and don't usually attend trade shows (when they do, it's very much in packs, surrounded by frenzied prospective employees brandishing resumes). Blizzard is very much the "rock stars" of the gaming community, for good or ill.

I suspect that PR was aimed at industry analysts who continue to quibble over what a "customer" is defined as, especially in Asia. FF11's reports have much the same verbiage.

Probably because I live on a different continent, maybe because I'm old and crusty. But what in the blue fuck is this whole "O RLY" and Owl thing about?

There's one subboard devoted entirely to random noise, and instead of bumping threads there to keep them alive people will go O RLY - YA RLY - NO WAI! - YAH WAI - SRSLY? - SRSLY, et cetera.

Maybe Vivendi sucks it all up for hookers and blow.

if it's been shared with all the people who worked on the game.

I might get egged, but put me in the camp that wonders why hourly workers should get profit-sharing by default?

Hell the person who came up with green/blue/purple/orange/red(?) for items deserves a big bonus too.

I'm not going to say everyone should be rewarded equally, but they goddamn sure ought to get some bonus compensation for such a huge hit.

If HG:L isn't at a minimum robot jesus' cousin's refrigerator repair man's uncle.  I'm going to stab my sig to death with Haemish's dick.

I also think that if Hellgate sucks, I'll be killing people with Haemish's dick as well.  I hope it's not all Koreany by the time I get it.