f13.net

Blizzard today announced the official the burning crusade release date 01/16/07

from the press release:

"PARIS, France. – 9 November, 2006 – Blizzard Entertainment® announced today that World of Warcraft®: The Burning Crusade™, the highly anticipated expansion to the world’s leading subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, will be in stores on January 16th in North America and Europe. The expansion will be available in a similar time frame in Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore as well, and availability for mainland China and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau will be announced in the near future. In addition, Blizzard today announced that the subscriber base for World of Warcraft has reached a new milestone, with 7.5 million players worldwide."

So, even bigger money hats for them.

(http://static.flickr.com/11/16378777_30b8d7fbd3_m.jpg)

Yeah, this game is just sooo a flash in the pan kind of thing. Vanguard is totally gonna rule!

Blizz had better be hiring a shitload of good people to work on adding content and fixing this or that, and lease out Deep Blue to handle the server loads. That's around $110,000,000 per month just from subscriptions. Sure, Uncle Sam/paychecks/etc eat that up but good god.

I love bringing this thread up whenever we talk about current WoW numbers.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=1577.0


Um yeah, we were all waaaay off.  I do have to claim I saw a much bigger success than most of you.

Can I have my cookie now?

lol @ armchair industry analysts

I think WoW exploded a lot more than even the most fanboyish of us thought however, so looking back results in a lot of head slapping.

Hmmm - baby's due date is the 14th....Anyone want to bet which happens first?

If they happen the same day, you have to name your baby Blizzard.

Hey, I have a happy fun quote in that thread:
:-o

Who can know... Ziggy Stardust was huge too.

I know a shit load of people who have quit recently, 90% of whom are likely to be right back for the expansion, if their subs are still going up they must be selling like hot cakes still.

Oh, nice birthday present. Thanks Blizzard.

Thats my birthday.

That thread is all luv.  God, we were daft.

As of last month, I have spent more cumulative time in WoW than any other MMO. Even the eight times I returned to EQ. As a result, I love checking back on my E3 2004 Report (http://www.grimwell.com/index.php?action=fullnews&id=120#WoW) (sorry for link, it's just too big to copy/paste). I called it "decidedly meh" and something not for me. Heh.

The one thing I did get right:

But whatever feeling or right I get from that is tempered by:
Particularly embarassing statement based on what has become of EQ2, SWG and NC Soft...  :-P

Gotta love the pundits.

As a dumb question, how does Blizzard measure its 7.5 million players? By active accounts? By billing addresses? Some other way?

Anyone know?

That thread was funny.

They tell you in their press releases everytime they announce a subscriber milestone:

It is a bit odd really because game room users (which are of very high number in Asia) don't pay individual subs. # players != # subs. But either way they have a lot of players, a lot of money and a lot of subs.

Given the popularity of MMORPGs up to that point, I think a 3x or so improvement was a reasonable guess by some people. Sure it did 10 times that but who knows...some things catch fire.

No for WoW, and many other of the major Asian MMORPGs, they do. We've covered this many times in the past.

At least Haemish capped the thread for us with a prophetic note:


Oh yeah... blow away expectations, it did.

As a turncoat, I'll say what I've been saying since March: Shortly after the release of BC, they hit 10mil subscribers. Doubt they can sustain that for long, but it'd still be an important achievement.

On those 7.5mil though, they sub-license WoW to The9 in China (where the way-largest percentage of their accounts are held). I don't know for sure what the arrangement is, but I think they collect a royalty paid to Blizzard (or VUG) monthly. So there's still "accounts" per se, they just don't contribute $14.99/mo to Blizzard's bottom line.

Speaking of failed prognostications, I recall posting, shortly after I started playing alliance, that more women play alliance than horde.

I was wrong.  There are just a lot more manginas playing female alliance than horde.  Or were, rather, when I played horde (shortly after launch).  That may have changed by now. I predict the mangina population to go way up hordeside with TBC.

Not going to happen unless BC releases at or around the same time they launch in another major region. BC will bring back some former subscribers but 2 - 2.5 million of them?

WoW has operators in all the Chinese-language territories -- The9 in Mainland China as you said and Game First International in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Also iGames Asia is the operator Singapore and some other parts of SE Asia. The rumor going around about 3 months ago was that Blizzard was trying to negotiate a better deal with The9 with the BC release since I guess they are/were unhappy with the deal they made for the original WoW release.

If the numbers do not surpass your forecast, I am predicting a huge comeback by Shadowbane  :-D

Well, I expected the gaming populous to demand more than just a Diku_made_better with a brand name slapped on it.  I was quite underwhelmed in the WoW beta and considered my 400k estimate to be generous.  Again, I've underestimated just how low a bar the masses will accept.  WoW is a decently polished Diku experience... for most of us, that's nothing to expect 7 million subs from.  Then again... if someone asked me how many copies the "Deer Hunter" franchise would have sold, I never would have come close to that number either.

I still wonder how many people logged in once said, "meh" and then never realized their credit card was still getting charged.

probably quite a few, but probably not, you know, a million people or more.  :roll:

I dunno...

The most entertaining thing about the rise of WoW has been hearing the MMO pseudo-intellectuals and bumblefuck developers wail and gnash their teeth as the latest iteration of dinggratzlewtz renders everything else in the genre completely irrelevant.

Um.  I'm not sure that there's much wailing and gnashing going on, seeing as it's a good thing for them.

I love Blizzard for taking 7.5 Million people and keeping them the fuck away from me.

I'd imagine that WUA was referring to the Ivory Tower TerraNova-types who tend to view Diku-derivatives as an irrelevance to their grand vision of making 3D MUSHes, rather than the various devs and publishers who are hoping to pick up some of WoW's crumbs.

Anyway (and vaguely related to the thread) the final pre-expansion patch is going up on WoW's test servers Soon(tm) and there's a leaked patch message floating about.
Edit: Curses, foiled again! (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=8635.0)

Well, even to those types, WoW is good news.  If they're too fucking elitist to see it, they can go fuck themselves.

Sorted.

I'm still waiting for Raph to run in and tell us again how Habbo Hotel is more important than WoW.  Because it isn't.  It really isn't.

If the fact that I'd rather spend an hour pretending to beat monsters with a big stick in WoW than pretending to fill out tax forms or pay rent in "Player Driven Economy Simulator Online" or reading some shitty internet chain story put together by a group of mouth-breathing illiterates in "Player Generated Content Online" makes me an unwashed mass, sign me up!

FIFY.

/weak, I know.

Well, that depends on how he defines 'important' of course.

There's important from a creative standpoint and then there's important from a financial standpoint.  Occassionally the first leads to the second.  Currently, WoW has forced game developers to focus almost entirely on the second... which I think is a mistake with regard to future income potential. 

You still maintaining these numbers do not represent an expansion of the MMORPG market and only involve previous Blizzard fanbois? 

I hope not.  That's an insane argument, even from Schild.

I'm actually on the fence. The massive success is due to Blizzard and the Blizzard polish. I've always said persistant online gaming IS THE FUTURE and alll that. But does it represent a growth of the MMORPG market? Not sure anymore. Maybe. When 7.5M people filter into other persistant online games, ok, it was growth. If 5 million people join every other game put together though and 7.5 or even 8 million are playing WoW than people would probably argue it's an industry of 13M players. I'd still say, no, it's 5M players and Blizzard.

In other words, impossible to judge anymore. I think think there's a more important question though. In any reasonable amount of time, can any other company make a game with as much polish as Blizzard based on a new or established license, enough so that the Blizzard population has a higher attrition rate than churn?

No, they can't. The rest of the industry - at this moment - are filled with a bunch of blubbering fools caught with their thumb up their ass. So it doesn't matter whether it's expansion or not seeing as no one is taking any noticeable amount of players away from WoW and they won't be any time soon. Conan, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa - good or not, they're - combined - not going to dent WoW.

In other words, I don't know. It's impossible to tell. But who gives a shit anymore. But somebody better get SOMETHING SUBSTANTIAL out before World of Starcraft gets formally announced or Diablo Online shows up (at all).

Yeah, that makes more sense.

WoW isn't (just) popular because it's Blizzard, it's popular because it's the best game* in it's particular part of the MMOG market in much the same way as EQ was the benchmark for years - there was no other game with broad appeal that did it better.

*at what it does, natch.

I just loved this opening in the context of this thread.

Not trying to insert a polemic - but it's like Bush admitting 3 years after the fact that perhaps things are not going as well as intended in Iraq  :wink:

Not really.

It's entirely possible that this "market growth" never moves beyond Blizzard. Thus being the growth of Blizzard's fanbase, exclusively.

It was obvious, from day 1, that things weren't going as intended in Iraq.

When I start seeing bumperstickers that say "MMORPGS AND VIRTUAL WORLDS ARE AWESOME" instead of WoW memes, I will officially say "I was wrong." Until then, I'm totally not wrong, and every other MMORPG company is still scraping leftovers off the floor. That should be more clear. Though, I'll reiterate - there's no way to tell right now.

Eventually it will spill over into other games.  Maybe not the entire market, but WoW is a gateway.

My friend for example.  She barely played any games at all, but tried the WoW trial and has subscribed on and off for some time.  (She did this on her own, before anyone else she knew got into the game.)  It got her interested in trying other games.  CoX, D&D, SWG... most don't hold her interest for long, but now she has to try them and is anticipating LoTR (the poor dear).  If she can find another casual friendly game that touches on her interests she will definitely play it.

I doubt she is the only one.  We still don't consider her a gamer as we normally think of the term, but games are so ubiquitous now that they are a part of everyday existence, just another form of entertainment alongside TV, radio, and books.  And WoW was her introduction to this medium.

8 million now. (http://www.blizzard.com/press/070111.shtml)

WoW players won't spill over into other games in signifigant numbers until other games stop being cheap unfinished pieces of shit.  So never, basically.

CoV, DDO, GW, AA?  Its been a slow 2 years.

/ditto

/signed

-An Corp Thread-

BTW, my wife pointed out some fun facts:

8 million is approximately 1/100 of the population of earth. 
That figure is also pretty close to the number of people with college degrees.

much closer to 1/1000 than 1/100

Heh, it's not quite that widespread.  8 million would be 1/1000 the population of the earth.

Still, if you consider the amount of people that have regular internet access, either at home or at a 'bang', it's a very impressive number.


edit:  Dammit, I was supposed to be the smart one!

0.0012307692307692307692307692307692

We're only at 6.7 billion on this planet. The ratio of WoW players to people alive on the planet is still increasing.

Bingo.  My [wife's] bad.

Still, as you say, pretty impressive considering the non-third world population has to be a relatively small percentage of that.

Third world is going to catch up fast..


http://www.laptop.org/

So, how many people eat at McDonalds or shop at WalMart?

I'm not so sure that being massively successful says much about your product beyond that it touches the appeal of the masses.  Congrats to Blizzard on their money hats.  I'll play my little niche game over in the corner.

I like McDonalds =(

Nobody's stopping you.  I might even join you (in a general sense, I don't really know what game you play) when my friends stop dragging me back into WoW.

Not that it's too difficult a task.

Elitist bullshit. Always crops up from some snob. It's either when their favorite genre or band goes "mainstream" it means that must have sold out -- heavens forbid you share tastes with the dirty masses.

Massively successful mean you're sellling something a lot of people like. It could be really fucking good (iPods/iTunes as an mp3 player/mp3 service), really fucking cheap (Walmart), or simply really accessible -- but it's weird how quick some people are to assume it's cheap or low-class.

It's really best seen in the resteraunt industry and the music industry, which appears to be it's natural home. There seems to be this built-in snobbish belief that if lots of people like something, it really can't be that good. How else can you feel superior to the dirty uncultured hordes if you can't show off your superior taste and discrimination by indulging in things they don't like?

Me? I'm always glad to see things I like go mainstream -- whether it's music, food, or videogames. And for the record -- not a big fan of McDonalds, feel EVE is a superior game to WoW right now, but possibly not to WoW after WoW has 4 years of development in it, and try to judge things on their individual merits and not by whether or not it lumps me in with the commoners.

Brittney Spears has sold millions of albums and I don't like her either.  I probably should have mentioned that too... just so you know what a true elitist I am. 

So did the Beatles, and Elvis, and Black Sabbath for that matter. The Doors, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails... that Mozart guy. That Shakespeare guy seems to have sold al ot of theatre tickets, and books of his plays. Not to mention Henry Miller for someone a bit more recent.

Fucking sellouts, the lot of them, right?

Isn't what Nebu said basically that something can be popular without being good (or at least, good for him)? I didn't get the vibe he was saying anything popular must therefore be crap.

If I jumped the gun on that, I apologize. I've been hanging out with music snobs way the fuck too much lately, and it's colored my opinion rather heavily. (My brother is a musician, and he's one of those fucking music snobs. I like him a lot, and he's quite good at what he does, but it doesn't mean I don't get sick of that crap sometimes).

I'm a bit tetchy about that argument simply because it seems a lot of people equate "good" with "Something I know about and most people don't". Since I know a lot of those people, I tend to see where people aren't actually saying it. (And I've heard that argument a LOT about WoW -- generally from old-school EQ1 catasses that equate "skill" with "the ability to remain logged on for 12 hours waiting for your turn on a spawn".).

Actually, he really does come off in the post above much more on the side of "popular is crap" to my reading. With the masses and all that. (And Britney used as an example.)

Just because WoW is not your type of game doesn't mean it's bad.

... and my point is that one person can like both.  It's called making your own decisions, not letting what's popular color whether you like it, or whether you don't like it. 

Something can be subjectively bad. I think parmesian cheese is the most rank stuff in existance but a whole lot of people love it. It's not objectively bad, but subjectively I could call it so. So if WoW is not your type of game you could still label it as "bad".

To say that "being popular doesn't make it good" does not imply that "being popular makes it bad".

Or, if you prefer:

~( ~( P -> G ) -> ( P -> ~G) )

(I think.)

Knee jerks for the win.

No, but only uding examples from one side of the argument, and not clarifying your intention in any other way certainly acts to create an implication.



"These non-game-related popular things suck balls. I'll be playing my niche game in the corner, thanks." certainly carries with it an implication that popular things are defined as the suck.



For the record, I don't care if he loves or hates WoW. It doesn't hurt me if he likes or hates any game (or musical act). I overall like the game, but it certainly doesn't need me to fanboi-defend it. It's the argument he's using I take issue with.

http://zombiesloveburningcrusade.ytmnd.com/

 :-D

that's awesome.

I like some popular things, I loathe others.  It's not whether something is popular or not that makes it good.  Everything exists on its own merits. 

Like other entities that go mainstream, the popularity of WoW is both a blessing and a curse.  I think you all know why.  (hint: emulation vs innovation)

So, how do you guys think the login servers are going to do this week and what size of queues are you expecting?  Have they announced any new servers to handle the influx of people resubscribing?

Y'know, this statement made me think. I think it would be true to say that WoW took a genre that we (at least) all knew had potential and actually brought it to some minimum level of polish and gameplay that the general public can stomach.  Pre-WoW was the genre's beta, post-WoW is the genre's release.  The innovation was how to actually make the model work.

One day someone will figure out that WoW success does not mean "figure out some way to shoehorn elves into your game" *cough* moon elves, but rather, it means make a game that is challenging without being soul-crushing and stable enough to play once you get there.

See, was that all that hard?  (the answer, of course, is yes)

Launch faq. (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=67248135&postId=672520849&sid=1#0)


There were a lot of servers that got free transfers to new servers.  This may help the TBC crowding issue a little.