World of Warcraft hits 10 million subscriber mark.

Weather you realized world of warcraft (WoW), had become mainstream when the coveted south park episode aired to kick off its 11th seasion. Found your friends deserting you, there families and eventually all society for what you so foolishly deamed back then to be "only a game". World of Warcraft has become our generations biggest attention whore.

I say this as world of Warcraft hits 10 million users, and leaves us all wondering "how much higher can those numbers go ?". To break it down by number of subscribers per continent, Asia easily trumps all of north america and Europe combined with 5.5 million subscribers. America comes in second place with over 2.5 million subscribers. This all leads FPS (first person shooter), crazed europe to bring up the rear with 2 million subsribers.

While on other posts you might just get facts and figures I'll offer up my genuine opinion here on a game that shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Looking at Asia's numbers, its important to realise that Asia is counting not only the gaming mecca of japan but also South Korea and the limitless chinese market. If recent numbers are to be believed the chinese MMO market already has grown to nearly 59 million. While much of this is free to play, chinese citiezens don't pay anywhere near what we in america or europe do. 60 cents is a number I hear thrown around on 1up and Joystiq podcasts frequently when this emerging giant of a market is brought up. But thinking of the sheer volume, Blizzard doesn't have to care if the chinese pay less to play the game.

The Chinese government has taken steps to try to curb its people's use of computers to play games (hence charging by the hour and not the month), yet this actually helps Blizzard and any MMO that attempts to unseat it's dominance. South Korea is a prime example of people loseing sleep, there jobs and even dieing in the course of playing a computer game. And that was Starcraft ! Can you imagine what an MMO will do to them ?

Granted only one person has ever reportedly died of exhaustion playing starcraft but if your talking about paying per hour for being able to play an MMO then the sheer volume of time required to level your character (never mind the retooled leveling system Blizzard introduced to WoW for new players), go on quest and explore Azeroth more then makes up for the small fee. You could even say we in the US and Europe have it easy by comparison.

Blizzard isn't however content to just let Asia(china,japan, south korea), have all the fun. There are plans to tap into India, (where computers and IT are fueling the econmic boom), Russia and of course any yet untapped gamers in the booming East European countries.

This post was originally going to draw comparisons with Dungeons and Dragons but its very clear that WoW is its own entity all by itself. Eventually the game will start to drop off peoples radar and subsciption will begin to go down but that years away. For Now lets just appreciate how Blizzards been rideing the cash flow to finally get around to making Starcraft 2.

Merging With Activision to creat "Activision Blizzard", to compete with the evil empire that is EA, doesn't hurt either.

- Alex

Sources: Gameindustry.bizz
BlizzPlanet