Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced on Tuesday that it’s incredibly successful MMORPG, World of Warcraft, has surpassed more than 9 million subscribers worldwide. "We're thrilled that gamers around the world have continued to embrace World of Warcraft so enthusiastically," said Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment®. "We've worked hard to provide a compelling experience for our players, and we plan to continue updating the game with exciting new content for them to enjoy for many years to come." The milestone news comes as Blizzard works with its partner The9 to prepare for the release of the games first expansion, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, in China.
Since its North American release in November 2004, World of Warcraft has achieved many accolades including becoming the best selling PC game of 2005 and 2006 and has maintained a top spot throughout much of 2007. The Burning Crusade expansion pack continued that trend earlier this year by breaking sales records around the world, selling over 2 million copies within 24 hours of its official retail sales launch and over 3 million copies in it’s first month.
News source: Blizzard Entertainment
Since its North American release in November 2004, World of Warcraft has achieved many accolades including becoming the best selling PC game of 2005 and 2006 and has maintained a top spot throughout much of 2007. The Burning Crusade expansion pack continued that trend earlier this year by breaking sales records around the world, selling over 2 million copies within 24 hours of its official retail sales launch and over 3 million copies in it’s first month.
News source: Blizzard Entertainment
I'm glad I never got involved with the WoW or Sims franchises. Give me an old skool single player game any day.
I've found that unless you start playing multiplayer games the day they're released, you'll never keep up with the skill of other players with more free time. Case in point: I could never hope to win a game of CounterStrike, ever.
Counter Strike is another kind of game. It's like playing tennis: you can start today and train for years, but you will never become as good as a pro-player. That's right. But WoW has a cap: when you reach level 70, it's all about looking for powerful stuff, fighting and using the auction house. You can play for 5 years and have good stuff in your pockets, but you can be a relatively young player (like me, playing since 3 months) and still find awesome stuff. That's because items and rewards are mostly given in a random way
Personal opinion: Ultima Online was/is the first and unique *real* mmorpg. 10 years ago, it started it all. You know is coming back in a "revisited" edition?
/cheer
I suppose your right but then you could say the same about new york as to whether they count crack dealers towards their population. just because their scum doesn't mean they're not there
Hmm... And how shall we classify your response?
Hmm... And how shall we classify your response?
except for the simple fact that people like to complain more about something then praise it.... and it's also easer to whinge bout something you might not like.... I just got really sick of it... and this is comming from a world class whinger...
Why don't you go back to your Xbox Live where you can swear like a sailor with all your high pitched 12 year old friends while spouting abuse at the person who killed you on the dull and turd coloured Gears of War.
Everyone has their own addictions anyhow..
The way I see it, there's less annoying/retarded people you have to deal with in real life
Why don't you go back to your Xbox Live where you can swear like a sailor with all your high pitched 12 year old friends while spouting abuse at the person who killed you on the dull and turd coloured Gears of War.
Don't even try it
You got the same exact type of people playing WoW. Like I said above, I only tried it for an hour and saw too many immature people on there and felt it wasn't even worth it.
Right. Considering most of the starting zones are desolate. Major cities are now empty due to the exp pack... I feel you may be telling us porkies. Just didn't like the genre then?
I understand some people don't like it because it's a tad simple and a MMO but just spouting utter bollocks about it makes you sound like a jurno for the daily mail who spounds things like- GTA KILL COPS FOR POINTS! It's so off the mark it's untrue and if you did a little research you might even begin to like it.
It's like going to Liverpool and seeing one mugging then saying every scouser is a thief. Just because it has a massive population you have more chance of running in to an idiot just like you have a high chance of running in to an idiot in Gear of War due to it's popularity with the kids. But pick up Flatout and you have nothing but men and women over the ages of 22 playing.
Mass generalisations aren't cool.
Last edited by Spookie on 26 Jul 2007 - 14:26
Well, you're right and milions of players are wrong... We have a genius, here
Who will ever like a game where you have a yellow mouth moving in a maze, eating small dots while some ghosts chase it? (pac-man).
Just because millions of people play it doesn't mean everyone elses opinion of the game is invalid or stupid.
I, personally, thought NightmarE was right. I played it for about two weeks just to give it a fair test, and I thought the same thing he did. So what?
For some reason, because millions play it, anyone who doesn't play it and has a reason not to is somehow intellectually inferior to someone emotionally unstable enough to get irritated at the simple hint of there being something wrong with their game? Oh no!
Go collect some artificial rocks or something.
I think you're completely missing the point. Or avoiding it. You choose.
Either way we were making the point you can't judge a MMO on 1 hrs play. It's like going to see a movie and then reviewing it on the first 30 mins of footage.
Hell you could level that point at anyone who defends a console, a game, a sport etc.
Wrong. You can say whatever you want, IF you give it a chanche. He played it 1 hour. One. And then comes here explaining people how mmorpg is...
I've never played WoW, and it doesn't sound like an entertaining game to me.
Well, you're right and milions of players are wrong... We have a genius, here
That is because there are millions of morons out there who would waste $20 per month on a game.
Actually, I wasn't missing the point. I was replying to Flatty's:
You see? His entire point was quantity rules. Because millions play it, they are right. That's not true at all, and I defended THAT point.
No, it's not. Games should be fun from beginning to end. Movies can be drawn out by an amazing plot. And since I don't normally hear WoW players rattling off about the amazing storyline, it probably relies on its gameplay.
But, if you join a game up and are immediately faced with immature children and rather dull gameplay then why continue playing? If you feel it's not worth it, you are entitled to your opinion, and you can write that opinion down wherever you feel like it. He wasn't being biased or saying the game ruined his life, he was saying he tried it and didn't like the damn thing. Same as I did.
You could, but I wouldn't. There's a line between defending something and being emotionally attached to something. Judging from your comments spamming anyone who says WoW isn't the coolest thing ever, I'm betting your emotionally attached to it, and you're only telling us all off to feel better about playing it all the time. Good for you, but it makes you sound a lot less convincing.
What are you saying "wrong" to? I asked a question. How is my question wrong?
I think you're completely missing the point. Or avoiding it. You choose.
Either way we were making the point you can't judge a MMO on 1 hrs play. It's like going to see a movie and then reviewing it on the first 30 mins of footage.
Hell you could level that point at anyone who defends a console, a game, a sport etc.
An MMO is infinite, whereas a film is not.
How long must someone play an MMO to review it then?
I said it once, I'll say it again. You can't judge a MMO on a hours worth of play. Every MMO is slow to begin. You can't give someone 40 spells, a talent tree, a raid system, a RvR world and a ranking system from day one. EVE does that exact thing and most of the subscribers drop in the first week. MMOs are slow burners.
You don't see people saying: "That Counter Strike is so awful I can't play it! I joined a server and it was full of childish idiots. I REFUSE to try it again!". They just leave the server and find another. Just in the case of a MMO. Leave the general channel, find a friendly newbie guild and get in to the game and progress together.
Many games cater for this, EVE has EVE-Uni, many other of the MMOs have dedicated guilds on various servers with experienced players giving time to newbies to get them off the ground.
Negative, I play EVE-Online. I quit WoW over 3 months ago. I just think the constant "I PLAYD FOR AN HORZ ZOMG MMOS R 4 *** LULZ" are so common these days that they just needed the record setting straight from another perspective.
Good question, I reckon reaching a reasonable level to experience some group PvE, RvR (if it's part of the game) and see the storyline expand (*points at LotRo*). Expecting someone to reach level cap then experiance 'End game' content is unreasonable.
Live is £44 for a P2P system. The PS3 does it for free. Does that make every live user a moron?
edit: Fixed the condescending Jimmy Carr-esq tone. Don't think some would get the pun.
Last edited by Spookie on 27 Jul 2007 - 22:31
8,329,481 - Gold farmers. (8,329,480 are bots)
670,519 - Legitimate accounts. (only 144,396 actual players)
Anyway you slice it though, Blizzard still gets $135,000,000 US (9,000,000 x 15) per month because of WoW. And that my friends, is what is called "/win".
I give blizzard props for the way they designed the game to be so addicting, I'm not even kidding, MSG is one of the ingredients.
I'm a casual player though, not into farming, raiding and all that endgame stuff that takes hours of planning and scheduling raids, and headsets, that seems more like work to me. But alot of people enjoy that and thats fine.
You can still play WoW and have an active social life though, so all you haters can STFU.
Are there idiots ? Sure with 9 million subscribers theres going to be some idiots in there. But not everyone is.
A big factor in enjoying WoW is picking the right server, I found that the game kind of stinks on a low population server, then I switched to a high pop server and the overall experience is alot better.
My friends got me into WoW a few months ago and I love it. It's great fun. And to everyone else who thinks otherwise, what exactly are you hoping to accomplish by blasting all of us who think WoW is fun? Are you trying to change our minds? I'll tell you, the odds of someone reading a flame on a forum and then deciding to stop doing something fun are very slim indeed.
Can we at least try and not destroy each other over computer game preferences?
Couldn't you sell the gold and make a profit?
But of course Maple Story is not the overhyped products of the moment.
Nuff said.
Having servers with 1.5m players like in Europe is sort of impressive from a technical perspective, but then many websites out receive far more hits everyday. Maybe Apache should start making comparisons with city populations on websites using their software, or Microsoft could say "MSDN has more subscribers than the population of Tokoyo!"; MSDN is sending GBs of information to each person too not measly little UDP packets.
Play WoW is just like anything else. yes there is the group of dorks you actually substitute WoW for real life but the majority just play cause its fun. Maybe you all are right. maybe we should stop playing and maybe go cause some trouble. Get a clue
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.