World of Warcraft still growing -- 9.3 million served
by Samuel Axon 
Nov 14th 2007 at 11:13PM
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, MMO industry, News items
Gamasutra reports that Vivendi, the parent company of Blizzard, has seen its Q3 2007 sales go up 19% over the last quarter. Vivendi credits this growth partially to the Chinese release of The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft, which occurred in Q3. The company revealed that World of Warcraft now has 9.3 million subscribers -- 300,000 more than the the number reported last quarter.That means that WoW has grown by the size of one and a half EVE Onlines or two whole City of Heroeses in just a few months. Or put another way, the population of World of Warcraft is now greater than the population of Sweden. We think it's safe to say that World of Warcraft will be the dominant title in the industry for a while longer.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
dandyfrog said on 11:31PM 11-14-2007
I think it's all China. If you trust in the numbers from warcraftrealms.com, the US pop is now lower then it was prior to BC.
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Samuel Axon said on 11:45PM 11-14-2007
I think you're correct. Blizzard/Vivendi likes to spin the numbers including China and it's telling that they're not so eager to release figures about other markets.
Nevertheless, even the slowly dwindling North American and European subscriber base is still several times larger than the nearest competitors such as Lord of the Rings Online or EVE Online.
World of Warcraft won't be on top forever, but I think it will be a while yet before it goes to the backburner, don't you?
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dandyfrog said on 12:06AM 11-15-2007
No doubt they will be on top for long time yet. I'm curious to see what effect Wrath of the Lich King has on the US numbers. Whether an expansion will still have the same effect Burning Crusade had or not.
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Samuel Axon said on 12:11AM 11-15-2007
I expect they'll experience some diminishing returns with WotLK, since players have to have done the 60-70 content in TBC to enjoy the 70-80 WotLK content; that means the only people WotLK will attract will be people who already tried and stuck with TBC.
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Bakalex said on 12:58PM 11-15-2007
What about other MMOs such as Ragnarok Online ? I remember to have read, somewhere, that it gathered much more subscription than WoW. I'll try to find the info to bring it back here.
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Ted said on 11:15AM 11-15-2007
Originally commented on the Exsteel thread in response to the wow subscriber number mentioned there, but this is a better place for this comment:
I personally believe that Blizzard fudges their numbers. Since they technically never allow account deletion (you can only terminate your current subscription but can reopen it and reactivate your account at any time) my belief is that Blizzard reports on the total number of accounts they have... not the total number of active accounts.
Anecdotal evidence such as lots of reports of "emptier" servers and the fact that the global wowarmory only contains 4+ million characters (at how many per account) seems to support this theory.
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Samuel Axon said on 5:11PM 11-15-2007
Ragnarok Online does indeed have significantly more players than WoW. But its penetration of Western markets is comparatively negligible.
People raise interesting and very valid questions when they ask how much of WoW's current success is due solely to China. Sadly we don't have any specific numbers, so this sort of talk ends up being very fuzzy-like. It's still safe to say that WoW is still way, way above the competition in North America, though.
...for now. But not forever.
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