World of Warcraft: 10 Million Users and Counting

All one can say is WoW as Blizzard Entertainment announced this week that it now has over 10 million World of Warcraft subscribers. The majority of subscribers are in Asia totaling about 5.5 million, with about 2.5 million in North America and another 2 million subscribers in Europe. This is not bad for a game that first hit release in November of 2004. WoW is now available in seven languages with Russian on the way.

This makes World of Warcraft and its expansion pack The Burning Crusade the most successful subscription-based online game ever. The average cost is anywhere from $13 to $24 per month, bringing Blizzard more than a cool $15 million just to keep the servers up and running. Of course there is the in-game management as well which likely takes its toll on that income.

All of us WoW fans are now waiting for the second expansion pack to be released later this year, Wrath of the Lich King. This should prove interesting as to whether the franchise can keep up the growth with the new expansion when most other games would have relaunched a sequel by now with updated graphics engines and more bells and whistles. So far though, World of Warcraft seems to be going strong throughout the world.