Dromic wrote:
WoW is 16x larger now that is beyond funny. Wow for NA is only 5x larger. WoW was reporting about 5.1 million last week and WAR shows 1.2 million. Now that is toons not users. Number of users in normally 1/4 to 1/8 that.
Be nice and use 1/4 and you get:
WoW NA = 1.27 million users
WAR NA = 300k users (I believe these are only NA servers)
Now, you are just making those numbers up. I challenge you to find a link (of any kind) that supports them.
Here's a chart of WoW subscriptions by region:
Blizzard Press releases are here:
http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/
Each Blizzard Press release about WoW states:
?World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees? territories are defined along the same rules.?
The last press release on that page states that subscriptions had reached 11 Million in the time between the BC and WotLK release, but it doesn't have current numbers
The oldest press release on that page is from January (right after BC was released), and it states:
IRVINE, Calif. -- January 22, 2008 -- Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft?, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. Interest in the game has remained high in all regions, with thousands of new and returning players signing up through the holiday season. World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia.
So, has the 11 Million mark become the peak? I've seen news articles that seem to say no, such as this one titled
"Blizzard Unfazed by Conan, Warhammer". Also, Rollie's most recent charts have shown a steady number of concurrent players, and we've all experienced the terrible queues recently.
I am surprised that Blizzard hasn't put out a press report showing new subscriber numbers post-WotLK release, but that is the only reason to believe that they are suffering a loss of players. If you have more information, though, I'd love to see it
The mmogchart.com site has always had a lot of really good information about subscription numbers of different MMOs, but it looks like the author has let it fall out of date recently. I don't see anything since AOC's release in his charts. He has always given Blizzard an accuracy rating of 'A' for their subscriber number reporting, but with the lack of hard information at this time, I doubt that they would keep the 'A'.