World of Warcraft Hits 10 Million
By now you’ve probably seen the announcement last week by Blizzard that World of Warcraft had passed 10 million active subscribers worldwide: 2.5+ million in North America, 2+ million in Europe, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia. WoW’s growth has been remarkable, but a look inside the data shows why this announcement was a bit of a surprise.
Let’s take a look at WoW’s subscription numbers since launch:
WoW’s early growth was pretty steady, almost linear, from October 2004 until March 2006. The only real blip was June 2005, which signifies WoW’s launch into China. But after March 2006, the rate of growth began to slow, and since the release of the Burning Crusade expansion in January 2007, growth had slowed even further. From March 2007 to November 2007, the game was only adding 100K subscribers per month on average. The trendline looked like WoW would peak at below 10 million subscribers.
Yet suddenly, in the last two months, WoW has added 700K new subscribers. Why the sudden surge? Strong holiday sales is the most obvious answer. In fact, you will find similar jumps from Nov 05 - Jan 06 (600K) and Nov 06 - Dec 06 (600K). A probable driver of this year’s holiday surge were a series of high profile television commercials, both in the US and Europe, featuring celebrity endorsements.
Where will WoW finally stop? No one knows, but even with this recent surge the trendline is still showing less than 100K per month growth throughout 2008. Historically even the best MMOGs hit their peak after 4-5 years, so if history is any guide WoW should peak at around 12 million within the next two years, barring an unexpected launch into a new territory that nets millions of new players.
But so far, WoW has broken all the rules and consistently exceeded all expectations. So stay tuned!
January 30th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
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March 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I am so totally into the game,I started after my son showed me the Game(WOW)he played. After watching and listening ‘I Heart Bunnies’,in the “elite” realm of Tichondrious. BTW, thats where I now play.
Kamoori
PVP Warrior
June 8th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
People shouldn’t get worried about WoW being all over right away. It is still growing, and even when subs start to decrease, it will still have plenty of loyal followers.
June 19th, 2008 at 11:00 am
I am interested in knowing more information about the demographics of World of Warcraft. For example: users by age group, gender, area in North America….etc.
Where would I go about finding such information and metrics.
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:03 am
Demographic?
There are 10 million accounts. 8 million of these are chinese gold sellers.
1.8 million are 13 year olds that can’t form a proper sentance
180,000 are men playing as women
19,995 are men playing as men
5 are women. The women play as men though.
The average age group is 8-14. After turning 15 you are no longer l337, so you are sacrificed.
The most popular servers are the RP servers. This is because even the PVPers are desperate to get onto there, so that MORE people can see that they are just 13 years old.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Sentance? Sounds like you owned yourself.
July 6th, 2008 at 3:29 am
GotN, you do realise how economically idiotic that post was? Considering the large majority of people don’t buy gold, how on earth will the 8 million chinese gold sellers stay in business? Your sad attempt at hating just failed.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:46 am
[…] It was announced earlier that 1.5 million copies had been sold to retailers worldwide. We should soon see how that translates into actual subscribers. But to put things into perspective, it took World of Warcraft 6 months to reach 2 million subscribers. […]
November 12th, 2008 at 6:43 am
[…] the numbers, WOW (and MMO) is phenomenal. Earlier this year, WOW active subscriber number hit the 10 million mark. Meanwhile, there are about 16 millions of active MMO subscribers worldwide. If we do some simple […]
June 8th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I love how GotN can’t spell sentence.