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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!