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Summary: An article on Playfuls.com
took the news bout Blizzard's ten million subscribers and suss
out just how much money they're making.
An article on Playfuls.com took the news bout Blizzard's ten
million subscribers and suss out just how much money they're
making.
Blizzard announced on January 22 that its popular MMORPG has
reached the "more than 10 million subscribers worldwide"
milestone and that they are very proud of that...
It took Blizzard almost 6 months to pass from 9 million
subscribers to 10 million subscribers, the last update on how
many WoW players are out there are happening on July 24, 2007.
As expected, the Asian continent is where the title has the
largest mass of subscribers, with more than 5.5 million gamers
paying their monthly subscription for a chance to gold farm. The
US comes in second place, with more than 2.5 million
subscribers, while Europe is on the third spot, with only 2
million.
"It's very gratifying to see gamers around the world continuing
to show such enthusiasm and support for World of Warcraft," said
Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment.
"We're always pleased to welcome new players to the game, and
we're looking forward to sharing the next major content update
with the entire community in the months ahead."
OK, now let's do some simple calculi: if all those 10 million
subscribers were to pay the regular US14.99 month-to-month fee,
then Blizzard would fill its pockets with almost US 150 million
every single month (US149 million to be exact, but of course
there are people who pay for 3 or 6 months in advance). For the
company that also brought us StarCraft and Diablo that means a
revenue-target of more than US 1.7 billion (US 1,798,900,000)
for FY 2008, if (and that's a BIG "if"...) they manage to keep
ONLY 10 million subscribers for the 11 months left.
But with China's online gaming population going towards 58
million by the end of 2008, with constant new-comers flooding
servers worldwide, with a new expansion pack looming and with a
plethora of mods (yeah, World of Porncraft included...)
available, it somehow natural to think profits will go up even
further in Azeroth, and we are not mentioning the up-coming
launch of StarCraft 2...
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