World of Warcraft Hits 9 Million Users

Wowzer writes "Blizzard today announced that their MMORPG World of Warcraft is now played by more than 9 million gamers around the world. From the article: 'That's half a million more than the number of monthly players WoW had back in March five months ago. — It's interesting to note that if the World of Warcraft were a nation, CIA's World Factbook says that out of 236 listed countries it would be the 90th most populated country on Earth above Haiti, but behind Sweden.' Also revealed this week was that DC Comics are creating World of Warcraft Comic Books based on the MMORPG, with the first issue appearing on November 14th. The ongoing monthly series will be written by industry veteran Walter Simonson (Thor, Orion) and feature art by Ludo Lullabi and inker Sandra Hope."

Yes...

...but what did it hit them with.

Re:Yes...

A potentially relationship-ending addiction?

I thought I was going to have to post that. Thank you.

Here's a few links for people who are worried about WOW addicts:
http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-fro m-top.html [blogspot.com]
http://wowdetox.com/ [wowdetox.com]
http://wowrecovery.com/ [wowrecovery.com]
http://deletewow.com/ [deletewow.com]
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/WOW_widow [yahoo.com]
http://www.wowrecovery.com/ [wowrecovery.com]
http://www.wowdetox.com/view.php?number=13640 [wowdetox.com]

http://www.joystiq.com/2005/06/23/boy-dies-after-1 2-hour-gaming-session/ [joystiq.com]
http://www.joystiq.com/2005/11/04/wow-online-funer al-commemorates-death-of-young-gamer/ [joystiq.com]
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,195236,00.html [foxnews.com]
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/20/news_61278 66.html [gamespot.com]

Re:Yes...

Addiction to things that are not physically addictive is a symptom of depression, not a disease in itself. These "video game" and "Internet" addictions should make that clearer than ever. It's time for us to gain a more nuanced understanding of the addictive process; our current understanding is based on a misguided attempt to eliminate addiction by elimination of chemicals that have been involved in addictions, and this has completely failed.

You will not find me a real WoW addict who is not depressed, and you will not cure anyone of depression simply by removing WoW.

Re:Yes...

You will not find me a real WoW addict who is not depressed, and you will not cure anyone of depression simply by removing WoW.

You are quite possibly right, but you missed one: You will never cure a WoW addiction simply by removing depression.

Re:Yes...

Heroin is less time-consuming.

Re:Yes...

I'm sure there are millions of players who are perfectly functional, social, and productive members of society.

That said, I'm also sure there is a much higher portion of people who play compulsively, to the detriment of all else, in WoW and other MMO*s than in any other form of entertainment past or present. Anyone who's known someone who's played, and anyone who themselves has played, can name at least one person either in person or in game, who is online nearly every waking minute, habitually stays up well into the early morning, and/or neglects real world responsibilities for "play" time. Anyone who says otherwise is either a newbie, woefully naive, or willfully ignorant.

The parent is not a troll for pointing this out, and I can't help but wonder about the state of mind of people who dismiss the addictive nature of MMOGs out of hand. The problem, as I see it, is that much of the population has no experience with WoW, and is rightfully skeptical. The number of active players who will actually admit [wikipedia.org] the addictive nature of the games is small. But eventually the collective knowledge of society will better match reality, once enough people have been affected. 9M may sound large, but it's probably the number of accounts rather than unique individuals, and it's a worldwide number. Even if they're counting unique individuals, 0.05% of the population is orders of magnitude smaller than the margins of error for most polls.

Re:Yes...

Knowing blizzard:

Either a nerf bat or a ban hammer.

Re:Yes...

WoW just follows the rules of mmogs. These rules are:

You always try out-level, and never play with, your friends (no matter what the voiced intentions)

As soon as you finish that quest for that really cool item, a new one comes making it totally worthless

In pvp, if you're in an area where there's a remote possibility you'll get ganked, you will be

In pvp, if you're in an area where there's no way you'll get ganked, you will be

The smallest possible race will always be rolled as a tank, and be better at it than the biggest possible race

1 out of 3, no 2 out of 3 ... no, 3 out of 3 quests will, at some point, make no sense

You will always respec wrong

You will hate the game

You will not stop playing the game

You will wonder why you cannot stop playing the game

You will cancel your account

You will re-open your account

You will cancel your account

[ad infinitum]

The maker will always nerf your class

The maker will always buff your friend's class

You will sell your account for $x amount of money and feel you actually are a good business man (when, truth is, you invested 100x that much)

You will create a new account and character

You will tell yourself that it isn't so bad this time because you're so good at it

You will cancel your account

You will play another mmog and tell yourself and your friends how much better/different it is than the last

You will create a character on a role-playing server and never role-play (nor will anyone else; people who do rarely role-play are made fun of)

K, I'm done, someone take over....

Damn

WOW is fast to hit that many people. I hope the injuries aren't serious.

9 million users or accounts?

How many individuals? 9 million accounts, 6 million people?

But like in any economy...

80% of them are farming gold for the upper 20% :) Gold farmers shouldn't count...

Cheers!

Class warfare?

80% of them are farming gold for the upper 20% :)

That just proves the realism of the game.

Re:Class warfare?

Since it's WORLD of warcraft, not DEVELOPED COUNTRY of warcraft, it should really be more of a 95/5 split

MMORPG popularity

I find it fascinating that all the later, more popular mmorpg's seem to be far inferior to the "original": Ultima Online.

You could own a house, put vendors there to sell stuff, you had trade skills that were fully independent of fighting, you had an economy of "rare" artifacts with no use at all people just wanted them to have them, you could kill other players and take their gear.

And it was so much friendlier to the casual player: you could teleport to where your real-life friends were, you could play with your friends even if they played 40 hours a week and you played 2, you could macro when you were away to keep up with your friends or do things like craft armor to support a guild.

PvP made you actually have REAL friends and REAL enemies, instead of "You're an orc and he's an elf so you hate each other". It also made guilds have value, as you needed protection and could benefit from a guildmate making your armor while you made him potions.

Basically, I just can't stand that WoW is worse than UO in almost every way but has about 8.8 million more subscribers. UO was ahead of its time.

It exists

You could own a house, put vendors there to sell stuff, you had trade skills that were fully independent of fighting, you had an economy of "rare" artifacts with no use at all people just wanted them to have them, you could kill other players and take their gear.

EQ2 has everything but 'taking their gear'. EQ PVP servers have everything but 'owning a house'. Non-PVP EQ didn't have the gear stealing.
And it was so much friendlier to the casual player: you could teleport to where your real-life friends were, you could play with your friends even if they played 40 hours a week and you played 2, you could macro when you were away to keep up with your friends or do things like craft armor to support a guild. EQ has a cool system called shrouding, where a high-level player can 'shroud' into a different form and descend to a lower level; and change classes even. Its nice to play with friends leveling alts or, as you say, friends that aren't as hardcore.

Never played UO, I got sucked into EQ, just wanted to agree with you that WoW really is a dumbing down of the oldschool MMO's but that EQ offers basically everything UO offered, and is still alive and kicking (new expansion in a few months, baby! I think its #14 now ...)

Re:MMORPG popularity

I totally agree. PKers almost drove me away from UO completely when it first began. I tried to get my wife interested, but she hated how vulnerable we were and how pointless PvP was in general. (you call friends, they call friends, everybody dies and loses gear and it just wastes your time instead of allowing you to play the game)

I showed her WoW during beta and she was curious. When I purchased it, she started a character and was hooked within a few hours. She went on a trip and came back home to find her own account waiting for her. We still play side by side to this day and show no signs of slowing.

Key point to WoW's popularity: it appeals to EVERY play style in some form or fashion.

But see you are wrong

I get amused by the people that claim WoW is "inferior" because of its friendly environment and no-penalty PvP. Well it's not, that is actually what makes it superior to most people, and is the reason they have 9 million players. Most people aren't hardcore, they don't want a game that punishes them for failure, they don't want to have to deal with keeping up with those who make a game in to a life and so on.

If you want games like that, they are available. I'm made to understand EVE is such a game. Extremely hardcore, real loss, etc, etc. That's great if that's what you like, but don't pretend like it is "superior". One of the reasons WoW is so great is it treats things more like a single player game. When I die in a SP game I don't lose anything but time, I am set back to whatever my last save point was and must replay from there. The nearest MMORPG experience, since you can't reload, is to just have you have to wait a bit as you head back to your body. No loss of anything but time.

That's what has kept me interested in WoW. It is the 5th MMORPG I've tried (EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE, Starwars Galaxies) and the only one that has lasted more than 6-9 months or so. All the rest got boring fast for various reasons. For example in EQ the problem was it felt like they hated you. The game was setup to punish you severely for failure, and to be very unhelpful.

WoW gets it right for me, and for many others because it is extremely easy to get in to (I've never seen a more friendly start than WoW's newbie quests), doesn't punish you, and has lots to do for whatever it is you like doing. I realise that's not for everyone, but you need to realise that if a more hardcore experience is your preference that is a different preference, not a superior one. There is nothing wrong with wanting an easier, more friendly experience. After all, the whole point of games is to be entertaining. They are not for proving or accomplishing something, they are there to make you happy and let you have fun. Whatever it is that does that, that's what you should play. For 9 million of us (and counting) WoW is that kind of game.

Re:But see you are wrong

These are very good points. Along with this, I will point out one area where WoW really has been revolutionary: the UI. If WoW got one thing gloriously right, it was their very moddable and customizable user interface via a LUA scripting system. I hope this catches on in future game's of a variety of genres, not just MMO's, because it really allows you remove the largest barrier in enjoying button-heavy and information spamming games.

Re:MMORPG popularity

Being a 7.5 year UO vet, I think I can address this.

Many aspects of UO were ahead of its time. It could have been a fantastic MMORPG that would have reached millions of players, but too many factors prevented that from occurring.

- Garriott's vision of a dynamic online world never reached fruition. The ecology system never really worked (animals preying upon other animals to keep the spawn rate down). It does work in WoW, and it's fascinating to watch monsters fight each other.
- Garriott (and Raph's) vision was too dependent upon players "playing nice" and wanting to be a moral, socially upright group. What they didn't count on was how some people feel they have the right to be complete and total a-holes because they're hidden behind the anonymity of a game character.
- The economy was ruined... by players. Greed, immorality and the desire to simply ruin the experience for others drove exploiters to imbalance the money system. Granted WoW has its share of gold exploits and problems with people selling their gold farming "services," but it's not nearly as skewed as UO was after the first two years.
- The PvP system was ruined... by players. Instead of a fair playing field where everyone has an equal chance, it turned into a predator/prey system where crafters gathered resources and fighters took it away. I despise PvP, but WoW is so well balanced and has such few penalties I'm considering participating. If it's attractive to a pacifist like myself, I imagine it's remarkable to those that enjoy PvP. If someone kills another player for gear, they're playing and killing for the wrong reason, IMO.
- The classless system was unique and allowed some flexibility, but still you ended up in a niche of "warrior, caster or crafter." I knew of numerous players who started out going one direction only to discover they had wasted their time and needed to go a different direction. I lost count of how many times I "respecced" my main character. Having grown up playing D&D, I prefer the class style.
- EA prevented UO from reaching it's potential numerous times. 1)Pushed Garriott out. When you get rid of the person with the vision, how do you know where you're going? 2)Lost the "Ultima" in "Ultima Online." I'm sure you probably played the series, too. Didn't you want to see more correlation with the series stories? There were two major attempts to bring that content to UO, but EA killed them. Then they brought in Todd McFarlane to add his touch. Another major mistake there. 3)There were also multiple attempts to overhaul the game entirely, but EA wouldn't hear it because it might endanger their constant cash flow if some players decided to jump ship if they had to start over. I would have stayed because there was nothing better than UO for several years (tried DAoC, AC, AO. EQ sucked from the outset, so I never needed to try it.)

To your points:
- Crafting skills in WoW are just as separated from fighting as they were in UO. In order to gather resources, you must be able to face the wilds and at least fight enough to defend yourself from roving monsters. Otherwise a crafter can stay in town safe from harm.
- WoW also has a few rares, but they are not exchangeable which I prefer. My pets from my Collector's Editions make my account fairly valuable. Since I cannot foresee my future of not playing WoW, I have no intention of cashing in.
- I do hope WoW implements housing, but I hope they do it correctly. I despised how UO just allowed players to ruin the landscape and affect the monster and resource spawns. I had even sent the designers several suggestions of having housing servers with teleporters to keep the land pristine. If WoW does add housing, I'm sure it will be a separate server that would not affect the current world.
- I liked having my vendors sell my wares while I was away, but I did not like having to keep them stocked and paid whether they sold anything or not. I much prefer the Auction House in WoW.
- WoW has a very similar, and I think more robust, soc

Is played or has been played?

I haven't given Blizzard a dime in several months now. I'd imagine they're still counting the folks who used to play, but no longer do.

Re:Is played or has been played?

World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition
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.

Taken from http://www.blizzard.com/press/070724.shtml [blizzard.com]

Re:Is played or has been played?

Perhaps you could quote the part of the article which defines that for me.

I'll do the honors.

World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition
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.

Source: http://www.blizzard.com/press/070724.shtml [blizzard.com]

Apologies on behaf of the poster you replied to. He shouldn't expect anybody to actually click through to the Blizzard press release. This is Slashdot, after all.

Numbers game?

Is that nine million current active paid subscriptions? Nine million unique accounts (including trial accounts and accounts that aren't being played right now)? Still a darn good number, I'm sure there are lots of other gaming companies that would like the headache of supporting that many players.

ONE OF US

ONE OF US ONE OF US

Comic endeavor

Each issue of the WoW comic's gripping storyline will be interrupted by the characters running around shouting misspelled racist and homophobic epithets at the reader for two solid pages.

I Know Nothing of WoW, but...

I knew WoW was a HUGE MMORPG and that's about it but if my calculations are correct 9M Active Accounts * $10/monthly subscription fees(that's my guess, I don't know the actual figure) * 12 Months = $1.08 Billion a year! Holy Cow, that's insane!

What's the metric?

How did they measure this number? Is this number of accounts created or number of current active accounts? I'm guessing its the former, where someone like myself (who hasn't played in months) would be included.

all the while...

... and mankind has hit a new low.

Yet Somehow...

There are only 9 million players but 11 million night elf hunters. Go figure.

What is World of Warcraft

Am I out of touch, what is this World of Warcraft thing?

Does that include trial users?

Does that include every user created using those $2 trial disks that in reality you can get for free? ...Because if so I've got 9 million bridges to sell you.

Highly Inflated

I would wager that this number is highly inflated...

Personally, I own and maintain 3 accounts and my girlfriend has her own as well, so 2 players, 4 accounts... If you take a look at my guild of 50+ active members you will find an impressive roster of well over 200 characters many of which are on seperate accounts. I know I have at least 15 players with more than one account, and our biggest account holder is sitting around 8.

Take a look at Dual Boxing [dual-boxing.com] and evaluate how many multi-account users there are out there... Many claim (and have video proof) of 5 [dual-boxing.com], 10 [dual-boxing.com], and even 50 [gameslah.com] boxes running at a time... with one of the contributors to the community boasting over 200 wow accounts [dual-boxing.com] on one server...

I figure that without even counting farmers, we have made a significant notch in the 9 million number...

yeah but...

It's interesting to note that if the World of Warcraft were a nation, CIA's World Factbook says that out of 236 listed countries it would be the 90th most populated country on Earth above Haiti, but behind Sweden. i pasted this to a friend who pointed out that while the taxes are much lower the death rate is significantly higher...

In other news...

The Department of Education reports 9M new drop-outs.

GDP

Anyone know what the estimated GDP for the WoW economy is? I bet it's more than some poor countries!

One Word

WOW!

Åh nej!

De är ikapp oss! Börja kopulera för guds skull!

Re:WTF?!

English only in general. Reported

Reported? Are you serious?

Anyway, in Swedish: "They have caught up with us! Start copulating for god's sake!"

'poopsock' tag? wtf

Does anyone know why in the world this article is tagged 'poopsock'? I don't understand

Re:'poopsock' tag? wtf

I had to look it up [urbandictionary.com], myself.

In seemingly unrelated news...

Bedpans have been selling in record numbers, despite orders from hospitals and hospices declining over recent years.

*Mom! Bathroom, bathroom!*

Ok, but...

...they should thank Cartman, Kenny, Stan and Kyle.

Obligatory -

Eat shit, nine million flies can't be wrong.

9 Million users my ass...

It's probably more like 9 million accounts and 3 million users.

Apparently there's this fad called "dual boxing" [wowwiki.com]. This guy [dual-boxing.com] has 50 computers on WoW at a time between him and his gf.

And you thought your buddy was addicted with his ONE measly account.

My experience with WoW

I gave into it two Summers ago, since most of my gaming friends were wayyy into it already and gave me a free trial account. I have to say that until then I resisted the urge and was mostly uninterested with the game altogether. Then I started playing quite intensely. After 20 8-hour sessions or so, questing hardcore and reaching level 30 with a Rogue and 25 with a Fire Mage, I realized that the amount of time needed to level shot up exponentially, and also realized that I had a real life and classes to worry about (having a girlfriend also helped... and no, not a cyber girlfriend, thank you very much). Soon after that I was turning down my friends' request to log in because I knew I'd be giving up the rest of my day(s). A few months later one of my friends did decide he was addicted and had to erase all of his characters (not an easy task if you knew the kind of gear he had), cancel his subscription, uninstall the game and give away the CDs. I understand that now he has found a healthier balance of WoW and real life. Many props to him.

I also tried getting back to it, putting in a few hours a week. Unfortunately once you get past a certain point, a few hours a week won't get you anywhere and I think that's the biggest fallacy in WoW. Games shouldn't turn into full time jobs just to keep up, and if you're a fresh player you're gonna have to put in that kind of time. On the other hand, CounterStrike is a game that you can play 30 minutes a day and get your fix. Heck, I'd recommend Diablo II any day of the year over WoW. It only gets time consuming on Act 5 the third time around...

Woo hoo!

And the remaining 5.991 Billion people *still* don't give a fuck.

Ahh, perspective...