Today Blizzard gave a press release concerning their subscriber count… 8 million. Of course I immediately questioned whether that number included actual current subscribers or anyone who has ever had a WoW account. The answer is at the bottom of the press release.
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.
8 million is quite impressive. It seems that they have captured the casual gaming market that gaming companies have been trying to target for years. I do wonder how many of those subscribers have made it to the end game, where everything is raid based, and you can’t do much without first gathering 40 people. The first 60 levels are quite fun, plenty of solo and small group content, but after that what I saw was all raid based. I recently got an email about the new WoW expansion coming out (Burning Crusade). I’m sure the expansion will capture even more subscribers. I would consider coming back to the game if they added more non raid content.
On a related note, Sigil announced that Vanguard will be released on January 30th. Although I hate to say it, speaking as a beta player, the game is not ready for release. It is not much more than a crappy copy of WoW. Although the graphics are more realistic than WoW, it results in the scenery being dull and uninteresting while WoW is more stylized and easy to look at (some people call it “cartoony”, I would call it “artistic”). Vanguard’s user interface is almost a complete copy of WoW, down to the colors and fonts. From what I have seen of the beta, it is far more buggy than WoW was during beta.
Unfortunately, this is probably par for the course for new MMORPGs in development now. Many will try to go with “what works” (features from WoW). The next big MMORPG will need to be more revolutionary. A poor copy of WoW just won’t cut it. I would very much like to see new and interesting MMORPGs on the block, and would like them to succeed (especially something like Stargate or Firefly), but I don’t think it is going to happen in the near future. New games really need to differentiate themselves from WoW to succeed, and the game developers right now are too hung up on trying to cash in on Blizzard’s success.