World Of WarCraft Expansion Hits 3.5 million

[Ulwar]

Gamasutra is reporting the following:

Officials from developer Blizzard Entertainment have announced that the World of WarCraft expansion pack The Burning Crusade has now sold over 3.5 million copies in just one month, following its mid January launch in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.

The sales of the expansion, which dwarf those of even successful stand alone PC titles from other companies, totaled more than 1.9 million copies in regions that play on North American realms (which includes 100,000 copies in Australasia). An additional 1.6 million copies were sold in Europe.

The eagerly awaited expansion sold almost 2.4 million copies worldwide in its first twenty-four hours – more than any other PC game has ever sold in its whole first month.

As a whole World of WarCraft’s worldwide subscriber based has now reached 8.5 million users – an increase of 500,000 in under two months. The Burning Crusade has also recently launched in South Korea and the company is currently working to localize the game into Simplified and Traditional Chinese for mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau - for release as soon as possible.

“We’re thrilled about the overwhelming response that we’ve received for The Burning Crusade,” said Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment. “We have worked hard to build upon nearly every aspect of World of WarCraft with this expansion, and it’s gratifying to see that players and reviewers are enjoying the new content.”

ORIGINAL HERE

Yes, folks, that's 8.5 MILLION worldwide.

[Richelle]

8.5 million... that's more people than live in 39 different US states....and more than about 150 different nations.

That's a lot of people.

[Hardrock]

i think half that is still on alleria

[Eliot]

its pretty amazing amount of people!!

blizz is making a killing.. money hand over fist

[Lyese]

Lets see $14.99 x 8,500,000,000 = More money than a company should make.

[Ulwar]

Lets see $14.99 x 8,500,000,000 = More money than a company should make.

Uh ... maybe you mean $14.99 x 8,500,000. Your number is 8.5 billion.

But in any case, here's the math:

Assume 8.5 million active subscribers, average monthly cost is $13.99.

Gross revenue is $1,426,980,000 per year. Yes, that's almost 1.5 billion US dollars just in subscription costs.

Now, let's look at purchase prices. Let's assume that those 8.5 million paid $40US per (and assume that $30 goes to Blizzard - Oak you might have more info on this), and we now have 3.5 million on BC at the same price.

So, that's $360,000,000 is purchase income. The numbers are huge. I'm surprised we haven't seen a WoW movie yet.

On the flip side let's look at the bandwidth requirements. Let's assume that at any given time, 10% of the subscribers are online. So, that's 850,000 connections. Since they say broadband is required, let's conservatively say that each connection uses an average of 40 kbit/sec (it may spike to more, but we're talking averages).

That's 34Gbit in bandwidth. A rough estimate on cost is $75 million a year. Those are just scary numbers!

[Amuna]

Well, people in the eastern parts of the world pay considerably less monthly I hear. I don't have numbers to back this up though.

[Richelle]

Each region has different pricing schemes based on the player base.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft#Pricing

In Asia it appears they pay for actual time playing as opposed to the calendar time we pay for.

Anyway you look it though, it's still a lot of money.