Can you say WoW?
July 24th, 2007Blizzard just announced that they have reached 9 million active subscribers. The rate at which they’ve been increasing subscriptions is amazing.
There are very few regular non-subscription games that have even sold 9 million copies worldwide. Halo and Halo 2 didn’t sell that many. Zelda: Ocarina of Time didn’t do it. According to VGChartz.com, just 26 games ever have surpassed 9 million sales, and only a few from the last generation (all PS2). Blizzard has probably sold far more than 9 million copies of the game, they just have 9 million subscribers also paying $15 a month, which is a monthly revenue of $135,000,000 and an annual revenue (assuming no additional subscribers) of $1,620,000,000. That, of course, not even counting the actual revenue from sales of the game or its expansion.
Mind-boggling.
Posted in Jeff, Online, PC |
July 24th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Actually, Halo 2 has sold 9.2 million. But it is still an amazing accomplishment.
I’ll neve runderstand the appeal of an MMO. people bitch about paying 50 bucks a year for live, but they are willing to pay like 100 bucks a year for WOW.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Jeff,
How are you getting annual revenues of $2B? By my calculations, $1.35M * 12 is only $1.6B. Which is, of course, still a ridiculous number.
By the way, how old is VGCharts’ data? They show WoW as having sold only 7M copies - and their Japan PC sales for just about everything are “0″.
(If you’re interested according to them the leader of the pack would be The Sims, with 17M copies worldwide.)
July 24th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Weird, I must have mistyped something into the calculator. I’ve fixed it now.
I’m not sure how old or exactly how accurate VGChartz is. I noticed the same thing about WoW in Japan, so clearly it’s not fully updated or counting everywhere. It’s probably more accurate for console games, but if Dave’s right then it’s a bit off for Halo 2 as well. Is there a better source for sales information? For some reason, it seems like the info is hard to come by.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
So what you’re really saying is:
WoW, it prints money!
July 25th, 2007 at 1:05 am
Don’t you see? Boring Grinding = TEH NEW BLACK!