World of Warcraft breaks 9 million subscribers!

[Bodhesatva]

World of Warcraft has now reached 9 million subscribers!

http://kotaku.com/gaming/money-should-be-renamed-wow/wow-breaks-9-million-subscribers-281824.php

As Kotaku said, "Money should be renamed WoW." For comparison, this means that WoW alone is larger than PSN and Xbox Live combined, despite the fact that it's just a single game and that game costs 15 dollars per month to subscribe to!

Interestingly, this amounts to:

15 x 9 = 135 million dollars a month for Blizzard in revenue

Or 15 x 12 = 180 dollars per year per customer

Or 180 x 9 = 1,620,000 dollars for Blizzard per year in net revenue. That's 1.6 Billion dollars in revenue based on this game alone, and that's not including the purchase of the actual game itself or its expansion(s). Assuming that even 30 percent of former WoW players have canceled their subscription, that means this game has sold 12 millions copies thus far, and is still selling quite well (still in the top 10 best selling games on Amazon, both for the original and its expansion). This means that WoW would be one of the most succesful games of all time if we were simply judging by game sale revenue, which we haven't even included. Let's assume that the average player paid 35 dollars for the game (it was 50 to start with, but is now 20. 35 seems like a reasonable average).

That's 35 x 12 = 420,000,000 dollars in revenue from sales of the original game. Approximately 5.5 million copies of the expansion have sold, at an average price of 40 dollars, so that's 40 x 5.5 = 220,000,000 dollars. WoW has been in release for 2.6 years. If we assume that WoW had an average of 6 million subscribers last year (that's pretty close) and 3 million the year before that (also pretty close), we get the following:

3 x 180 = 540 million for the first year
6 x 180 = 1,080 million for the second year

Thus, by November of this year, we can estimate that World of Warcraft has produced approximately this much revenue:

540 + 1,080 + 420 + 220 + 1,620 = 3.38 billion dollars in revenue, and still climbing quite quickly. We're likely to see at least another billion dollars (at least -- more likely closer to 1.5 billion) by November 2008.

I'm going to bold this synopsis for people who don't like math: World of Warcraft has likely produced somewhere between 3 and 3.5 billion dollars in revenue for Blizzard. It will likely produce 1.25-1.75 billion dollars more in the next year.