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. 

What is with comparing the WOW userbase to Xbox Live and PSN?

Anyway, this game keeps growing it's insane. There's nothing stopping it.

I always wonder by 9 million do they mean people who have ever subscribed to WOW or people who are currently subscribed.

To put the game's enormity into perspective? 9 million sounds like a lot, and it REALLY sounds like a lot when you compare it to the competition. Conversely, if I said it had 9 million subscribers... then it turned out that the competition had, say, 20 million and 40 million subscribers, then that would make the game's accomplishment relatively less significant. 

And its current subscribers. That's been made quite clear in several of their press releases.

My friend and his 2 brother's are totally addicted to it, it seems there is nothing to stop the whole world becoming a bunch of WoW zombiew :P

I guess that's an excuse to not play WoW, they make too much money from it ;)

The amount of people playing Wow is the same amount of people with Wii's about.

The amount of people with PS3s is less than half the amount of people playing WoW

It's a shame that this game has halted a lot of sales on the PC overall. One of the major reasons I've never cared for p2p. You feel obligated to play to get your money's worth causing negligence of other games. Though I will admit that many people playing aren't your typical gamers. A bunch of my friends from college were playing for awhile but they all seem to have broken the habit (it's nicknamed Warcrack).

OH THE HUMANITY!

wait ...

oh ... ohoh. It has more than 9 million subscribers. Phew! ... I thought ... *sniff* ... 

I tried it once... some friends told me "try it, its cool... it takes you to a huge new world..."... I tried it and I was into it like crazy... fighting those monsters, exploring those unknown worlds... but then, the trial ended and I was free of the addiction :D

I know so many people who love WOW. My best friend is addicted to it and has been playing it since launch. He talks to me from time to time about the politics of his guild and what not.; While I love him, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't say there wasn't room for concern.

Anyways, my wife really likes WOW, yet I can't seem to get into it. I've tried really hard twice to get involved with it, when it first launched and now with the Burning Crusade.

Personally, I found Final Fantasy XI and PSO much more fun. In fact I'm actually thinking of getting PSU's expansion for PS3 when it drops later this year....