October 29th, 2008

World Of Warcraft Risin’ High

There's something in the air... Can you smell it? It's near, and some may overlook it but, in the end, nobody will escape! Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft's second expansion pack, is only two weeks away, but that doesn't mean Blizzard's massive "millionplayer" online game's growth has come to a halt, waiting for the new content to arrive. In fact, we're talking about a new milestone reached by world's most popular MMORPG...

...since World of Warcraft's worldwide subscriber base has just exceeded the 11 million mark! A funny fact is that, even if we consider the chance of having a few percent of those 11 million accounts belonging to users creating multiple accounts, the World of Warcraft crowd is largen than the population of countries like Belgium or Portugal.

Just as a reminder, the 10 million subscribers mark was left behind back in January, and with the release of the new expansion pack,

the 12 million subscribers barrier could be overrun faster than most of us are expecting now. Next March? September? Who can tell?

Speaking for myself, I must confess I was crazy about the Warcraft series, and since World of Warcraft was released, I tried to avoid it. After finally getting a trial account last month, I only played the game for a few hours, but it didn't quite reach my inner core the way Warcraft 2 did.

So...what about you? Are you one of those 11 million subscribers, one of the former World of Warcraft players, or...