11.5 million subscribers, my arse
Could World of Warcraft be a victim of white lies? well they keep on bragging about the 11 million subscribers. Surely times 11,000,000 with the monthly subscription + games sold would equal a crazy amount of money monthly. The merge with Activision, if they are making crazy amounts monthly why merge?
Personally I think its figures they are using from free trials to lost subscribers added to the list. I myself have 4 accounts (3 for myself and 1 for my wife). I used to dual box for fun, as I was so bored leveling my 6th character to 70.
Finding the maximum players that can appear on a server, apparently its 20,000 but Blizzard have never released the official numbers. (Source)
Lets do the math
11,500,000 subscribers / 20,000 = 575 servers worldwide
Thats nearly 600 servers having to be completely full to reach 11.5 million subscribers.
The US alone has 200 realms (source) so thats roughly:
- 4,000,000 players in the US alone if each server is 20,000 limit
- 6,000,000 players in the US alone if each server is 30,000 limit
Please take note, this is if all 200 of the US servers are maxed out to the full. If we take a mean result from this, lets say 5,000,000 subscribers on US servers alone. This leaves 6.5 million left worldwide.
Somehow these numbers don’t add up, they are obviously getting mixed up with inactive trial signups & inactive accounts over subscribers. Trouble is we live in a follow the herd society… this leaves new MMO’s out to die as they can only compete with thousands of real subscribers. No one will never know the truth about actual numbers, however I’d love to hear from you if you have any inside info.
#1 by Fail math! on 21/09/2009 - 5:07 am
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EU+NA+CHINA =11.5MILLION
Also 6 Million Subs come from china and they gave a different payment system…they don’t have a monthly sub and its run by a different publisher
3 Million subs are in US 2.5 Million are in EU 6 Million in China
#2 by spooksie on 21/09/2009 - 5:18 am
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Do you have the proof?
#3 by geldonyetich on 21/09/2009 - 7:16 am
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I saw some news article somewhere that reported that more than half the subscribers were in the East, so it pretty much concurs with your numbers.
However, there’s really no way you can determine number of players based off of the servers. The servers can hold *way* more than 20,000 offline players, and if you’re counting online players it’s tricky because (judging from my experience running online (not massively so) games) most players only log in for a few hours a day or a few times a week.
In the end, we can determine this: World of Warcraft was a great success.. Ludriciously so. EverQuest, the previous big-name Western contender, topped out at about 600k players. It’s extremely rare for any Western MMOG to top a million. Consequently, we know that World of Warcraft fished in a lot of players who never played an MMORPG before.
It likely had less to do with whatever merit the game possessed a lot more to do with how many Blizzard fans there are out there. Those who seek to emulate World of Warcraft success by copying it are consequently disappointed.
#4 by StrykerX on 21/09/2009 - 9:46 am
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I believe that Asia has a TON of “site license” style subscriptions at internet cafes. Apparently a lot of people over there play MMOs on public computers for a small hourly fee. That could account for a few million right there…
#5 by Voice of reason on 21/09/2009 - 10:04 am
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You need to do more research cus this a joke, blizzard clearly state on their press releases that the numbers do not include banned, canceled, inactive or trial accounts.
The last offical numbers by blizzard was 5.5million western subs, there are ~450 western servers so lets do math:
5.5mil / 450 = 12,000 (roughly)
So an average of 12,000 per server, more than plausable
Wotlk (latest xpac) sold 4million in the first month of release (only available to western players), not all would of purchased in the first month, Wotlk has not been out of the top 3 PC sales chart since release 11 months back, with WoW battlechest hardly out of the top 5.
There is not enough info to really look at the none western subs, but I see no reason for blizzard to make stuff up.
Maybe do more research in the future.
#6 by Ytram on 21/09/2009 - 2:49 pm
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To concur with “Voice or reason”, Vivendi and now Blizzard Activision is a publicly traded company. If they were to lie about these things, they could get hit hard by their investors and could face criminal legal problems because of it.
And why do people bring up the fact that they are including “dual boxers” in the numbers? Of course they are! Just because you are the same person with two accounts doesn’t mean that you’re not actively paying two subscriptions, so it doesn’t affect the revenue numbers.
#7 by Passingby on 21/09/2009 - 4:15 pm
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Ytrram, while yes, it does not effect the revenue numbers, they are not stating the correct numbers.
If people are paying for more than one active account (as has been stated for many an article)
Then the line should read “11.5 million (active) SUBSCRIPTIONS”
A subscriber is a person/individual. If all of the players dual boxed, then it should be “6 million subscribers”
Which number sounds more impressive? The statement is inaccurate and some would state it is a lie.
#8 by Edge on 21/09/2009 - 10:49 pm
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Seriously? You want Blizzard to somehow magically figure out if someone is using an account by themselves or paying for several for their family or something. And how exactly do you expect Blizzard to do this. No, for all intents and purposes ONE paid monthly account is ONE paid monthly subscriber. This is all that matters to stockholders, this is all that matters to the bottom line. Whether one person plays on 5 accounts or 5 people play on 5 accounts the amount of money made is the same. What you do with a paid account as long as it is within the terms of service is your problem not Blizzards and it is not their responsibility to figure it out for someone. There is no lie on Blizzards part as there is no way for them to tell how each account is used.