Whole Lotta Gnomes
January 11th, 2007
Since SirBruce has been sleeping, I’ll go ahead and make some off the cuff analysis. Of interest is the continental breakdown:
- North America: 2 million
- Europe: 1.5 million
- China: 3.5 million
That’s a fairly large market, but one that I suspect has room for expansion still (by Blizzard or others). To compare with their market share breakdown in August of 2005:
- North America: 1 million
- Europe: 1 million (as of January 2006)
- China: 1.5 million
Interestingly, Korea isn’t in either of these breakdowns, despite being believed by most analysts to be the 3rd most popular MMOG in Korea.
If Second Life had those kinds of numbers they’d be claiming to have 1 billion people playing right now.
That would be a lot of naughty bits. (I finally saw a video of that. That was lame. I was expecting realistically-skinned IRON RODS OF THE PATRIARCHY and they were just floppy pink novelty items.)
It’s still rude to throw rubber naughty bits at someone, online or off…but that was much less impressive than I thought it would be.
SL might have that many phallic objects.
Are we sure he’s sleeping ?
Metrics for China are absolute garbage. The way accounts are created and used alone makes it impossible to track. Most accounts in NotQuiteChina (TM), like HK and Taiwan, use gamecards and would therefore be far more reliable, but the Mainland is all funky net cafes and most people have multiple accounts untied to credit cards.
Also, they DEFINITELY are not paying $12.95 a month, something most people seem to forget.
They did a pretty good job of defineing chinese subscriptions in the release. Granted it doesn’t allow for easy comparisons between the USA and Chinese numbers, but to call it a garbage metric is just wrong.
Sir Bruce sleeping? No. Hanging upside down from the rafters of a darkened data center somewhere, muttering quietly to himelf. Yes, probably.
Regarding the China issue: there’s got to be a better metric that can more accurately measure the situation.
Similarly, package deals (like SOE’s Station Access) where one account might be valid for several games defy the traditional counting method.
I’d say “distinct accounts logged into game X in the prior 30 days” but companies, I’m sure, would prefer to report whatever statistic makes them look good.
Korea only got about 50m people, so getting to the 1m mark will be tough.
China’s number is not that impressive given that (1) they have at least 125m+ internet users and (2) it’s easy to get access to WoW.
On the other hand the US numbers are impressive. There are over 200m internet users in the US, so this means 1 in 100 internet users in the US are subscribing to WoW!
Getting 1 in about 200 internet users in Europe is not too bad.
Frank
Since debuting in North America on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft has become the most popular MMORPG around the world. Today, World of Warcraft is available in seven different languages and is played in North America, Europe, mainland China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Im gonna say the lumped all asians together in 1 boat…San pan
the writer must be a southern Boy
I love the line “Region of Taiwan”. Because Puerto Rico has their own air force and president, too!
poppin,people are afraid when speaking of Taiwan.
Taiwan is the fulcrum point for so much crap. China says it belongs to them, taiwan says they are not ever submittign themselves to China control. US boats patrol taiwans coast and harbors. If China makes a move on taiwan you can bet a strike on the coast of Cali will happen at the same time,forcing the US’s hand to either back off or initiate a strike to end civilization
So,taiwan is a region when companies speak of it and not a country,state,province,etc,etc
Yeah, uuh, I know. I sort of, uuh, live in Taiwan?