WoW Invades Newspapers
Presumably, the edition of World of Warcraft offered in The Times will feature 14 days of gameplay, much like the inexpensive trial version currently available at many game stores. Blizzard also provides a free ten day downloadable trial through the World of Warcraft web site, and additional months of play cost between GBP 7.70-9.00 ($13-$15 in the US) depending on the length of the subscription plan.
Earlier this month, Blizzard revealed that World of Warcraft has a subscriber base of more than 8.5 million people, over 3.5 million of whom have purchased The Burning Crusade expansion pack released in January.
In related news, a recent financial report from game retailer GameStop cited "brisk" World of Warcraft sales as one of the chief reasons behind the 26.5% sales increase experienced by the company in the fourth quarter of 2006.
-
sgtsanity
replyThe broader marketing campaign is probably also due to World of Warcraft thoroughly exhausting the usual PC gaming market. They've already got all the subscriptions they can from there, so the only way to maintain their massive growth is to start reaching outside that demographic. It's not so much general appeal as incredible effectiveness.
-
See, I was just thinking the same thing. Most people have already finished the game + the expansion. That subscription number is going to start falling soon and they need new people to fill the ranks. Frankly, I'll be glad when the WoW start is no long on the rise and starts to set.
-
-
People said just that a few months after WoW launched. Just because maybe you are getting bored of WoW and quitting soon doesn't mean that all the other people are. Every time someone quits, someone else gets a real-life buddy hooked on the game. Overall, still, more people are joining than leaving.
-
Still, even millions of subscriptions ago, back when the game had half its install base, I was seeing articles about the game being used for business networking and in all sorts of other contexts and among other demographics that you simply don't see for most video games. This is an extraordinarily insular form of entertainment.
-
