Think online gaming is huge? You have no idea. Blizzard Entertainment announced their “World of Warcraft” game passed the one million subscriber mark in North America and broke the four million subscriber mark world wide. That’s a lot of gamers. That’s also a lot of monthly income.
Let’s do a little unscientific deductive reasoning here.The average retail price for a “World of Warcraft” game purchased at your favorite software outlet is about $50. Assuming all the subscribers bought a legal copy, using authentication codes provided by Blizzard, at 4 million world wide users, that’s $200 million. Now, take all those users and multiply it times their monthly fee of $12.99, $13.99 or$14.99, depending on the payment plan chosen. So their monthly revenues are looking like somewhere between $52 million and $60 million a month, times that by 12 and you’ve got over $700 million a month, just for one game.
This is a rough estimate because players can use prepaid cards and there are different methods to run this game. The box game bought in retail stores also contains a month of free service and 4 million does include those users as well.
“It’s very rewarding to see so many new and returning players logging in to play World of Warcraft daily,” said Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. “With the continued support of our retail partners, World of Warcraft has reached more than 1 million paying customers in North America well before its one-year anniversary in November. We would like to express our appreciation to both the players and our retail and license partners for helping us make World of Warcraft one of the most popular online games in the world.”
“World of Warcraft” has spread like wildfire to other corners of the world. Besides North America, the game is available in Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Europe and they released the game in China back in June. The game picked up 1.5 million users in China in the first month of release and they plan to release in Taiwan later in the year.
Blizzard is no stranger to online gaming although “World of Warcraft” was their first pay service. They’ve also run their Warcraft II, Starcraft, Diablo and Diablo II all in their online versions but all these were free services, paid for with online advertising.
Regardless, this shows the online gaming industry is quite large and will certainly get bigger, particularly as the new generations of game consoles and computers come out. The revenues are proving quite heavy and will only increase as more games hit the market and the games are offered in more places.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
