Sorry, I completely missed these replies back on the 12th :) I certainly agree that for Blizzard's business model subs are the important metric and the lack of traditional unit sales information for WoW or any of it's derivatives is not neccesairly on it's own an indication of them making/missing certain milestones.
I am however, still minded to believe that if they managed to get 10m "purchases" of The Burning Crusade that's pretty big news and we'd have heard of it.
Certainly in the West, it's become clear to me that a "purchase" of some sort is required to play full time and the expansions seem to work on a similar basis. However, it's less clear how that works in Asia. I found one article that might shed some light on it which I'll post as it's a big topic in of itself when considering the price of this stock.
When WoW broke 10m, Blizzard announced 5.5m of these players were in Asia so we're safely talking about 50% of the userbase.
The Lich King expansion is aimed at players level 68 or above. You can only get to level 68 by purchasing The Burning Crusade so in the main, this expansion is squarely aimed at those who purchased the first expansion.
If we agree not 100% of players will purchase expansions, we can also agree that not every player who purchased one expansion will buy two. The percentages could well be quite different but we're still talking about a subset of a subset of that 11.5m LTD and XXm GLS.
In my original post, I did mention that to get current GLS for Lich King assuming 75% of players upgrade that far the GLS for WoW in general would need to be over 15.5m. It's currently 11.5m. It's certainly going north of that number but another 4m? With StarCraft II & Diablo III on the horizon. We're already being very generous with that 75% given the subset argument above and as I also noted the vanilla game is still charting high so some of these new players contributing to the 11.5m are definitely just playing the vanilla game, at least right now.
On the other hand, current subscribers would not include those who purchased an expansion for a month and then stopped playing some time ago. There are bound to be some who get into Lich King for a while and then lapse again.
It's probably even difficult for Blizzard to guage how many copies of the game they've "sold" with relevance to our GLS prediction, particulary with the Asian business models.
To answer your other questions;-
I think it's $40 to upgrade your account in the West at least and I think the character limit is 10 per realm. Not sure if there is a hard limit on characters per account but my friends sure had multiple characters.
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Sorry, I completely missed these replies back on the 12th :) I certainly agree that for Blizzard's business model subs are the important metric and the lack of traditional unit sales information for WoW or any of it's derivatives is not neccesairly on it's own an indication of them making/missing certain milestones.
I am however, still minded to believe that if they managed to get 10m "purchases" of The Burning Crusade that's pretty big news and we'd have heard of it.
Certainly in the West, it's become clear to me that a "purchase" of some sort is required to play full time and the expansions seem to work on a similar basis. However, it's less clear how that works in Asia. I found one article that might shed some light on it which I'll post as it's a big topic in of itself when considering the price of this stock.
When WoW broke 10m, Blizzard announced 5.5m of these players were in Asia so we're safely talking about 50% of the userbase.
@apujanata,
The Lich King expansion is aimed at players level 68 or above. You can only get to level 68 by purchasing The Burning Crusade so in the main, this expansion is squarely aimed at those who purchased the first expansion.
If we agree not 100% of players will purchase expansions, we can also agree that not every player who purchased one expansion will buy two. The percentages could well be quite different but we're still talking about a subset of a subset of that 11.5m LTD and XXm GLS.
In my original post, I did mention that to get current GLS for Lich King assuming 75% of players upgrade that far the GLS for WoW in general would need to be over 15.5m. It's currently 11.5m. It's certainly going north of that number but another 4m? With StarCraft II & Diablo III on the horizon. We're already being very generous with that 75% given the subset argument above and as I also noted the vanilla game is still charting high so some of these new players contributing to the 11.5m are definitely just playing the vanilla game, at least right now.
On the other hand, current subscribers would not include those who purchased an expansion for a month and then stopped playing some time ago. There are bound to be some who get into Lich King for a while and then lapse again.
It's probably even difficult for Blizzard to guage how many copies of the game they've "sold" with relevance to our GLS prediction, particulary with the Asian business models.
To answer your other questions;-
I think it's $40 to upgrade your account in the West at least and I think the character limit is 10 per realm. Not sure if there is a hard limit on characters per account but my friends sure had multiple characters.