"Proving that Western MMO's can have a global appeal, EA Mythic's upcoming fantasy MMORPG is selected in the "Best Foreign Online Game" category at ChinaJoy, China's largest gaming expo."
The article links to a chinese website (translated using google so the URL is too long to paste here).
"A04 best foreign online games (ranked alphabetical order):
Dance Mission
excellence sword
kart racer
heaven
[b]War hammer Online: decisive century[/b] "
http://www.warcraftrealms.com is NOT a Blizzard website. It is a third party website using a third party tool to capture its data. (notice the advertisements for gold selling? Buying gold is a bannable offense according to the games EULA. Not something blizzard would have on an official website.)
Also, even as a third party source this data is completely irrelevant to us at simexchange as it does not do anything to measure unique accounts. It only gives incomplete statistics about individual characters (avatars) who were seen online at the time a census was taken.
The purpose of warcraftrealms is to see demographic information relevant to the game world, not to real life. IE: to see how many level 70 gnome warriors there are on my server etc...
I could go into a more detailed explanation about the data collection method used, but it is irrelivent because the type of data captured is not useful to thesimexchange anyway.
The only official (run by Blizzard) website that supplies data about characters is www.wowarmory.com. It is an amazing tool for players of the game, but doesn't help us predict stock prices at all.
The Warcraft Realms will pick you up unless you have not logged in for 30 days, Blizzard is counting everyone, even inactive players in their total count.
"If it were only 5 million, there are some serious implications for the Burning Crusade stock..."
You have to remember that MMORPG's are subscription based games and not every copy sold remains an active subscription for its lifetime. For example my account was inactive from last December until this month when I started playing again.
5.8 to be exact. This site tracks the number of active players playing WoW. "
This site captures its numbers by using an in game UI Addon which is installed by players. It does not in any way take a census of active subscriptions. It runs through a series of /who commands and records all characters found online at the time of the scan.
As of July 2007 WoW had broken the 9million subscriber milestone.
5.8 to be exact. This site tracks the number of active players playing WoW.
There have been major movements in the MMO community away from WoW, people are ready for something new, they came back to play BC for a while, but have since stopped playing again.
@pilias_simber, where do you see only 5 million active WoW players now? I thought there are 5 million in China alone. Wasn't the most recent press release we've seen touting 10 million active subscribers? If it were only 5 million, there are some serious implications for the Burning Crusade stock...
WAR is fixing many of the fundamental gameplay issues that annoy MMORPGers while keeping the gameplay simple and easy to just pick up and play. This is something that only a few games have managed to do well, including WoW and seems to be the formula for what makes the huge MMOs huge.
Also its obvious the fanbase is ready to move on to a new title. There are only 5 million active WoW players currently, as most have moved on to other games.
This game has a lot of the same things going for it as WoW did/does in terms of gameplay and graphics. Also, like WoW it has a huge existing fanbase from Warhammer the tabletop game.
WoW opened the floodgates and introduced MMORPG to the mainstream gamer. Now it's been 3 years and a large portion of those new players liked what they got, but want to try something "new".
In 2008 WAR and AoC will offer that freshness many current and former WoW players want. WAR will be able to bring in the mass audience while AoC caters to the mature crowd.
The only thing that should stop this game from exceeding current expectations significantly is the timing of WoW:Rise of the Lich King in relation to WAR's release date.
@Heloise10, Doesn't Smell good? It means they're optimizing the Game and it's Engine as well as finishing out art, classes, quests, encounters and much more before heading into the next stage of their beta. Nothing to worry about at all, if anything it's reassuring.
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