@deftangel, I remember seeing a post made by KoC that talked about those net cafe players. I tried searching for his post, but failed.
IIRC, in that post, KoC said that WoW needs specific license key for each account, not each computer. Therefore, for each player, they need to purchase a new game to get those license key, even if they play it in the net cafe.
Maybe you can search for KultofCows post yourself, and discuss things about it that might be wrong (I didn't play WoW, so I couldn't discuss things about it with you).
Deathknights will now be creatable on any server within your region as long as you have a level 55 character on your account, according to an announcement made on the official forums by bluename, Wryxian.
Would there be a performance hit playing a game off an SDXC card? We could run games off DVDs, too, but the reason we install the games is because it is much faster on the hard drive.
One other point, the net cafe explanation definitely makes sense for games like Warcraft III. When I was in Taiwan when the game came out (this was many years ago), I played it at a net cafe. The game doesn't require a unique CD-key for each Battle.net account, so players can just start up a free account and play online in the net cafe. In this case, Battle.net accounts would not reflect sales numbers at all.
I understand the net cafe argument. However, as I recall, I needed a CD-key to start a WoW account (it has been a few years since I played) so this required at least a purchase of the game to start a subscription. I recall my brother and I both had to buy the game so that we had separate CD-keys to start accounts. Is this no longer the case? Or did Blizzard structure this differently in Asia?
I do agree that I have not seen sales numbers in the Blizzard PR to confirm the levels; however, from a business perspective, pushing subscriber data is stronger than original sales data because it indicates continued revenue. So that is one reason they push subscriber data. I thought the assumption was that each subscriber was also a buyer, so subscriber numbers are inclusive of sales.
Massively multiplayer online games tend to take up less space on your hard drive than your standard PC game, as the bulk of the data is stored on farms of servers that power your MMO of choice. However, despite the fact that most of the underlying magic is happening far away from your own screen, MMO clients still take up a number of gigs of space, as laptop users who regularly play different titles know all too well.
* It will break 12m this year but not 13m * Like the author said StarCraft & Diablo will eat into subs * Subscribers != sales
Many players in Asia (which make up a very large segment of WoW players) do not *buy* the game. They visit their logo internet cafe and pay from there.
This is why the expansions are so over-valued. Have we ever heard of the first one hitting 10m? Nope. Will the second? Nope. Net cafe's buy as many copies as they need to service computers which turn services a lot more subscribers.
When you get down to the nitty gritty numbers, World of Warcraft's growth has stayed fairly consistent over the last three years or so. This of course is after the initial boom in 2005, and thanks mostly to a continued schedule of expansions the last two years. But where will it go from here?
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I remember seeing a post made by KoC that talked about those net cafe players. I tried searching for his post, but failed.
IIRC, in that post, KoC said that WoW needs specific license key for each account, not each computer. Therefore, for each player, they need to purchase a new game to get those license key, even if they play it in the net cafe.
Maybe you can search for KultofCows post yourself, and discuss things about it that might be wrong (I didn't play WoW, so I couldn't discuss things about it with you).