"The9 Limited announced today that World of Warcraft recently had a peak concurrency of one million players. The Chinese operator has been handling the Blizzard game in the China region since June 2005. This concurrency number is the highest since the game's original launch."
In 2006, Blizzard Entertainment made the somewhat audacious statement that the developer was targeting annual expansions for its massively popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.
There's fighting talk today from THQ executive Jack Sorenson, who has told Eurogamer that he reckons Blizzard's all-conquering World of Warcraft has "peaked".
World of Warcraft's beta site seems to be active again, possibly ready for imminent Wrath of the Lich King testing.
If you go to http://beta.worldofwarcraft.com, rather than being told this page does not exist, you are redirected to http://beta.worldofwarcraft.com/game/character-copy.html
this page kindly informs you that you do not have access to view the content.
The bestiary page for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has been updated with a new creature and two pieces of concept art from the upcoming expansion. the tenacious and stoic taunk
In its latest podcast Blizzard has opened up Wrath of the Lich King's storyline and how the second WoW expansion will operate inside the studio's huge tome of Wacraft lore.
The assumption here sounds like it would take an enormous amount of marketing to take on WoW. I'm not sure that is quite quantifiable. I think the better argument is that the network effect of a game like WoW is an unsurmountable barrier that positions the platform much like eBay.
eBay, however, isn't the only Internet auction player. There are others, but they are all very minor players. I don't think these players are thinking they need billions of dollars to overcome eBay, they just need to make a better platform for buying and selling. Google overtook Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Excite, and all the rest well before they had the billions of capital. Of course, there isn't as much of a network effect with search engines, so a better example may be Facebook.
Speaking at an investor meeting, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has said that he thinks it would take an investment of $500m to $1bn to take on World of Warcraft - and even then, success isn't guaranteed. "We don't think that even if we made the USD 500m or billion-dollar investment to get a product out that we would even be successful doing it," he said.
If you can't beat them, join them - hence the recent merger of Activision and WOW owners Vivendi, creating Activision Blizzard.
Ahhh World of Warcraft addiction gets taken to another level! Now, not only can you play WoW for hours upon hours but you can also hop on your phone to get your fix now too.
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