Sorry only just seen this comment having posted another article :)
WoW may well have sold 20 million copies. Subscribers do not equal sales. This however is with regard to the second expansion pack targeted towards hardcore players. A good proportion of the WoW userbase are likely to be quite happy playing the base game or Burning Crusade.
I still maintain if Burning Crusade hit a big milestone like 10m we'd have heard about it.
20m for this is just bonkers though and it's very VERY debatable IMO whether this will every see the light of day there. Whatever you think about WoW sales, if you discount China you have to remove 40-45% of the global total.
Game regulation is the field I work in. I can't claim to being an expert on China but I do know the Chinese Govt. are very keen to do something about foreign MMO's.
I don't post often, for obvious reasons, but I too am heavily short this stock. I have been fighting it with all my resources since it was at 1500DKP.
This stock has no business at this level until it can be shown a previous pack has this number of sales. Not even full WoW can claim 20 million in sales- and thats WITH China.
To whomever is going long on this stock and trying to boost it daily: how do you expect to make money?
It's only a matter of time before the bottom falls so you should probably get out now :)
And yet this stock continues to go up despite the Chinese government offering no encouragement whatsoever regarding the possibility of the Lich King expansion ever seeing a Chinese release. Every day we get closer to Star Craft II being released the slimmer that possibility gets IMO. The Chinese Govt. are desperate to protect & promote the games developed in their homeland.
If Acti-Blizz are doing their sums correctly they'll have figured out that Star Craft II offers much better prospects for growth and prioritise accordingly.
*Disclaimer* - Subscriptions != Sales - I'm short on this stock
As WoW's operator license in China changes hands from The9 to rival NetEase, the game's servers will see some downtime. Analyst Colin Sebastian says this downtime could result in some "subscriber churn" that could affect WoW's total global userbase. "We expect some churn among infrequent users off of the current 11.5M+ WoW subscriber count," says the analyst. "In fact, data suggests declining timecard purchases ahead of the transition." Asia accounts for about 50pc of WoW's global userbase
Even in World of Warcraft, you can't escape the swine flu pandemic hysteria. As discovered by a few WoW players, the disease exists in Azeroth, too. This isn't another attempt at being topical and pop culture-y that you often find in Blizzard games, this is a genuine disease that you can get in the game that has actually existed since the Wrath of the Lich King beta.
This morning the World of Warcraft is eeriely silent as the latest mini-expansion The Secrets of Ulduar (aka Patch 3.1) goes live across US and Oceanic servers (with Europe to follow tomorrow).
Its nearly 12 million subscribers help Blizzard--one half of Activision Blizzzard--generate over $100 million in revenues each month. Were any console-maker to successfully woo the notoriously PC-focused developer-publisher, the resulting royalties and sales would give it a major leg up in the tooth-and-nail console wars.
"Such hurdles, however, can be cleared. A few weeks ago I mentioned the interesting direction Nintendo is taking with the DSi, a console which continues to drive down manufacturing costs while introducing technologies that would allow for (mostly) secure digital distribution of content, as opposed to easily copied cartridges. This seems likely to be a prelude to the launch of a cut-price DS system in China, with a digital distribution model instead of a cartridge slot in order to combat piracy."
As such, it's starting to look as though all of Blizzard's careful manoeuvres haven't been enough. The company itself hotly denies that anything has gone wrong, but in recent weeks it has been reported that the Chinese authorities aren't happy with the depiction of skeletons and undead characters in the latest expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King - which hasn't yet launched in China. That's a bit of a problem for Blizzard, since the entire pack focuses on a war against an undead army.
But the Chinese govt. are under a lot of pressure both to "do something" about foreign MMO's and preserve their own games industry.
If Acti-Blizz follow the same pattern as the first expansion, then the Lich King expansion won't actually bring them much direct revenue as they'll give it away for free. The idea of course that it keeps a high number of paying subscribers online. There are bound to be questions about how much hassle this is going to be worth them if it's not thought the lack of the Lich King will hurt subscriptions too much. Especially if they are keen to get StarCraft II launched in Asia this year which has significant potential to cannibalise the WoW install base anyway.
The Chinese government dept which deals with the import of foreign videogames into the country, the GAPP, has announced that it plans to tighten restrictions. It will crack down on approval criteria in an apparent bid to avoid the excessive penetration of foreign culture among Chinese youth," Those words from Digital Publishing Bureau director Kou Xiaowei also included a reference to World of Warcraft, which is still awaiting approval for the Lich King expansion's release in the region.
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Sorry only just seen this comment having posted another article :)
WoW may well have sold 20 million copies. Subscribers do not equal sales. This however is with regard to the second expansion pack targeted towards hardcore players. A good proportion of the WoW userbase are likely to be quite happy playing the base game or Burning Crusade.
I still maintain if Burning Crusade hit a big milestone like 10m we'd have heard about it.
20m for this is just bonkers though and it's very VERY debatable IMO whether this will every see the light of day there. Whatever you think about WoW sales, if you discount China you have to remove 40-45% of the global total.
Game regulation is the field I work in. I can't claim to being an expert on China but I do know the Chinese Govt. are very keen to do something about foreign MMO's.