WoW has definitely sold more than 11.84 million units. There were still 11.5 million subscribers in February 2010.
The reference notes that 70% of WoW trial players quit before level 10. I have not seen what portion of players quit before level 70, but that statistic would weigh heavily on the purchases of WoW: Lich King, which is entirely late game content.
WoW should be getting back online in China soon, still without the Lich King expansion. The GAPP have requested NetEase make "further content changes" before they'll give it approval.
Bearing in mind they previously didn't require the same of The9 it illustrates their continued clampdown on foreign MMO's. It will be interesting to see just what NetEase had to do to get approval when it happens.
"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.
Sales for blizzard games tend to be very very long-legged. Sales of Warcraft III Battlechest still appear in the charts. Copies of Starcraft Battle chest are still sold every month, and the latter has been out for a decade.
WoW may have "peaked" but just like Diablo II, and starcraft there will almost always be an audience for this. People still play Ever quest, and Ultima Online. The biggest question is when WoW calls it quits is it going to be a slow death, or fast death?
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.
@KultofCows, Yep, that was the post I was looking for. Thanks for linking it here.
Deftangel, How much is the price to "upgrade" account to play the expansions ?
I more or less agree with your position, that 50% - 75% (not 100%) of Wow player will purchase the expansions, especially if it is true that the expansion are focused for the high level characters.
Just curious, in WoW, is one account = 1 character only, or 1 account = several character ? I haven't played WoW, so my question might sound stupid. I had played Ragnarok Online, and in that game, I can have several character for one account (up to 4, IIRC). The same thing is valid for FFXI, IIRC (my brother played it, not me, and I remember it also have several player for 1 account).
Regarding Wow itself, remember we are predicting GLS, not LTD. I remember seeing a post predicting WoW to cross 13 Million, either in 2009 or 2010. So, whatever percentage you are using to arrive at WotLK, you need to base it on GLS, not LTD. For example : 50% of 13 Million, not 50% of 11 Million.
Personally, me thinks MMO stocks are dangerous (high risk) and profitable (high margin). It is dangerous if your prediction is wrong, but it is profitable if your prediction is right. I remember seeing rikitikitik, one of NeoGAF's highest networth player, went down from 31 Million to 18 Million, because of incorrect prediction of Age of Conan MMO.
Ok I've done a little more digging. You do have to "upgrade" your account to play the expansions so in one sense, it could be argued that is a "sale" just like downloading a game. Fair enough.
However;
Reading the WoW forums, it seems to be that you need to have upgraded to the Burning Crusade to upgrade again to the Lich King. If that's true (delighted if a player can confirm) then the GLS for the Lich King can not possibly be more than for the Burning Crusade (which topped out around 10m I think).
Regardless of that even, I stand by my original comment of subscribers != sales. I came across a Forbes article which suggested Blizzard expected "half" of subscribers to upgrade to the expansion. That's under 6m as it stands. Certainly not every single account will upgrade. Some people have more than one to play with lower level friends. Even the latest PC charts have the vanilla game at #7 so some of these new subscribers are buying WoW just to play the core game, not the expansion packs.
It is ridiculous to assume that every WoW subscriber will upgrade their account. Currently we're predicting 1m more than there are total subscribers to the entire game. I've no idea of WoW's shelf life but let's be generous and suggest 75% of people will upgrade BOTH expansions ( that's high, IMO ). Blizzard would need to have over 15.5m subscribers for that to work out, again assuming 3/4 of all players decide to jump in.
The expansion packs are mainly aimed at those players with high level accounts. How many players have put the hours in to get up to the level to make it worthwhile? I certainly can't find any kind of PR that the first expansion sold 10m. I'd have thought we'd have heard something about that no?
75% of the current total subscribers is around 8.5m , that's a little more acceptable but the mindset on the exchange seems to be more or less every subscriber will buy the expansions and WoW will keep growing. I don't think there is any compelling evidence to support the former and WoW subs might be growing still but a lot more slowly than they were.
We've yet to see what StarCraft II sales are going to do to WoW subs, especially in Asia. That series is monumentally huge over there.
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WoW has definitely sold more than 11.84 million units. There were still 11.5 million subscribers in February 2010.
The reference notes that 70% of WoW trial players quit before level 10. I have not seen what portion of players quit before level 70, but that statistic would weigh heavily on the purchases of WoW: Lich King, which is entirely late game content.