BEIJING—Chinese Web portal operator Netease.com Inc. said Monday it received regulatory approval to offer the latest expansion pack for the popular "World of Warcraft" online game in China and plans to start letting players download the software next week. Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704164904575420873859026684.html#ixzz0wK4nIFWn
Comments (0) | Permalink

The NPD Group rolled up multiple SKUs of the massively popular PC online game and its expansion packs since its November 2004 launch to arrive at the 8.6 million figure. The statistics provided by NPD included the base World of Warcraft, plus the Collectors Edition version, the expansion pack-bundling Battle Chest, and the two standalone expansions: The Burning Crusade and Wrath Of The Lich King.
Comments (3) | Permalink

Following a bad day on Tuesday, when its stock lost 6.5 per cent and fell to its lowest point since 2006, the Activision Blizzard share price posted significant gains yesterday to bounce back and record an 11 per cent rise.
Comments (0) | Permalink

Few games have been as exhaustively detailed ahead of their release as second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. After Blizzard failed to plug the leaks from early testing, it resigned itself to the inevitable and lifted any and all non-disclosure restrictions from the public beta test. The insatiable hunger for information of 11 million fans was just too great a force to resist, even for a company as powerful and protective as Blizzard.
Comments (0) | Permalink

"Major MMO makers like Funcom and SOE are on board with a new company that promises to "legitimize" the real money trade of virtual goods, but World of Warcraft house Blizzard tells Next-Gen that it's still against the practice regardless. "We do not have any plans to support out-of-game trading for World of Warcraft anytime in the near future," a Blizzard rep tells Next-Gen when asked if it would ever consider backing the recently announced Live Gamer virtual item marketplace."
Comments (0) | Permalink

We're getting inside information from 7-Eleven of all places. According to several different store employees, the game will be streeting on November 4 for $40. 7-Eleven, we're told, will be selling the game starting at midnight.
Comments (0) | Permalink

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).
Comments (0) | Permalink

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.
Comments (0) | Permalink

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.
Comments (1) | Permalink

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.
Comments (1) | Permalink