Some quotes:
“In just one day, World of Warcraft sold through an estimated 250,000 copies to players. Over 200,000 accounts have already been created, and peak concurrency across all active game servers has been above 100,000″
“We launched with 41 servers in the U.S. yesterday, and we are bringing up an additional 34 servers today to accommodate the influx of players.”
“World of Warcraft has once again shown that Blizzard consistently delivers the best games in the industry,” said Robert McKenzie, vice president of merchandising at GameStop. “It sold better than any other PC game this year – in fact, World of Warcraft enjoyed the best day-one sell-through GameStop has ever seen on a PC title!”
The math:
250.000 players x 1 month x $15/month = 3.750.000 million dollars every single month
… and 250.00 players is just for the first day of sales.
In short, World of Warcraft is a HUGE success and it seems like Blizzard can handle it (they put up servers to handle the load)
Makes one wonder, doesn’t it? – Read somewhere that it was, more or less, customary for companies, to spend upwards of 4-6years on makin’ games these days. – Half-Life 2 for instance. Al those years, people workin’, receiving salaries, that’s a whole lot of up-front cash from someone hoping for a success. – Guess WoW is one ;)
I want to play it but it hasn’t been released here (Singapore) yet!