| You probably already know that Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft boasts more paid subscribers than any other online game out there. Perhaps you also know that its most recent expansion, Cataclysm, was the fastest-selling PC game ever released. If you play many computer games, you probably know, too, that its name and setting comes from a best-selling series of real-time strategy games. But we're betting at least some of the following trivia will make you raise your eyebrows. It's quite big. OK, you probably knew that. But did you know just how big? Blizzard gave the world a rare glimpse behind its curtain back in 2009 in a trade-show presentation. It takes over 13,000 server blades to keep its realms up and running, totalling between them around 75,000 CPU cores and over a hundred terabytes of memory. Its customer support team numbers over 2,000. Before Cataclysm launched last year, it had nearly 8,000 quests; now it has far more, and they've been translated into ten different languages. And in the first quarter of this year, it helped propel creator Blizzard to over a third of a billion dollars in revenue. It didn't get off to a smooth start. Like many other online role-playing games, World of Warcraft didn't exactly have a quiet and gentle birth. Releasing towards the end of November 2004 amid a storm of hype, fevered anticipation, and spotless reviews, the game's infrastructure would quickly be overwhelmed by demand. Long queues, crash-happy servers, and excessive lag dogged the game for months, causing at least one publication to take back the Game of the Year nod it lavished on the game a few months earlier. Blizzard was forced to hand out free days to appease angry consumers, and even took the unprecedented step of holding back copies of the game from retailers to stem the flood of new players. Barring the odd misstep, those days are gone. You could be playing with a celebrity. Any time you have 11 million people doing the same thing, the chances get pretty good that one or more of them is someone you might have heard of. Warcraft, despite its geeky image, is no exception. Mila Kunis famously plays (she's a mage), as does her former beau, Macaulay Culkin. So does Dave Chappelle, and noted hobbit Elijah Wood, although we don't know if he plays a gnome, the closest Warcraft gets to Tolkien's diminutive pipeweed addicts. You know who does play a Warcraft gnome, though? Verne Troyer, who was Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies. You can't make this stuff up. It won't actually ruin your life. World of Warcraft gets blamed for a heck of a lot. Broken marriages? Sure. Lost jobs? Thousands of 'em. Wrecked lives? Without a doubt. The stories are everywhere -- and while there are certainly people who get harmfully addicted to the game, they're the exception and not the rule. The average Warcraft player spends 21 hours a week glued to their game, and that probably sounds like a lot until you consider that the average American spends about 30 hours a week glued to their television. (Warcraft players, in comparison, watch more like 8.) In other words, we all waste a bunch of time -- some of it playing Warcraft -- and the vast majority of us can still keep our lives together all the same. Its days could be numbered. For nearly seven years, World of Warcraft has had the online role-playing game market sewn up. Not only is it the largest paid online game in the world, it's significantly bigger than all its main competitors put together, and for years its lead has looked completely unassailable. But the first quarter of 2011 saw a unexpected downturn in Warcraft's subscriber numbers, from 12 million to 11.4 million. Hardly a decisive drop, to be sure, and nowhere near enough to topple it from its number-one slot -- but it came straight after the December launch of the game's latest expansion, Cataclysm, which should really have spurred more interest in the game and not less. Looking to its laurels, Blizzard is hard at work on its next-generation online RPG, codenamed "Titan," and reportedly targeted for launch in 2013. Better clear your calendars. |
