Today we have two subscription reports coming from Vivendi, publisher for World of Warcraft and CCP Games, the makers of Eve Online. The reports show both games had steady growth in the third quarter, Vivendi reporting that its subscriber base increased from 9 million to 9.3 million with solid sales coming in from the recently released expansion “The Burning Crusade“. Eve Online has now stated it is nearing the 200,000 subscription mark currently at 195,000. This up from last quarter of about 160,000 accounts.
Considering that Eve is now nearly 5 years old and World of Warcraft nearly 3, it is very surprising to see that both these MMORPG are continuing to grow especially when you consider the amount of new MMORPG’s that have been released in the past few years. At this pace Blizzard is set to hit the 10 million mark sometime in 2008.
Eve Online Quarterly Economic Newsletter
You’ve gotta give it to World of Warcraft… Vivendi/Blizzard definitely raised the expectations of many MMORPGs by attracting so many new players to the genre.
I wonder if more people can be drawn in from the aether or if is now every new game developers’ goal to chip away at WoW by stealing a few thousand of its players here and there. That will be easy and hard at the same time. Easy because you can to look at the flaws in WoW and try avoiding them (or better yet, fixing them!) in your game but hard because players have invested upwards of three years in the and will likely feel a lot of attachment to their characters.
If Warhammer Online doesn’t take WoW down a notch, I really don’t think we’ll see an MMORPG that will be able to for some time.
I played WOW for 2 years, but I don’t anymore. Yet my sub is still alive. I wonder how many other rtards like me?
Anyway, I think Aoc will take over for warcraft as WOW sings its swan song.
EVE Online is as much or more of a phenomenon as WoW is IMO. I’ve followed that game for 4 years now and it’s literally never had a decline in subscribers.
Does it – and will it ever – appeal to a mainstream and more casual player base? Nope. But it’s a work of genius nonetheless – which is why it continues to be a success.
I have to admit if I was a bachelor and had twice as much time to game I might very well lose myself completely in that game world.
Either that or sign up with the military to go kill terrorists.