Wednesday 4 November 2009

WoW: new users figure - and it's so low!

"In a note to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Ji said World of Warcraft had experienced strong momentum since its launch, with nearly 1 million peak current users."

WoW is pretty famous in the blogosphere for having 11 million users. However Wolfshead pointed out not too long ago that there's a fair amount of creative counting behind that statistic (and we found even more loopholes in the statistical methodology in the comments).

Now Reuters has mentioned a new figure - WoW apparently peaked at nearly 1 million.

Reuters is a well respected news agency used by just about every major news paper and television news service.

It could be unreliable of course, earlier in the same piece Reuters describe WoW as "recently launched".

But it's very interesting isn't it?

4 comments:

  1. I'm willing to bet that Reuters typoed. That's probably supposed to read "one million peak concurrent users".


    (i.e. one million people playing at the same time, as opposed to 1 million accounts)

    "Peak current users" makes no sense as a term.

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  2. I have to agree with Andrew on this one.

    Some people say current users as current active connections on a server.

    1 million concurrently active connections between all their game servers. It still pales in comparision to the concurrent active user connections to the EVE cluster.

    It's a major milestone for WoW. To bring this news into an EVE comparision it would be like the first time they had 5000 concurrent connections to the EVE cluster.

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  3. I fail to see how one million concurrent active users "pales in comparrison" to anything, let alone EVE Online.

    We have no idea how many users (concurrent or otherwise) that each WoW server supports.

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  4. Possibly Andrew. The Morgan Stanley guy would have likely got it from an analyst's report. Those things are horrendously expensive so if that is the source it would be hard for us to get hold of one to see.

    Eve tells you how many people are logged on and it's generally about 45 000 at US peak time.

    So if WoW was a million concurrent at peak and they've just lost all their China numbers it puts them at about 10 times Eve. (ie 450k online at a time).

    It's all so murky. However it may be the case that rivals like Warhammer should not base their expectations on WoW's "eleven million users" as this figure is probably nowhere even close to how many people actually play now, especially with the Chinese numbers gone.

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