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Penny Arcade had the opportunity to interview Blizzard about the recent troubles related to 'World of Warcraft' (server downtime and massive lag).1. You say that you sold six hundred thousand units. Is the game not capable of supporting this many users?
The short answer is "The game is capable of supporting this many players," but it would probably be helpful to provide some background information. Based on our market analysis, we made some initial calculations about the size of the massively multiplayer online games market in the United States. We then accounted for new customers to the genre based on our previous games. Looking over this data, we did believe that there was the potential for an extremely sizable interest in a Blizzard MMOG. According to our research, other successful MMOGs in the U.S. had achieved roughly 300,000 subscribers after 12 months of operation. What ended up happening with World of Warcraft is that we achieved double these numbers in approximately the first six weeks of launch. We absolutely can support the number of copies we put on shelves, but we believed it would take us longer to get to this number in terms of players purchasing the game and logging on. |
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