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Ethic spotted World of Warcraft's numbers:

In less than three months, it had already sold over 800,000 copies in North America. With a subscriber base of more than 750,000 players and peak concurrency of over 250,000 users, World of Warcraft is now the biggest online game in North America.

[...]

On January 18, 2005, World of Warcraft released in Korea, and in just one day had achieved peak concurrency of over 100,000 players.

[...]

Most recently, the game launched in Europe on February 11, 2005, to even greater success than in North America. After just its first weekend, Europe had already hit peak concurrency of over 180,000 players.

Hey Brucie, time to update the charts. And, yes. I was right.

Now lets see how much those numbers will sink in the next months. Because that's what will happen, even if slowly.

(despite it's still selling like bread)

I paste here an excerpt from Dave Rickey:

To explain how I get the 440K-550K number, what I�ve done is looked at the Blizzard press releases and figured that they sold 400K in the first month, and 200K in each of the last two months. Normally a game would fall off more in the third month, but Blizzard was having a hard time stuffing boxes and putting up servers fast enough to meet demand, so I can buy that it took a while for everyone to get their copy. Probably by now they�ve caught up.

So 400,000 x 0.70 (a slightly below normal conversion rate) = 280,000 x 0.90 (a slightly higher than normal churn rate) = 252,000 * 0.90 (next months churn, so we can factor for after the third-month subscribers have converted) = 226,800 of the first months subscribers still there at the end of next month.

200,000 x 0.70 x 0.90 = 126,000 of the month 2 subs still present at the end of month 4
200,000 x 0.70 = 140,000 of month 3 subs after their free month runs out.
226,800 + 126,000 + 140,000 = 492,800 - 50,000 (the boxes that never became accounts) = 442,800

Run the same math with conversion rates of 0.80 and churn rates of 0.94 (slightly above the best ever seen in the industry) and you get:

400,000 x 0.80 x 0.94 x 0.94 = 282,752
200,000 x 0.80 x 0.94 = 150,400
200,000 x 0.80 = 160,000
282,752 + 150,400 + 160,000 - 50,000 = 543,152

I had similar suspects as I wrote on the linked thread at F13, but these formulas don't convince me. I do not believe that for 800k of boxes sold you just get 442k of active accounts in three months.

Still, I noticed the Blizzard forgot to add the word "active" to their statement about the subscriptions. So there are suspects.