Rob Fahey
14:14 (BST)
14/06/2005
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World of Warcraft hits two million subscribers
Major milestone reached as Blizzard prepares for huge Chinese expansion
Blizzard's massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft has reached another major milestone in its success, with the company today revealing that the service now has two million paying subscribers worldwide.
The figures place World of Warcraft comfortably among the largest subscription-based online games in the world, sitting just behind Korean firm NCSoft's vastly popular Lineage title in the record books.
The two million mark has been reached from subscribers in North America, Europe and South Korea, and Blizzard is expecting another major boost to its numbers following the commercial launch of the game in China earlier this month.
Figures from the public beta of the game in China showed up to 500,000 players using the servers concurrently, with six-figure queues to enter the game - numbers which come close to rivalling the peak concurrency in all three other territories combined.
Launches are also planned in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau later this year, all of which are major markets for online games - with Taiwan being the second most lucrative market in the far east for MMORPG titles after South Korea.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz recently, Blizzard's VP of business operations Paul Sams admitted that the huge demand for World of Warcraft had put an unexpected strain on the company's customer service and support plans.
"We want to do better than we have," he commented. "We have plans and aspirations and goals to be much better than we already are... Blizzard has the desire to be the best in class in the service that we provide and the overall experience. I think we've created a great game, but from a service perspective we have more work to do and I think that we'll get there."
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