In a press release of March 17, 2005, Blizzard announced that they have surpassed the 1,5 million subscriber mark for World of Warcraft. The tremendously popular game has also reached its peak concurrency with more than 500 000 subscribers playing at the same time.
World of Warcraft was released for the North American market November 23, 2004. Since then, it has made its debut also in Korea and Europe, which has created an enormous popularity.
So far, the game has achieved a lot of record-breaking milestones, some of which are listed in their press release:
# Europe: Over 290,000 account creations and 180,000 peak concurrency in its first weekend.
# Over 500,000 active subscribers, and 230,000 peak concurrency to date.
Korea:
# The most successful 100-day launch of any MMORPG in Korean history since its commercial release on January 18, 2005.
# World of Warcraft is currently played in 75% of Korean Internet Game Rooms (IGRs), the primary venue for playing games in Korea. IGRs subscribe directly to MMORPGs and then players buy blocks of time from the IGRs for game time.
North America:
# Over 200,000 subscribers and 100,000 peak concurrency achieved in the game's first 24 hours.
# Current subscriber base of over 800,000 players.
The game will soon be launched in additional regions of Asia, and Blizzard will also improve its service support in the existing data centres. World of Warcraft is scheduled to be released in China in 2005 and in Taiwan and other regions soon after.