Analysts see World of Warcraft adding another million subscribers

Right. W/e.

Blizzard got popular w/ the casual, non-typical, mmo gamer. But, it was a fad. A lot of those players have left. It's still a HUGE, roaring, success, but come on already. It'll do well w/ WotLK, but I highly doubt it'll garner 1 mil >>**NEW**

Seems Massively gets more pro-WoW with it's articles every day...

Secondly...LK will have a draw for about 3 months...after that the stale attitude will come roaring back. You can only last for so long till the game just gets old...and having to wait probably 2 years for another expac isn't that great.

Also, their numbers are bit fudged since they include Asia which has a subscriber method all on its own.

Are these new or returning players?

What do they forsee as the amount of people that will leave again after a few months after the new content becomes old?

Kind of a barely plausible analysis if you don't cover all the bases..

Blizzard will hype the hell out of the expansion between now and Xmas. Given they are the market leaders and have exceeded every expectation from an MMO, they have the experience and hard data, I don't think anyone can doubt their ability to reach out to new players. After all, they have recently moved into two new territories.

I don't think an average player is going to get through all the new content in a few months. Let's not forget we are a specific subset of MMO fans here, and therefore our consumption of that may be a lot quicker than average. But because this is such a mainstream game, I don't anticipate that number to be a significant amount of the 12 million, even if all players in that demographic left.

What impresses me is that WoW is such a huge mainstream success, and still a game that I really want to play as an MMO.

Spin much? So, is the analyst getting a kickback from Acti-Bliz or is Massively?

Warhammer got a long long way to go before it even get come anywhere near the numbers that WoW got. And just for the record wow is both casual and hardcore.

I do not see any casuals raiding 25 man instants!

I don't remember anyone accusing the tons of articles on this sight about WAR's numbers being spin? Is massively getting kick back money from EA? And how could any self-respecting MMO player give money to EA? EA, bad gaming company or the worst gaming company?

Sounds like a conservative estimate, if anything. WoW's subscription base has grown by 900,000 this year, and that's without an expansion, and with a lot of people getting bored, and with a few hyped competition launches, like AoC and WAR.

I think a lot of the nay-sayers underestimate just how many new people are checking out this WoW thing that they hear so much about. And that's been a constant influx ever since launch.

Knowing 70 percent of the population will be playing Death Knights in this expansion and the fact that they are making all content up to this point useless, once again, is detering me from playing WOTLK. While I'm sure it will be fun to play for a short amount of time the long haul will see this expansion push away alot of people who are looking for a good time to get out.