WoW: Blizzard Heralds World of Warcraft Hitting Eight Million Worldwide Subscribers
If you know what MMOPRG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) means, then you almost certainly bow down to the WoW. World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game set in an immersive world replete with guilds, alliances, beasties, and hordes, is built on the engaging concept of completing quests to gain experience and rewards within the game.
So engaging, in fact, that Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft has surpassed eight million subscribers worldwide.
The gaming world is enormous and online and growing and will influence all of the next wave of Internet development, from blogs to social networking to what is referred to in shorthand as MMOs (or massively multiplayer online). The convergence of “gaming” with what we tend to think of as socializing or networking is already happening, and will become much more commonplace in 2007.
All of this really struck home for me around a year ago when I heard an NPR report about gold farming, which just about blew my mind.
