World of Warcraft Keeps Growing, Even as Players Test Its Limits [NYT]:

[On Nov. 23,] Blizzard had arranged for producers and designers to sign copies of the game at midnight at a hangar-size Fry’s Electronics outlet in Fountain Valley, not far from Blizzard’s base in Irvine, 40 miles south of Los Angeles. The company had set up a similar signing for an earlier strategy game, Warcraft III, and about 700 people showed up. Planning optimistically, the company had about 2,500 copies of World of Warcraft on hand.

“So I planned to roll over there around 11 p.m., and as I tried to get off the freeway I look over and I see this gigantic, dark, surging mass around Fry’s, and I’m like, ‘What in the world is that?’ ” said Paul Sams, 34, Blizzard’s senior vice president for business operations. It turned out that the pulsing was more than 5,000 people.

“The cars were backed up on the off-ramp,” he said. “I parked like a mile away, and when I get there the line is looped around the building, and then looped around the parking lot. It was like a football tailgate, with the R.V.’s and barbecues in the lot and everything.”

By the end of that first day, about 240,000 copies of the game had sold across North America, Australia and New Zealand, the product’s initial markets. The game has now sold almost 700,000 copies in those markets, and at peak hours about 250,000 people from those areas are playing the game simultaneously.

Interesting, detailed article on the unexpected success of World of Warcraft. As the game was in beta last fall I recall coming across multiple references to the game’s addictive qualities in various locales.

One point the article does not address is what numbers the releasing company, Blizzard, was expecting to support. For instance, what are the numbers that the competition supports in EverQuest and EverQuest II? The underlying thrust of the article is simply that the success of the game caught the company by surprise. However, in order to really unravel the story behind the customer-support problems that unexpected growth has caused, it would be best to be able to report numbers.

That’s hard data to pry out of a company though, so I’m quibbling. The guy they quote in the excerpt above says they met their first year’s sales projections in less than a week. Elsewhere “two of five” community liasons are quoted. Five community liasons for over 250,000 subscribers. That seems a bit thin to me, but of course I haven’t the faintest idea what a best-practices number might be.

Anyway, interesting article. I wonder what Blizzard will do with all that money.