I’d say about 1 in 2 people reading this either play World of Warcraft, know someone that plays it, or has completely lost their lives to it. The reason I know that is because the expansion pack to WoW, Wrath of the Lich King set record numbers for sales its first 24 hours upon release.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King sold 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours of release. Although all the markets are looking down because of the economy, video games, WoW in particular are looking like everything is gravy. The main reason being is that during turbulent economic times people still want to be entertained. Even more so than when times are good.

The Lich King Is Laughing Maniacally At All The Gold

So, just how much money has Blizzard, now Blizzard-Activision made off the WoW franchise? Well, it’s estimated that around 11 million subscribers play WoW. Most of those people have upgrade to the Burning Crusade, the expansion that came out prior to Wrath of the Lich King. Then tally up those software totals, with the $15/month that WoW players must pay in order to play their game everymonth. Financially it estimates to about a $1 billion/year industry.

Just think of how much money you’d have right now if you had invested in Blizzard back when their big release was Lost Vikings on the SNES.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 9:27 am and is filed under Consumer Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.