There's usually a wide chasm between video games and the politicians who make decisions that affect the sale and content of said games, so whenever we hear of a civil servant with a ludological streak, it warms our heart. Sure, their trysts with gaming are usually not major aspects in their lives, as a majority of their free time is spent appeasing constituents and kissing babies. However, a Republican candidate for the Connecticut legislature recently outed herself as having an extreme fondness for World of Warcraft, evidenced by her main character: a Level 70 Orc Hunter.
Jeanne Stevens, the aforementioned WoW fiend, is a mother of four and a local business owner in addition to being a legislative hopeful, making us wonder where she finds the time for late night excursions into Zul'Aman. We guess it helps that her father, uncle and kids are all suckling WoW's luminescent teat as well. We only hope that Stevens' story inspire other political figures to reveal their own gaming tendencies -- we hear Cheney can five-star "Psychobillly Freakout" on Expert.
World of Warcraft's Chinese overlords, The9, announced the game hit the epic (but not legendary) feat of having over one million concurrent connections. According to The9 it breaks the concurrency records set by the game's launch in China on September 6, 2007.
Instinctively, the finger for this record-breaking concurrency is pointed at Chinese gold farmers, but apparently those players are on the North American and European servers and wouldn't be counted in The9's tally. The milestone isn't too shabby for a game that's allegedly peaked.
Tickets for the 2008 Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational convention and tournament being held in Paris, France, will go on sale this Thursday The event will be at the Porte de Versailles Exposition Centre on June 28 and 29, with tickets costing €70 / £55 ($110). Attendees will get hands-on time with WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King and StarCraft II.
The tournament will have $100,000 in prizes, but all we really care about is the big announcement. Blizzard has a habit of revealing big things at its special events, as it did at last year's invitational in Korea when it announced StarCraft II. Then again, Blizzard could just make us sad Pandaren by neglecting to reveal anything at all.
Earlier this week Activision CEO Bobby Kotick made a bold statement saying that even with a $500 million or $1 billion investment his company couldn't produce a product that could compete with World of Warcraft -- lucky for him his company owns it. GameDaily reports that Lars Buttler, former VP of online at EA and current CEO of server-based game company Trion World Network, believes Kotick is just looking to scare off the competition.
Buttler tells the site that Kotick is just defending the merger and believes WoW is just the beginning of the "connected era." Buttler goes on to use some fancy buzzwords but dismisses the idea that nobody can take on WoW no matter what the investment. He even says if developers disagree with Kotick that they should call his company. Trion is currently starting up and allegedly has products "well under way," but currently has no announcements.
The UK's Halifax bank has reportedly stopped transactions to Blizzard Entertainment "due to a significant number of fraudulent transactions," meaning those with Halifax issued Visa/Mastercards won't be making their World of Warcraft payment this month. The Register writes that the bank doesn't blame Blizzard and is apparently tired of dealing with all the fraudulent charges using stolen credit cards. The bank will allow payment processing once customers contact it to make arrangements.
Sister-site WoW Insider has chronicled many fraud issues on the insanely popular MMO. Between the keyloggers and phishers, Azeroth can be a dangerous place. In all fairness, the Halifax issue could have happened with any MMO as they all have similar scams. Although what Halifax is doing is inconvenient, it's still better than customers checking their monthly statements and discovering fraudulent charges.
Vivendi Games' revenues totaled €1.02 billion ($1.5 billion USD) in 2007, with much of the cash flow thanks to World of Warcraft's 10 million players and the €814 million ($1.2 billion) Blizzard brought in, an increase of 58% from 2006. WoW's next expansion Wrath of the Lich King is expected later this year and should keep this little phenomenon on track.
Proving how much of a work horse Blizzard is in Vivendi Games, the Sierra Entertainment, Sierra Online and Vivendi Games Mobile businesses saw combined revenues of €204 million ($301 million), a 29% decline from last year. Timeshift and World in Conflict drove sales but didn't perform as well as 2006's Scarface, Ice Age 2, Eragon, Spyro: A New Beginning and F.E.A.R. Now forget all you know of Vivendi Games -- here begins the age of Activision-Blizzard.
World of Warcraft continues to live up to the acronym, now supporting a subscriber base of more than 10 million. (Actually, those subscribers do the 'supporting' – due to pay nearly $2 billion to Blizzard and its parent companies over the course of this year.) Just how big is 10 million? If Blizzard drafted all WoW players into a private army, the armed force would easily trump the size of the world's ten largest armies combined. In civilian terms: WoW players now equal half of Australia's total population.
Blizzard defines subscribers as those who have paid a subscription fee or are using an active prepaid card, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game during the last 30 days are also counted as subscribers, but players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or canceled subscriptions and expired prepaid cards are excluded. WoW currently totals more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America and approximately 5.5 million in Asia.
It's simply un-American! The commie sympathizers at Blizzard have apparently placed financial restrictions on the amount of gold players can have in World of Warcraft. WoW Insider reports two players have reached the anti-capitalist limit of 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper and that's the end of the road for them. After that they are not entitled to the cash they have earned by the sweat of their own fingertips.
Without getting into an Andrew Ryan diatribe, the limit is apparently just some arbitrary number ... actually, Ross "über math nerd" Miller says, "It's not arbitrary, it's 2 to the power of 31, which is a 32-bit integer." We're not sure how Blizzard feels about the cap, but we're certain the citizens of Azeroth can't be too happy about "the man" keeping them from living out their financial fantasies.
As campaigning for the presidential primaries reaches critical mass, America's political eye will be sharply focused on a number of locations during the upcoming months -- places like Iowa, Washington, D.C., and ... Azeroth? Yes, the fanatical internet following of Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has spread its influence into the digital realm of World of Warcraft, and is currently planning a pro-Paul march from Ironforge to Stormwind on the Whisperwind server.
Most of us will be too busy attending the "Orcs for Obama" and "Rogues for Romney" rallies to make an appearance, but if you want to show your support for the Republican underdog, and you don't have better plans for the night of January 1, then roll on in to Ironforge astride your Great Red Elekk and join in the festivities.
Everyone knows that World of Warcraft is the hottest thing to hit the MMO genre since BakeQuest: The Battle for Sliced Bread. But according to at least one rival developer, that popularity may be starting to dwindle. Speaking to the accurately named VideoGamer.com, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Quest Designer Joel Bylos cites a "feeling on the Internet" as evidence WoW is beginning to lose its appeal. "You get that just from online communities, which of course we all pay attention to as well," Bylos said when asked if people might be getting tired of WoW.
We're sorry, but a "feeling on the internet" probably isn't the best way of measuring satisfaction in a game with 9.3 million paying subscribers (up from 7 million roughly a year ago) and a celebrity-packedad campaign. Sure, there will always be internet trolls and forum whiners that threaten to leave over every little problem, but by and large the silent majority seems just as hooked on the game as ever. Much like Democrats who promised to move to Canada if George W. Bush was reelected, these vocal complainers seem good at making threats but bad at following through on them. Then again ...
Verne Troyer, better known as Mini-Me from Austin Powers, is the latest celebrity to grace the airwaves in a World of Warcraft commercial. Troyer and his mage blink late to the ad game following the international flavor of Van Damme and Toledo, and the more domestic musings of Shatner and Mr. T. Great ad campaign. What celebrity would you want to see and what race/class would they be?
Perhaps there is life after World of Warcraft after all, and it is likely just as addicting. Various job listings for Blizzard list a "Next-Gen MMO" as the project for which they are hiring. Though many forum posters guessed this was just a way for the company to be coy about needing extra manpower for the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion, company man "Drysc" (38th post) confirmed that it is not for the Lich King but, as it says in the job listing, "it is an unannounced Next-Gen MMO ... And that doesn't mean an expansion for World of Warcraft either."
Is anyone really surprised that Blizzard would be staying in the MMO market, given their first entry into the genre makes more money than self-replicating Nintendo DS systems? Of course, given their lengthy development cycles (that have been promised to remain intact following its merger with Activision), it may be years, if not a decade, before we see anything from it.
The MMO genre has come a long way in a very short time, but it's still important to look back at the events which brought us to where we are today. Michael Zenke over at Massively responds to MMOCrunch's list of MMO's most memorable event by citing what he feels to be its most influential, from the high points (Toyota's World of Warcraft commercial), to the lowest (the spontaneous and unannounced addition of New Game Enhancements to Star Wars Galaxies).
Were there any obvious milestones in MMO history overlooked in these articles? Were you there when Lord British was assassinated in Ultima Online? Were you or someone you love affected by the Corrupted Blood plague of 2005? Let us know in the comments.
Like an unholy alliance, Dell and Blizzard have teamed up to unleash this beast of a laptop computer into the world. The XPS M1730 World of Warcraft Edition comes in Horde and Alliance flavors, and sells for $4,499 USD. WoW, indeed.
Admittedly, you get a lot more than just the laptop for nearly five large. The deal includes a WoW-branded backpack, a "golden ticket" entitling the buyer to a FigurePrint of their in-game avatar, a special key to all future WoW betas, and a plethora of Warcraft merchandise, including novels, trading cards, soundtrack CDs, strategy guides, and a behind-the-scenes DVD disc.
The computer itself is a 17" widescreen notebook, with backlit keyboard, illuminated speaker grills, and a built-in LCD screen dedicated to displaying in-game stats. The laptop also comes pre-loaded with World of Warcraft, as well as The Burning Crusade expansion. We haven't done the math, but we're pretty sure it's still not a bargain. Still, it's a nice little collection for the Warcraft enthusiasts out there.
Though some World of Warcraft fans may be in a tizzy over the news that Vivendi and Activision would merge to form Activision Blizzard, it seems that shareholders in the two companies weren't put out in the slightest. GameDaily is reporting that Activision saw a NASDAQ bump of 16 percent ($3.55) in their stock since the news was released, bringing its worth to $25.70. Vivendi got a three percent jump.
Not every investor is smiling though. When faced with the news that the company would have a new, super-powerful competitor, EA's stock tumbled 91 cents to $55.29. We're sorry, Electronic Arts, but at least you can take comfort in the fact that (at the moment, at least) your company has the far better name.
Conduit, Mad World and more: All our hands-on impression from Nintendo Fall Media Summit 08
Hide your wallets! New games this month: October Edition
Joystiq at E for All, the highlights and lowlights
Nintendo DSi vs. PSP-3000 vs. iPod Touch, v1.0
Joyswag: The Video Games Live Album
Listen to the Joystiq podcast (because your ears can't read)
Posts with tag WorldOfWarcraft
Everyone knows that World of Warcraft is the hottest thing to hit the MMO genre since BakeQuest: The Battle for Sliced Bread. But according to at least one rival developer, that popularity may be starting to dwindle. Speaking to the accurately named VideoGamer.com, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Quest Designer Joel Bylos cites a "feeling on the Internet" as evidence WoW is beginning to lose its appeal. "You get that just from online communities, which of course we all pay attention to as well," Bylos said when asked if people might be getting tired of WoW.
