Top 10 Windows games

I'm subscribed to the monthly "Exploring Windows" newsletter. This issue had another link to the gaming section of the Microsoft site, where Microsoft presents not only the games they make themselves, but also have lots of information about other games. Logical enough, somebody interested in PC games will automatically be a customer for Windows, there aren't all that many games running under Linux.

But the most surprising thing to me on that site is the top 10 Windows games by sales volume, where for week 5 of 2006 World of Warcraft is again the best selling game (I assume the data are from the US).

Me playing World of Warcraft, I tend to have a view from the inside. So what I see is often people leaving, or at least going into hiatus. And being on an old server, I don't see all that many real newbies either. Other players see the same thing, and this gives rise to all this discussion about longevity of the game, and the "game over at 60" problem. But if I try to distance myself from my in-game observations and try to see the larger picture, the view is quite different. There is barely a month where no new server opens up. Total growth of subscriber numbers might have slowed down a bit, but the game is still growing. Which not only means people are still buying the game, but *more* people are buying the game than are leaving.

WoW might not be in the top spot for sales every week, but whenever I check it is the top 10, so the sales hold up pretty steady, and that for 15 months now, which is a phenomenal age for a PC game. Everybody always calculates how much Blizzard is making from 5.5 million subscribers multiplied with the monthly fees (which is difficult, because monthly fees differ over the world, and some countries have other models of payment by hour). But I think that the box sales alone must keep Blizzard rolling in cash.

And of course the day the expansion set comes out, Blizzards main problem will be satisfying all the demand fast enough. Expect people queueing up at stores, others complaining that Amazon didn't deliver the pre-ordered game, and all the usual chaos on release day. I'm still dreaming of a online purchase and download option, but offering the Burning Crusade for download would be like inviting a Denial of Service attack on your servers. I don't think the current technology of the internet could handle the data volume of the number of people interested multiplied with the probably large size of the download, not even with a peer-to-peer network solution. Obviously people buying your product faster than you can deliver is a nice problem for a company to have, Blizzard will earn millions of dollar on a single day. Too bad they are part of Vivendi Universal, a huge media conglomerate with lots of problems in other sectors, thus you can't buy Blizzard shares.