I read something today that amazes me:
Blizzard COO Paul Sams has expressed his personal admiration for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, but argues that console online services can’t compare to Battle.net and World of Warcraft.
“When you look at Battle.net and you look at the subscribership we have with World of Warcraft, even Xbox Live is not even close to us,” he said, speaking exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz in Leipzig.
At the time of writing, Sams says that World of Warcraft has over 6.5 million players worldwide and is “just shy of seven” – a figure he believes the massively popular online RPG can reach by the end of 2006.
Okay, let’s do some back of the envelope calculations. Each subscription is $15/month and they have 7,000,000 members. That’s $105 million a month. Over a year, that’s 1.26 billion gross. To quote Strong Bad, that’s not a small number.
I remember reading long ago that MMOs were a niche game. Seems like the niche is pretty big in Blizzard’s corner.
Yet another test for you to take. Here are my results:
Your
Ultimate Roleplaying Purity Score |
| Category |
Your Score |
Average |
| Hacklust |
14.15%
Slew entire Asgardian Pantheon with one hand while blindfolded |
53.6% |
| Sensitive Roleplaying |
16.46%
There is no player. There is only…. Zuul. |
54.7% |
| GM Experience |
26.09%
Closer to a novel than to a campaign |
69.6% |
| Systems Knowledge |
88.7%
Played in a couple of campaigns |
90.4% |
| Livin’ La Vida Dorka |
20.69%
Carries dice in pocket ‘just in case’ |
63.4% |
You are 38.95% pure
Average Score: 68.9% |
|
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Just a test to see how the new Microsoft blogging word processor handles a little recursing. 
I’m writing this post using the new Windows Live Writer beta. This thing is really cool, at least while writing. We’ll see how it goes when I post.
It’s analysed my blog and gives me a WYSIWYG template to fill in for my blog post. It’s pretty slick. Here goes the publish.
Edit: It posted great. I wonder if there’s a way to use it to edit posts, not just create new ones.
One of the things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while is to get the details of my Corman Lisp/Emacs setup online. It is now so. If you follow the Corman page link in the upper right hand corner, that will take you to it.
This is a first in hopefully many pages on using Lisp in general and Corman Lisp in particular. Next up, UFFI. It’s already ported, but I need to do the writeup and post it.
Otherwise, life is swell. Microsoft is still there. It’s weird to think I’ve been working there for almost 2 months. How time flies.
