With nearly 7 million WoW players, Blizzard leads online gaming

Xbox Live? Not even close.

August 28, 2006

In a recent interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Blizzard COO Paul Sams made some grand statements about his company's online services. While Sams does admire the Xbox 360 console itself, he pointed out that Blizzard's online services, including Battle.net and the wildly popular World of Warcraft MMORPG are miles ahead of Xbox Live and other online services.

"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," says Sams at the Leipzig Games Convention Developer Conference.

Sams says that over 6.5 million gamers are playing World of Warcraft, and that Blizzard expects to achieve 7 million players by the end of the year. Xbox Live currently supports over 3 million players.

Blizzard also recently announced that the company will be releasing a World of Warcraft expansion every year.

Meanwhile, Square Enix's online RPG Final Fantasy XI has 200,000–300,000 active players on a daily basis (although the gameplay is still healthy). While Final Fantasy XI currently leads online RPGs in the Japanese market, it doesn't have the reach in North America that World of Warcraft does.