Mark Celsor

I read a post on Slashdot the other day that Blizzard Entertainment announced they now have over 10 million paying subscribers participating in their World of Warcraft video game world. Holy crap, that’s a lot of people! Just to put that into perspective New York City (the largest city in the US) only has a little over 8 million people. Another way to look at it, 2.5 million World of Warcraft players are in the US. The current population of the US is around 300 million, so a little under 1% of all US citizens pay $13-15 a month to play. More people in the US play W.o.W. than work as farmers. Madness! Last week I wrote a post about Second Skin, a feature-length documentary about W.o.W. players. So apparently the game is a pretty big deal and pretty fun… but I have the fear and I’ve never even signed up for a free trial account. I don’t want to get sucked in. At Clear Ink we did a lot of marketing work inside the Second Life virtual world and I know some marketing firms like Zeus Jones have sponsored World of Warcraft characters, so there must be some interesting marketing activities going on in there. Do you all think I should overcome my phobia, return to some of my high school Dungeons and Dragons roots and check it out?