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The power of WoW and dumb analysts

by: Chuck -
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The New York Times has an interesting article on the growth of World of Warcraft which you can find here. The article discusses that with 4 million subscriber’s world wide that WoW has become the 800lb Gorilla in the industry. The best part is on the second page where Michael Pachter a "research analyst" for a seecurities firm indicates that the service has peaked and will eventually drop down to one million subscribers and that the MMO market has peaked in the US and Europe. The overall cloudlessness of this guy is astounding as it's really hard to see that WoW has peaked right now (I think they've got another year or so of growth before we will see any large scale reduction in WoW subscribers) and the MMO market as a whole is growing so much.

You just look at the quality stuff that NC Soft is putting out right now and will be releasing shortly. If anything I think we're poised to see more growth in this market as more and more gamers get online and as the games become easier to play and more diverse. The only thing that's going to kill growth in the short run if we hit a massive bump in the economy and that may actually help growth as people aren't going to go out as much ($15 a month for unlimited play time vs. the cost of seeing a movie? That's a pretty easy decision on a tight budget).