World of Warcraft Reveals New Player Stats

World of Warcraft, Blizzard's new massively-multiplayer RPG, continues to set North American records, a mere month or so after its release. In addition to being the fastest-selling PC game ever, WoW now holds the distinction of hosting the most simultaneous North American players at one time, according to Blizzard with over 200,000 players online at once during the holiday season. Over 600,000 copies of the game have sold through in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, the territories in which the game has launched so far, and many retailers continue to be sold out in all three regions. The game has yet to be launched in other territories likely to be big for the company, especially the Blizzard-friendly South Korea and Europe. Blizzard is holding off on supplying more copies of the game to retail until the current server load has stabilized; to speed that process along, more servers will be added soon after tests to ensure each server's stability are complete. World of Warcraft's popularity over the holidays was indeed immense, in contrast to a number of other smaller MMOs, which continue to struggle with expensive launch costs and increased competition. In fact, Wish, a PC MMO that started its second beta test on January 1st, announced today that the entire project has been canceled. "After careful consideration of all the facts and analyzing all the data which we have gathered from the Wish Beta 2.0 test so far, we have decided to cancel the Wish project," said the team at Mutable Realms. This is the latest in a long string of MMORPGs to be cancelled in recent months, with titles such as Dragon Empires, True Fantasy Live Online, Mythica and Ultima X: Odyssey all suffering a similar fate.