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It blows my mind that the word "paltry" would be applied to WoW's subscriber base. It dwarfs even its biggest competitors by an order of magnitude!

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He meant it ironically.

That depends on who you consider their competitors. WoW worldwide is about 50% of the MMORPG market. It will be interesting to see how SWTOR fares in that space. Almost up to 2M subs already,

However if you consider the larger online gaming market I would consider WoW's main competitors the likes of Zynga. Farmville alone has 28.4M monthly active users.

I'm not sure I would consider WoW (a game with a monthly subscription and a 20+ GB client) to be a direct competitor with Farmville (a free-to-play game with a browser-based client). I suspect that they appeal to very different audiences.

You would only be partially correct. See this report we did at Raptr:

http://blog.raptr.com/2011/09/27/zynga-report/

Specifically, ~20% of WOW players also played a Zynga game, and ~30% of XBox players also played a Zynga game.

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