According to Craig Sherman, a speaker at the MI6 Marketing Conference in San Francisco, World of Warcraft is only doing a fraction of the business it should be doing.
Speakers at the conference were debating the future of MMOs, and in particular, the scope of free-to-play games. Apparently, there are 800 million teens worldwide that would like to play an MMO, but don’t have the means to pay a subscription - in other words, they don’t want to pay, can’t afford to pay, or don’t have a credit card.
Based on those figures, Sherman claims that World of Warcraft’s 10 million subscribers can hardly be seen as a success. “There are 800 million teens in the world. That’s not a success.” In his opinion, a 10% share of the the market could qualify.
Via softpedia.com
If there were no subscriptions to pay, surley WoW would fail and be rubbish without the support that the game gets.