One MILLION Chinese!

[Said in that Mike Meyers/Dr. Evil voice.]

Yes, Blizzard’s partner in China, The9, put out a press release to announce that World of Warcraft hit a concurrent play record with one million players logged in and playing on their servers.

While perhaps not the hottest news bite of the day, it is quite a feat.

Only CCP releases similar numbers, and I think the last number for EVE Online was around 40,000 concurrent players. (But all on one server!)

Now somebody is going to be a wet blanket and point out that the players in China only pay twenty seven cents a lunar year to play and so on. But like Stalin said, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

And then there was the rather silly comment over on WarCry about many of these people being gold farmers. Silly because gold farmers play on US and EU servers, not on the mainland China servers run by The9. Selling gold to people who can only afford such a low price point is not a winning proposition. To make money, you have to sell to people who have dollars or Euros… okay, just Euros.

The real question is what would happen if all million concurrent players pressed the space bar and jumped at the same time?

Of course, one of the interesting things about this press release was ending up, after a few clicks, on the official World of Warcraft China site. I like seeing game screen shots in other languages.

While they were behind the US and Europe getting The Burning Crusade, they appear to be all caught up now and enjoying Patch 2.4 with everybody else.