A full year after its initial release, World of Warcraft (WoW) is well on its way to global domination in gaming world. November 8, 2005 dawned with an announcement by Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft, of the game’s official launch in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. This launch follows a highly successful period of open beta testing in the region involving more 800,000 players, and comes just a day after Blizzard’s announcement of six new gaming realms to accommodate its growing number of players.

With over 4.5 million players worldwide even before Blizzard’s most recent launch, World of Warcraft can clearly be called an “epic� success. On initial release to the North American public in late November 2004, the game sold more copies in 24 hours than any previous PC game in history. Gaming giant GameSpot gave WoW Best Game of the Year and Best PC Game of the Year honors. Additionally, the game won the Editor’s Choice Award from GameSpot, GameSpy, and IGN and has been awarded Best Massively Multiplayer Game and Best Role-Playing Game by several other top gaming sites.

Truly a gaming anomaly, World of Warcraft has proven itself to be a lasting favorite with hardcore gamers as well as players newer to RPG and Massively Multiplayer gaming. Recent trends have shown that players frequent lose interest in a new game within a few months after its release, and that although game sales may continue for some time after the software’s initial launch, much of the original gaming audience quickly moves on to test out ever newer games. This phenomenon, much to Blizzard’s delight, has not shown itself to be to true for many players of World of Warcraft. Spending just a few minutes in-game uncovers an usually large number of “first generation� WoW players, those individuals who have actively played one or more characters since the game’s initial release nearly a full year ago.

Equally fascinating is the fact that this gaming goliath shows little signs of slowing down. With this week’s launch of World of Warcraft in Taiwan Hong Kong, and Macau, the online gaming community is expected to easily reach 5 million players by the year’s end. And the highly anticipated World of Warcraft expansion pack to be released in 2006 has many gamers drooling in expectation over new game content, quests, and two new playable races.

Not bad for a gaming company known mainly for third-party development ten years ago.

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