Blizzard Entertainment on Thursday announced that its online role playing game World of Warcraft has passed more than one million customers in Europe.
World of Warcraft brings players to the war torn fantasy world of Azeroth, where different species like humans, orcs, night elves, the Undead and others have formed themselves into two loose factions — the Alliance and the Horde — and are vying for control.
Users buy the game up front and then pay a monthly fee to experience an online, persistent world inhabited by computer-controlled characters and thousands of other real players.
Blizzard released World of Warcraft. in November 2004 simultaneously for Mac and PC, first for the North American, Australian and New Zealand markets, and has gradually rolled out the game elsewhere around the world. The game is now played by more than 5.5 million Mac and PC users worldwide.
At last week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco demonstrated a development build of World of Warcraft running as a Universal Binary on an Intel iMac. Representatives of Blizzard indicated the Universal Binary will be rolled into the next build of the game, which is automatically updated when you log on to play.
Blizzard claims the million-user mark is four times the previously estimated size of the entire European market for European online role playing game players.