The enormously successful life-drain that is Blizzard Entertainment’s massively multiplayer online RPG, World of Warcraft, has reported an active player base now totaling more than 9 million subscribers worldwide.

WOW was first released in North America in 2004 and since then, with the help of the critically-acclaimed expansion pack, the Burning Crusade, has gone on to be the most popular expression of the genre worldwide. It is now available in seven different languages and evidently enjoyed by an extraordinarily large and blossoming worldwide userbase. MMORPGs are one of the most fiercely competitive videogame genres due to the fact that players generally only have time to play one of them at a time thanks to the huge demands on users’ time. As such it will be interesting to see how Blizzard work to hold onto this virtual nation of players as rival worlds enter the market vying to steal its inhabitants.