World of Warcraft hits 4 million subscribers

The growth of Blizzard Entertainment's massively multiplayer title World of Warcraft continues unabated, with the firm this week announcing that it now has over four million paying customers on the service.

Although that number includes players who are still using the one month subscription that's bundled with the retail version of World of Warcraft, the figures still comfortably make the game into the largest subscription-based MMOG in the world - eclipsing even NCSoft's massive Lineage, which had over three million subscribers at its height.

The figures also include a large number - over one and a half million - of players in China, who are paying for the game using a system of game cards that grant a certain number of hours of play rather than fixed monthly subscriptions.

Alongside this overseas success, however, the game is also seeing vast success in its home territory, with over a million paying players in the US and Canada alone according to this latest update - almost certainly making it into the first MMOG to reach that milestone.

"With the continued support of our retail partners, World of Warcraft has reached more than one million paying customers in North America well before its one-year anniversary in November," commented Blizzard president Mike Morhaime.

"We would like to express our appreciation to both the players and our retail and license partners for helping us to make World of Warcraft one of the most popular online games in the world," he concluded.

Blizzard has plans to launch the game in a number of additional territories before the end of the year, including the potentially huge market of Taiwan - believed to be the second most lucrative market for MMOGs in the Far East after South Korea, where the game has already been a major success.