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So much has been written on the Internets about Blizzard Entertainment's massively multiplayer game, World of Warcraft, that it has acquired the appearance of ubiquity in America. We read that the game has 9 million "subscribers" and that its appearance on South Park puts the finishing touches on the game's march into the American mainstream. Last year, a new meme got started that WoW is the new golf because some set of people use it to network. We thought it might be fun to do an actual comparison between WoW and golf.

Golf is a fairly popular sport in the US, although nowhere near the level of basketball, football, or baseball. There are several estimates floating around out there, but we'll go with 26 million Americans who play golf at least once a year. That's about 8% of the US population, and among certain populations (cough, old white guys) the game's penetration is undoubtedly much higher.

How does WoW stack up to a true mainstream American hobby like golf? There are a lot of bad numbers about how many Americans truly play World of Warcraft. We scarequoted "subscribers" in the lead because it is a stretch of the definition to include Chinese players under that label. Chinese players use prepaid cards that do not recur like a subscription. This is important because the majority of WoW players are Chinese. Blizzard's Chinese partner, the9, stated on May 22nd that over 7.5 million Chinese accounts had been activated, although it's likely that a couple million accounts have lapsed. Because most writers and bloggers aren't digging into the facts, it lends WoW a purported popularity that stretches beyond its factual penetration.

So how many American players are there? Well, the best metric we've got is the number of people who bought the Burning Crusade expansion. Traditionally, expansions have sold to a very high percentage of a user base and very quickly. In its first month on the market, WoW sold about 1.8 million copies for North American regions. Let's assume that 70% of North American subscribers would purchase the expansion within its 1st month on the market. Doing the math, we arrive at about 2.6 million North American subscribers, or less than 1% of the American population.

No one disputes that what World of Warcraft has done is unprecedented in Western markets. WoW has about 5 times as many Western subscribers as any MMOG before it. But it's worth getting the facts right. At times, it has seemed that Internet media have talked up World of Warcraft like a Northeastern prep school newsletter promoting squash (500,000 players) as equivalent to football (18 million players). But let's be intellectually honest. According to the National Golf Foundation, there are more non-white golfers (3.4 million) in the US than total WoW players.

Blogs and other internet media can provide distribution to a wider variety of opinions than are normally expressed in the much-reviled mainstream media. But it's also possible that the echo-chamber effect of the blogosphere ends up promoting an equally narrow set of ideas, the same tired suit merely tailored for a younger, tech savvy audience.

But because I believe in replacing bad ideas with better ideas and I don't want all the Warcraft hordes to crucify me, let me update the golf analogy with a better one. WoW could actually be the new surfing. With a comparable number of American participants (2.8 million surfers), the sport's strangeness and popularity among a cool subset of the American population (young, male, high advertising value) has led it into the mainstream consciousness, if not mainstream usage. While remaining a niche activity (indeed, that's part of its branding), it has spawned a lingo and a fashion and a lifestyle, all of which it could be argued WoW is too. It's not a bad model: the 2006 surfing market was recently estimated at about $7.5 billion.

Written by Alexis Madrigal, a former gaming analyst who blogs at the rather excellent Consumer Conspicuous. Writer, producer, and consumerist, he is a product of Ridgefield, WA (pop. 3000) and Harvard’s English department. Trained as an analyst, he is interested in consumers with limitations—children, the poor, rural residents, housewives, the elderly, non-English speakers—and their uses of interactive entertainment. 

Posted by Ed Cotton