WoW is quickly becoming a real life Skynet as it covers more and more parts of the world and draws in more and more people to play. 10 million worldwide subscriptions doesn’t come close to the numbers MapleStory has but that game isn’t American so it doesn’t count. One interesting thing about the press release is that they apparently reached this mark because of, “new and returning players signing up through the holiday season.” Which sort of brings up the hypothesis that now that the holiday season is over, wouldn’t the “returning players” return to their status before the holiday season? Weren't they not playing the game because they didn't have time? MEANING: WOW can go below the 10 million sub mark by the end of this month.

That would be something really interesting to try to find out but it’s unlikely that anyone will and very unlikely that some one would release that information to the public. On top of this, four months from now WOW is going to probably be out in another in another region and they will definitely pick up enough subs to get the 11 million mark.

All these upcoming MMOs better quickly adopt this blanket release tactic because WOW is becoming the EQ to a lot of these areas, and with no competition WoW is just going to be picking up more and more players.

Blizzard Press Release.