When I walked out to the mall last night to pick up my Wrath of the Lich King box at the Gamestop, I expected maybe a dozen or so people. It’s not exactly a major population hotspot, and I assumed most people would have jobs the next day. Midnight release events aren’t for everyone.

Boy was I was wrong. There were easily between 100 and 150 people waiting in a line that stretched past the Mrs. Fields, down the hall and out the building. The same thing was happening all around the world.

Even though I’ve been writing about how big this game is, sometimes I still forget how big this game is. World of Warcraft, as is often mentioned, has 11 million players. If it were a country, it would be the 75th largest in the world. (It would be ahead of Greece and behind Zimbabwe.)

This is the designated part of the article where I talk about the video game industry weathering the economic downturn, but extrapolating industry lessons from WoW can be misleading. It’s an industry unto itself. There isn’t another massively multiplayer game that even comes close to their installed base. Click on this link and look at this graph, I insist.

How World of Warcraft became such a monolith is probably best left to another analyst, but it has a lot to do with the classic Blizzard approach to making games: Take an existing game genre, get rid of the obnoxious parts, streamline the experience so anyone can pick it up and play it, and polish it until it gleams. Ultima Online, Lineage and Everquest did it first, but World of Warcraft did it right.

Kudos to Gamestop for running the thing smoothly, though. Everyone paid in advance, and everyone in the line got their boxes shortly after the stroke of midnight to go home and play. A few of them have even stopped since then.

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