MMO Blog

Subscriber numbers are important to developers, to publishers. How many people are playing your game is directly collerated to how much money you have coming into your bank account each month, and it helps to be able to show that you've got an awesome game that lots and lots of people are interested in. 

But why should we, the consumer, at all care about how many people bother to play these games regularly?

We shouldn't, but we do.

We reported yesterday about World of Warcraft's account problem. There might be some unusual activity affecting a small subset of users, maybe, which Blizzard are looking into and will most likely fix very, very shortly. They've announced it because they've had to send out a few emails to those few users affected, and I suppose they wanted to nip the whole complaint in the bud before people started freaking out. 

Along with their warning, they also told users to change their password and buy an authenticator, just in case. It's not enough to keep your 12 character, alphanumeric password safe anymore, you also need to update it often and buy additional third party hardware/software in order to protect your digital gold, your emails and your social network account. Is it worth it? Is it just paranoia?