One of the most interesting talks at this year’s Game Developers Conference was that regarding World of Warcraft, which was delivered by Jeffrey Kaplan, who is the lead designer on the game. The Blizzard man managed to cram very cool statistics in his speech, revealing just how incredibly big World of Warcraft has become. And, of course, big equates profitable for those running the game, the always happy Blizzard.

It seems that no less than 16 million quests are completed each day in the MMO. Of course, an accurate measurement is hard to make, so Blizzard relies on data collected over the long term and averages. The company says that for the time frame between July 2007 and March 2009, 8,570,222,426 quests (yup, that is a number with 10 figures) have been completed by players. That's quite a number, considering that the population of our planet has only recently gone over 6,5 billion.

In order to allow players to reach this kind of number, World of Warcraft offers quite a few things to do while playing. It seems that Blizzard initially aimed to ship the game with about 600 quests, which were deemed more than enough to keep players occupied until the first expansion. The original game needed shipping with more than 4,000 quests, while the two subsequent expansions brought the number to 7,650. The developer thought that it could launch one expansion during each year, before settling on the more realistic figure of one expansion for every two years of game life.

At the moment, World of Warcraft is the most played Western-style subscription-based MMO in the world. It is estimated that more than 11.5 million players have active accounts. By contrast, other MMOs are happy when their player base goes over 1 million. Others are closing down because of lack of active players, like Tabula Rasa or Hellgate: London.