Warhammer Online Will Have Around 250,000 Players

An analyst says that Electronic Arts is targeting to get “around 250,000 subscribers” for the Mythic developed Warhammer Online. He believes that the subscription numbers are set for a substantial drop after the initial month of free playing time expires at the middle of October for most of the people who bought the game at launch.

Electronic Arts says that in the first week at retail, more than 1.5 million copies of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning were sold. This is higher than the sales of Spore, which only managed to sell about a million copies in two weeks. The main goal for Mythic is to create a MMO that manages to offset the money spent on its development.

Analyst Arvind Bhatia from Stern Agee talked to Edge and said that around 60 million of Electronic Arts' revenue for September would be brought in by Warhammer Online. He also added that “based on our estimates for sell through, it would require about 20 percent to 25 percent of the purchasers to remain long term subscribers--which we believe is achievable”.

Mark Jacobs, the Chief Executive Officer of developer Mythic, said that he would like to have a subscription based that numbers “more than EverQuest and less than World of Warcraft”. This basically means that he wants more than 600,000 people at least playing the game while not hoping to get to the 11 million that World of Warcraft now boasts.

So, as far as this analyst is concerned, Warhammer simply does not have the power to take on the Blizzard developed MMO. The biggest problem the Mythic created game has, at the moment, is that the second expansion for World of Warcraft is set to be released soon and a lot of players will want to check that one out.