WoW Invades Newspapers

While detailing her addiction to Blizzard's World of Warcraft, Caitlin Moran of popular UK newspaper The Times also announced the latest bit of promotion for the ultra successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Saturday's edition of The Times will include "a free trial version of World of Warcraft, plus an eight-page game guide," her column states. Such a far-reaching, and relatively demographic-agnostic method of distribution is extraordinarily uncommon for video games, demonstrating World of Warcraft's uncommon level of success in achieving greater relevance among broad mainstream audiences than do most successful games. Presumably, the edition of World of Warcraft offered in The Times will feature 14 days of gameplay, much like the inexpensive trial version currently available at many game stores. Blizzard also provides a free ten day downloadable trial through the World of Warcraft web site, and additional months of play cost between GBP 7.70-9.00 ($13-$15 in the US) depending on the length of the subscription plan. Earlier this month, Blizzard revealed that World of Warcraft has a subscriber base of more than 8.5 million people, over 3.5 million of whom have purchased The Burning Crusade expansion pack released in January. In related news, a recent financial report from game retailer GameStop cited "brisk" World of Warcraft sales as one of the chief reasons behind the 26.5% sales increase experienced by the company in the fourth quarter of 2006.