Uploaded February 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Let me throw a couple of numbers at you real quick. Ten and ten million. Taken on their own, they don’t tell you all that much. When you apply them to World of Warcraft, well, they can straight up blow your fucking mind. Ten years and ten million players are what we’re referring to here. World of Warcraft’s latest expansion has brought its subscriber base back up above the ten million mark. To illustrate just how batshit insane this is, let’s have a quick look at what was happening when this game first launched in 2004. George W. Bush was still in his first term. Facebook was still a dinky little nonentity that nobody outside of Harvard knew about. Smartphones weren’t a thing yet. A tsunami annihilated huge swaths of Southeast Asia. Massachusetts was the only state that had legalized gay marriage. Hell, some of you reading this were probably still in car seats. Personally, I was just finishing up college. I was supposed to graduate in 2003 but I, uh, didn’t. I was on what we politely refer to as the “extended plan.” Less politely we refer to it as “I’m too busy drinking, partying and playing video games to take any of this crap seriously because I’m an idiot.” For the record, I don’t really recommend doing things that way. But I digress. I started playing World of Warcraft right after it launched, and I’ve never really stopped. I’ve taken a couple of big breaks, even thought I was done with it once or twice. I always end up coming back to it. Is it an addiction? Maybe at one point, it was. Nowadays it’s a part of my larger gaming hobby, but it’s an important one and not just because it’s still a fantastic game. Warcraft has been with me for 10 years. In that time I met, fell in love with, and married an incredible woman, become the father of two beautiful little girls, bought my first home, and somehow forged a pretty successful career for myself. Basically in the time I’ve been playing World of Warcraft, a whole era of my life has come and gone and I’ve somehow become a (gulp) adult. Ick, I feel gross just typing that.
Let me throw a couple of numbers at you real quick. Ten and ten million. Taken on their own, they don’t tell you all that much. When you apply them to World of Warcraft, well, they can straight up blow your fucking mind. Ten years and ten million players are what we’re referring to here. World of Warcraft’s latest expansion has brought its subscriber base back up above the ten million mark. To illustrate just how batshit insane this is, let’s have a quick look at what was happening when this game first launched in 2004. George W. Bush was still in his first term. Facebook was still a dinky little nonentity that nobody outside of Harvard knew about. Smartphones weren’t a thing yet. A tsunami annihilated huge swaths of Southeast Asia. Massachusetts was the only state that had legalized gay marriage. Hell, some of you reading this were probably still in car seats. Personally, I was just finishing up college. I was supposed to graduate in 2003 but I, uh, didn’t. I was on what we politely refer to as the “extended plan.” Less politely we refer to it as “I’m too busy drinking, partying and playing video games to take any of this crap seriously because I’m an idiot.” For the record, I don’t really recommend doing things that way. But I digress. I started playing World of Warcraft right after it launched, and I’ve never really stopped. I’ve taken a couple of big breaks, even thought I was done with it once or twice. I always end up coming back to it. Is it an addiction? Maybe at one point, it was. Nowadays it’s a part of my larger gaming hobby, but it’s an important one and not just because it’s still a fantastic game. Warcraft has been with me for 10 years. In that time I met, fell in love with, and married an incredible woman, become the father of two beautiful little girls, bought my first home, and somehow forged a pretty successful career for myself. Basically in the time I’ve been playing World of Warcraft, a whole era of my life has come and gone and I’ve somehow become a (gulp) adult. Ick, I feel gross just typing that.
