In the “money” section of the CNN website has appeared an article with a possible release date of World of Warcraft for November, then December for Korea and January for the Europe.

Is that reliable? It depends, to announce those dates is Phil O’Neil, president of Vivendi, also publisher of Blizzard’s products. If the game is launching for November it means that they still have a lot of time to work on it, that means that the release date is simply a rough guess since nearly everything could change.

It’s interesting the fact that even the publisher is giving out a wide margin. In general the deadlines of publishers are always missed, just think to Half-Life 2, also to be published from Vivendi. But World of Warcraft is a special case, the game is at a good point and a release that distant sounds strange, in particular because the beta is without NDA and will soon turn completely open.

Blizzard is really going to offer and support that for so many months? I’ll quote Anyuzer‘s article:

That said, while it looks like World of Warcraft is going to win this race, there in my opinion is another facet to take into consideration when thinking about World of Warcraft. Assuming that people are looking for a game to play, not a buggy product to beta, this could cause some potential problems. Classically in EverQuest and the subsequent expansions it does not take more than six months for players to burn through all of the content. The only real exception to this that I can remember was Velious, where a few of the major enemies had ‘just’ been beaten by the major guilds before Luclin hit stores. Point is, if World of Warcraft allows this much time for testing, will there be any content for players to actually have fun with by the time the game hits shelves? And will this damage possible player retention?

My personal opinion is that the game will hit the shelves exactly for the end of October, the most “interesting” date to push out a game and maximize the sales, then November for Korea and December for Europe, along with the Christmas.