While this site is still alive I report this (and just because I lost an earlier message where he was betting with Haemish that WoW wouldn’t reach the 400k mark):

Lum:
I’d be very surprised if even World of Warcraft gets 500k.

Blizzard:
This holiday season, demand for World of Warcraft was so great that more than 600,000 copies of the game were purchased by customers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. With so many copies of World of Warcraft installed, the game went on to shatter all previous concurrency records in North America, achieving over 200,000 simultaneous players during the holiday period.

(bold in text is original)

Linkage. And this is just North America release. Let’s see what will happen when the game will really launch worldwide.

For reference below I’ll report the whole message Lum wrote that is interesting for other reasons:

…except that MMOs are niche products by definition.

The “casual player” or “mainstream player” so far has not paid a monthly fee for online content. Now, you can argue whether or not this has because no for-pay MMO has been created that can appeal to the “mainstream player”, but the point is that to date the most successful MMOs still appeal in the main to a very hardcore niche who have adopted that product as one of their primary forms of online entertainment.

Now, you can create a very profitable base from that (just ask SOE, or heck, the people I work for), and that would disprove that companies cannot successfully manage niche products. I would also argue that Mythic’s success disproves fairly strongly that PVP-oriented products automatically fail in the marketplace.

I have said, and I will keep saying until I’m disproven, that the most successful MMO launches in the near future are those that keep a sense of scale. 500,000 users is not going to happen. I’d be very surprised if even World of Warcraft gets 500k. 50,000 users may happen. If you can create a successful online service infrastructure budgeted around retaining 50,000+ users, you have just created a successful company that is in an excellent position to further leverage that infrastructure against future games.

—

DAOC launched with a budget assuming a userbase of 50k. Obviously we were pleasantly surprised to do better, but our initial staffing levels assumed 50k users. (Not coincidentally, our CS was completely overwhelmed until we were able to hire and train more.) We had a total staff including CS of I believe 50 at that point, half of which were developers.