World of Warcraft Has 2,000 Customer Service Reps

In a story about the merger of Activision and Vivendi Games for an agreed $18.8bn, the Telegraph reveals the number of folk who’s job it is to help confused orcs and goblins who want to play World of Warcarft.

[Screen Digest analyst Piers Harding-Rolls said:] “With console games the risk is huge. In the online space you can make it free to play but have advertising. You can have subscriptions for the massive multiplayer online games. You can have incremental sales of virtual items. There’s lots of different opportunities to elongate the shelf life of the product. That’s the driving force.”

Blizzard is rumoured to be developing another massive multiplayer online game to follow on from World of Warcraft. Mr Harding-Rolls said: “There’s a suggestion World of Warcraft may have peaked. Blizzard has got over 2,000 people doing customer relations across the globe. They’ve got that huge infrastructure of staff and servers. All that, you feel, needs to be translated to a new title as the other one slows down.”

World of Warcraft joins forces with Guitar Hero – Telegraph

On the WoW note… has anyone seen Schatner in the new TV commercials for the game?