Every day there are predictions made about games; will they be huge hits, will they flop? Some people actually make a living from predicting these things, so you would have thought that when it comes to something like WoW, they should have had a pretty good idea of how successful it was going to be, right?

Wrong. CVG have written an article about some of the more famous goofs made by analists, including one regarding WoW. Back in 2005, after World of Warcraft had earned itself 3 million subscribers, Michael Patcher made a claim in the New York Times that WoW was merely a fad, and that the number of subscribers was sure to drop back down to 1 million, rather than exceeding 4 million:

"I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month," "World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it's the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers."

check out http://www.gmbar.com/wownews/w owprediction.php