Today a couple of record breaking announcements were released by the creators of Guitar Hero III and World of Warcraft. Apparently the sum total of the sales for the entire Guitar Hero franchise have surpassed 1 billion dollars and World of Warcraft has added a 7th zero to it's subscription total which is now listed at 10,000,000!

The break down of WoW subscribers worldwide was also given. Apparently they have 2 million in Europe, 2.5 mill in the U.S. and a whopping 5.5 million users in Asia. They explicitly stated that these are paying customers who send them a monthly fee, not users on their 1 week trial account or people who used to be subscribers but cancelled. The noteworthy caveat is that the majority of the users are in Asia where they don't pay the full $15 montly fee. The9 is the distributer in China and they charge significantly less than we pay here.

Activisions announcement was no less impressive. In 26 months they have sold 14 million units of their game Guitar Hero. According to the NPD group the aggregate of sales for all the various titles in the franchise made it the best selling console game in dollars for the 2007 fiscal year. Activision has also profited hansomly off the guitar peripheral sales and the 5 million songs that were downloaded for the game.

Of course, the two companies this article is about also merged in late 2007 forming the mega-giant Activision Blizzard!