I know we're pushing it here, what with two consecutive stories on Blizzard's MMORPG and everything. But then again, they more than deserve it - now that World of Warcraft's population has passed the 8 million subscribers mark! They hit the previous milestone (7.5 million) a couple of months ago, but after the Dark Portal opens up in a couple of days, I wouldn't be surprised if the subscribers count would register a sudden boom of one or even two million new players. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, and see what Blizzard has to say about this accomplishment:

"We're ecstatic that the World of Warcraft community has continued to grow steadily since we launched the game," said Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "This milestone wouldn't have been possible for us to achieve without the incredible support of our players. With the release of our expansion pack, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, coming next week, we're looking forward to welcoming more players to Azeroth and offering even more quality content for our community to enjoy."

Aside from surpassing 8 million accounts (and arguably players) worldwide, World of Warcraft has also achieved new regional subscriber milestones - with more than 2 million players in North America, more than 1.5 million players in Europe, and more than 3.5 million players in China. Plus another million or so spread throughout the other territories, including Australia.

Some brief details about the contents of The Burning Crusade expansion pack are included in today's announcement, if you somehow didn't know them by now, but what I'm most curious about is the new game servers that will - hopefully - go online on January 16. Get ready for some serious queues and innevitable lag... but if you at least manage to register a few favorite character names before everyone else, it should be worth the wait.

P.S. The WoW Model Viewer was recently updated and is now able to read content from the game's 2.0 version, so it should work with The Burning Crusade as well.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)