Another "multi-millionaire" this week, after Guild Wars reached 2,000,000 sales a few days ago, is the massive BioWare community - which has grown steadily over the years to a whopping 3,000,000 registered users! Going back in time, it was more than a year and a half ago (in January 2004) when BioWare announced a figure of 1.5 million community accounts. And today it may have been an even higher count, had they continued to develop Neverwinter Nights 2, instead of handing it over to Obsidian. But nevertheless, BioWare continues to do what it does best: role-playing games, of course!

Currently in development are Dragon Age and Jade Empire for the PC, Mass Effect for the Xbox 360, and possibly Jade Empire 2 rumoured on the Xbox 360. While Dragon Age is still being kept under some secrecy, Mass Effect was widely showcased at last month's E3 2006, and even won the "Best Role Playing Game" Game Critics Award (not to mention dozens of recognitions from individual websites).

To celebrate the community's success, BioWare announced The BioWare 3 Million Member Celebration, an event that includes prize giveaways to reward loyal BioWare Community members. The grand prize is an "Ultimate Gaming Setup", consisting of both an extreme PC gaming system and a Xbox 360 Premium bundle, while 2nd and 3rd place winners will each receive an Xbox 360 Premium bundle and an nVidia 7800GTX 512MB video card.

Next up, we're waiting for Blizzard to announce a population of 7,000,000 World of Warcraft players...

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)