World of Warcraft has been one of the most controversial games of the decade, up there with Counter Strike and Grand Theft Auto.

WoW is mostly famous for accentuating the already popular image of gamer nerds, who spend their lives in their parents’ basements, pale because of almost no exposure to the sun, lack of live social interaction and so on so forth. This stereotype, however, applies to fairly few WoW players.

Sure, you may become addicted to a game to the same extent one can get addicted to a book. Few are those who take their obsession further, but those few are, of course, those who are shown on the news for forgetting to eat for a week because they just had to get to the next level. Strangely, I have trouble remembering when actual gamers were asked to join special reports about games on, say, Fox News – except, of course, so-called “expert” Jack Thompson.

The MMOG released by Blizzard increases in popularity with every single negative review – it goes to show just how much parents care about what they’re buying for their children and how much more important being on the news complaining about what you bought is. The last statistic shows that the WoW subscriber base has now reached a whopping 11 million – more than the population of Greece.

These subscribers come from North America, Europe, China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Russia and Latin America.

The subscriber total excludes those who play under “free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards.” It makes you wonder about the total number of people playing WoW – 20 million? Why not?