World of Warcraft's astounding numbers

by Ben Silverman

With about 12 million subscribers, chart-topping sales and enough pop culture cred to warrant both an Emmy-winning turn in South Park and shout-outs from William Shatner and Ozzy Osbourne, we knew World of Warcraft was big.

But during a game conference in Austin covered by Gamasutra, the game's developers dropped some stats that make it out to be, well, really, really big.

To operate a game as massive as Warcraft, Blizzard employs over 4,600 staffers and uses 20,000 computer systems, 75,000 CPU cores and a staggering 1.3 petabytes (that's over 1 billion MBs) of storage. And you thought your 32 GB iPhone was cool.

The game itself, when viewed from The Matrix, would take up about 5.5 million lines of code, made even safer by the fact that the QA crew has flattened over 180,000 bugs If you were actually wandering around in Azeroth, you could find over 1.5 million art assets, from wall torches to wheels of cheese, and would have the opportunity to chat up 40,000 NPCs (non-player characters). They could then dole out 7,650 quests, which you could complete using a handful of the game's 70,000 spells.

The craziest stat of all? In the five years since World of Warcraft launched, players have earned a McDonald's-threatening 4,449,680,399 in-game rewards.

Man, that's a lot of loot.