World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria sees 1 million concurrent players in China

It turns out that kung fu pandas are popular in the birth place of both kung fu and pandas.

At its busiest, the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria expansion in China has hosted more than 1 million concurrent players. That’s a huge number for the massively multiplayer online fantasy role-playing game. For comparison, developer ArenaNet boasted that its recently released MMO Guild Wars 2 reached 400,000 concurrent players at one point. Analysts estimated that Star Wars: The Old Republic averaged 350,000 concurrent users at its peak.

This 1 million number represents a spike and not an average, but it’s still impressive and illustrates the potential of the Chinese market.

Blizzard did not provide sales data for the Mists of Pandaria expansion in the Asian country, opting to point out this statistic instead.

Activision Blizzard previously reported it sold 2.7 million copies of Mists of Pandaria everywhere outside of China. At that time, it also noted that subscriptions to the MMO increased from 9.1 million back above 10 million. It’s likely that a great portion of that increase came from Chinese players.