Blade & Soul launches with 1M players in first week — MMOs are still a $11B yearly market

That didn’t take long.

NCSoft’s Blade & Soul launched six days ago, and already, the publisher says 1 million people have played this massively multiplayer online role-playing game from South Korea. While paid MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft lose subscribers, the free-to-play online model (be they RPGs, strategy games, or shooters) keep finding ways to attract people and make big bucks — either with foreign imports like Blade & Soul, tweaks to existing models (like World of Warships), or just by providing a fun experience (Path of Exile, the online game that’s an evolution of Diablo II).