(via Terranova) World of Warcraft has hit 600K subscribers, and 200K concurrent. Let’s see: 600K * 20 bucks a box plus one month at $15 bucks a pop equals… roughly $21 million, give or take. Well on their way to money hats for everyone!

It’s still growing too. Someone at the office here discovered that the game is still selling out here as soon as the boxes show up at a store here in Austin, and last week, even the Blizzard Online Store was sold out. Amazon has a week-long wait. EBWorld has it on back order, with a limit of one per customer. One of my co-workers didn’t even want it, until he couldn’t find it, then he had to have it. Now he’s addicted. Houston, we have a phenomenon.

Someone said that now is a bad time to be in the space – and to be fair, there’s a few games out there taking lumps for this. But now is the time not to panic, but to plan – plan for players to eventually get bored with World of Warcraft’s gameplay and want to go elsewhere. You just need to be sure you have the most compelling gameplay to invite them to when that happens.

Don’t laugh, it’s worked in the past. But again, you’re not going to get there unless you have a Big Idea that can win that mindshare.