Raph has chimed in on the problems with comparing MMO populations to each other. It’s excellent, and touches (and improves upon) many things I was thinking about posting, so I’ll just thank him for saving my time.

Incidentally, this was all instigated by Sir Bruce’s latest update, and a stray comment on Slashdot that this chart shows WoW has surpassed 50% market dominance worldwide. And even though there’s a lot of reasons to doubt the accuracy of the numbers (for reasons detailed in Raph’s post, which Bruce freely admits in the Slashdot thread), it’s pretty staggering to be close enough to be able to have that conversation at all.