EA's Strangely Biased BioWare Community Figures.

Electronic Arts is just pleased as punch. The company has happily said that the BioWare community is now at four million users! That's more than mainstream social networking websites such as Friendster and Xanga (who?). Apparently those two sites have audiences of one million and two million respectively. Impressive, eh?

Right up until you look at the footnotes, anyway. The stats for Friendster and Xanga, come EA tells us, from "Nielsen Netviews as of May 2008". Independently audited figures. Good good.

The figure for BioWare's community? "According to internal EA tracking as of June 2008". Ah. Kind of makes you question why one is internal while the other two are external. Also kind of makes you wonder how many of those accounts are active...

EA also informs us that the community gets 38,000 new accounts every month.

While we're throwing some statistics around, here's one for a spot of context: MySpace was reported as having 100 million users back in 2006. Here's another: Facebook reports it has 80 million active users. Here's our final statistic for the day: World of Warcraft had 10 million users as of January.

Best not get too excited for now, eh?