am i the only one very alarmed by these numbers?

More WoW players means more players ready for a good PvP MMORPG when it comes out. There are probably hundreads of thousands if not millions of WoW burnouts waiting for another MMORPG, that perhaps is less exploitative of the treadmill humans will walk for a treat.

bigger WoW playerbase means newer MMOs will have a bigger pressure to create an MMO that will cater to the hungry burnout minds of those that have seen WoW as their first and only MMO. i don't want to argue how WoW is the bane of the MMO market, but if developers will strive to achieve what WoW has, (i.e providing easy and short term satisfaction, followed by more of the same in different colours), then the MMO market will stagnate with ideas that have been rinsed and reused until there is no fun left in them whatsoever.
this is what has happened to the gaming market on the whole over the last decade. big companies create games based on concepts that have proved profitable in the past, thus creating games that are the same in gameplay as the ones before them, and that becomes very repetative very quickly, but they still sell well to the masses. and smaller companies have an even bigger pressure, because of a smaller budget and the risk that the game won't sell and the company will be forced to sell out. up to now, the MMO market was excluded from this trend, and most MMOs strived to be unique with new concepts that no one has tried before. WoW is threatening to change that.

Sigoya:
It's alarming if WoW is eating away from other MMO populations, but my hope is that the general MMO population is growing vertically AND horizontally.

do you know of a site that tracks this growth? i used to look at mmogchart.com, but they haven't updated since last year.