PC gamer sales are currently having a resurgence in the U.S., and one of the reasons behind it is the steadily growing popularity of MMORPGS. In particular, Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

New York Times reports that according to an analyst from the NPD Group, U.S. retailers sold US$ 203 million worth of PC games in the first two months of 2007. NPD's Anita Frazier said that sales in the same period last year peaked at US$ 136.8 million.

According to Frazier, sales of RPG titles were 43 percent higher than in the first two months of 2006, and the release of The Burning Crusade in January is likely to have accounted for a great deal of these sales. "The robust performance we're seeing in PC game sales can be tied to several key titles across several genres," said Frazier. "But we'd be remiss not to address the continued success of World of Warcraft."

The New York Times recently decided to state something patently obvious to many gamers. In a nutshell, WoW rules the world, both in an economic and a personal sense.

It's been less than two years and World of Warcraft really has taken over many gamers' lives, affecting them in different ways. While this article does happen to gloss over the seedy underworld of farming and addiction that occurs with games, it does a good job of representing video games in a positive light on a very mainstream (perhaps we can even say "uptight") news medium.

One of the main ways WoW affects people, according to this article, is opening up a venue for socialization that couldn't normally exist. For instance, Jason Pinsky is a dedicated player clocking in around 3000 hours on his hunter character. He says of playing WoW,

I’m a 33-year-old guy with a 9-to-5 job, a wife and a baby on the way. I can’t be going out all the time. So what opportunities do I have to not only meet people and make new friends but actually spend time with them on a nightly basis? In WOW I’ve made, like, 50 new friends, some of whom I’ve hung out with in person, and they are of all ages and from all over the place. You don’t get that sitting on the couch watching TV every night like most people.

Very true.

At the same time, the only way WoW gets its broad base of fans is by appealing to both hardcore and casual gaming. Take Kim Daejoong, a Korean doctor of herbal medicine and also a WoW gamer. He mentions that for a game to appeal to even the mainstream, "it has to be easily accessible, and there have to be lots of things for you to do, even alone. What WoW has done better than other games is be able to appeal to both audiences — hard-core players and more casual players — all within one game and bring them together."

If the New York Times is putting out articles to get the word out on World of Warcraft, then the doctor's proposition couldn't be more true. Perhaps it'll even be more pronounced once the Burning Crusade expansion comes out, don't you think?