AUG. 6, 2008 • World of Warcraft launches in Russia. The game is available with a fully localized version of the MMO, playable on Russian servers, and supported by a Russian-language customer service staff.

Impact: WoW had been localized for English, French, German and Spanish.  Other Europeans have been forced to choose one of those languages when playing WoW.  The fact that Blizzard picked the difficult task of localizing in Russian, before say Italian, shows the potential untapped growth of that market.  Russia is a country that has a fairly strong interest in PC games.  The subscription price is 359 rubles a month, which is roughly the equivalent of $15.