Blizzard in Korea

Battle.net - big in Korea. That's the word from Blizzard, touting its online gaming site Blizzard.net as "the world's largest Internet playing venture." The number of active users on the site has grown to 2.1 million, Blizzard said, and since the beginning of the year, usage has increased by 50 percent.

Blizzard says that on a recent weekend, more than 675,000 games of Starcraft: Brood War were logged on the site; close to 500,000 gamers spent more than two million hours playing online that weekend. More than 4.7 million games have been played over Battle.net since Brood War was released in December.

Much of that popularity can be traced to Battle.net's introduction to Korea. More than 400,000 Starcraft matches originating from Korea are played daily on the site. Battle.net in Korea has grown by approximately 2,000 percent in the last six months, Blizzard says, rising from 15,000 game hours per day to 300,000. And Korea is now the biggest market for the site, having overtaken usage recorded in the United States.