World of Warcraft has yet again given Vivendi Games a very nice boost. A million more subscribers have joined the popular MMO since December 31 of last year, helping to drive revenues north.

Media conglomerate Vivendi has announced its financial results today for the third quarter and nine months ended September 30, and unsurprisingly World of Warcraft continues to have a major impact on the bottom line for the games division. Vivendi Games' revenues climbed 49.8 percent to 716 million euros ($1.05 billion) for the nine-month period. During Q3, the games division posted net revenues of 216 million euros ($316.7 million), representing a 19 percent increase.

"This strong increase is primarily driven by the continued momentum of Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft, its award-winning subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and the very successful first quarter 2007 release of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Blizzard Entertainment's first World of Warcraft expansion. The Chinese version was released late in the third quarter," Vivendi said.

Overall World of Warcraft's subscriber base has increased to more than 9.3 million gamers worldwide, which is up more than one million subscribers since December 31, 2006.

The company added that recent revenues "also included initial sales of the highly rated action-strategy game World in Conflict from Sierra Entertainment, developed by their internal studio Massive Entertainment and released in the third quarter."

Vivendi as a whole also did quite well in the third quarter, posting net revenues of 5.42 billion euros (up 10.9 percent).