I found THIS ARTICLE to be interesting indeed. The juicy part of this article is that Blizzard announced that over the last five years it has only cost them $200 million in upkeep. Now at first glance this looks like a lot, but let’s put things into perspective. 5 years is 60 months. World of Warcraft currently has something like 10 million subscribers (I think it’s actually about 12 mil now) paying about $15 a month. (They can pay $1 or $2 less if they pay for multiple months at a time)
So this is about $150 million they are making a month. 150*60=9000. So they’ve made $9 billion dollars from monthly fees alone. So in other words, only about 1% goes to upkeep. Interesting.
Update: Let’s look at something else, shall we? How many subscribers, paying $15 a month, would they need to break even after five years? Well, $200 million divided by the 60 months is about $3, 333, 333.33. Not divide this by $15 (for the monthly fee), and you get 222,222.22 which would round to 222,223 subscribers. They currently have more than 10 million. I’d say they did Ok.
Now let’s look at one final thing. What if they took a method like Guild Wars did and only charged for the main game and expansions. Well, $50*$10 million gives you $500 million. Then you can pretty much double that considering the Burning Crusade expansion pack. Again, looks like they would be Ok. Hmmm…it does seem like the subscription model isn’t necessary.
So I’m sure many of you are wondering, “Why is there a crashed Ferrari here?” The answer is for two reasons! Numero Uno, Castle Crashers is a topic on this particular episode. Numero Dos, is because The Gamer Lounge has gone under a sort of crash, if you will, due to school. Because of this, the last three (I think that’s right) episodes have been only me. However, Larry and I should be recording together again this weekend. As Larry would say, “Woot!” 😀
The Gamer Lounge 