How much blizzard make a month/year from World of Warcraft

Gustov said:
So getting a figure is going to be impossible?
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If you can't get a hold on figures from Blizzard, then yes. There is an absolutely huge part of the WoW subscription base that is located in Asia, that is why they have so many more players than the European games. Look at games like Lineage etc and look at their subscription counts, there are a lot more MMORPG players in that region.

However they don't go by traditional subscription models, often they pay at their local gaming shop for a few days, go to an internet place to play and pay there, or pay extremely low monthly rates. Also in some of the countries they are subject to extreme governmental oversight, so it's a much more complicated business, and probably more costly to run than here.

Also bandwidth isn't exactly free. So really you're not going to be able to calculate a correct figure the way that you're trying to.
 
The Data centres taht hold the wow servers are massive. They have massive bandwidth.

People say the servers can be cheap. But no blizzard will get decent servers for relaibilty. IIRC the eu wow datacenter had a server farm of over 100 IBM servers. Your looking at 2k a server. So 200,000k on servers, They would have to have, masses of back up devices, back up power options. Switches. Prob have a 100gb incomming link - if nott 2/3 of them.

This soon all adds up, then you need to look at all of the GMs, they are on about 18k a year. Developers, technical staff, coders, graphics staff, thats all without the administration team behind them all..

There total revenue might be high but there profit wont' be , IIRC its like only a few million.
 
Personally if I was doing an essay on the profitability of a public company the first place I would go would be their accounts and see what information they have in there. A product as large as WoW will more than likely have its own section.
 
lol, servers are cheap because people running illegal ones have them on crap machines? A very silly statement.

The difference in price you need to pay for a few people to run around on a cheap server with very little reliability, in a random datacentre on some rack where if something went wrong you'd need to phone them up and hope they can fix it within weeks, and running a professional, expensive, reliable server in your own data centre are two very very very different things. You're also forgetting the amount of power needed to host tens, or hundreds of illegal players together shockingly won't be the same amount required for 10's of thousands of people all playing together at the same time.

While I'm not sure its a hugely costly thing for them to provide in terms of total profit being eaten away, its still significant.

Remember they have to have countless backup servers ready to go at a moments notice, infact most likely have the equipment for each to have a back up machine ready to turn on instantly. Several games like these are spread across several servers to spread the load. AFAIK Lotro game world is split up onto several severs so as you move, although its a continuous world and everything talks to each other at different locations your recieving and sending info to a different server, not sure if WoW would be like that aswell or not.

Then you've got back up to the back ups for testing out every patch, beta servers, etc, bandwidth costs, wages for a lot of employee's, from programmers, boss's, distribution, PR, R&D, tech centre guys. It all adds up to rather a lot, and rather a lot of a figure significantly less than the 11million x expensive uk monthly subs.

I suspect many countries pay much less anyway, and most long term players buy long term plans again at a saving. A huge portion of that 11million are essentially not coming anywhere near close to paying a monthly subscription and in reality, several hundred people can be sharing basically the same subscription in some online cafe in China/asia where the majority of the players seem to be.


Now, I didn't read to carefully all told I'll admit, and I'm shattered for some reason but that Blizzard info seems to say they've had a net income of around a -$36 million for the previous 9 months up to September. Now, that can mean lots of things, high developements costs pre WOTLK release, the merger, etc, etc, etc. But one great product, or 10 profitable products doesn't necessarily mean a hugely profitable company.
 
it makes them over $80m USD per month from subscriber revenue. the game itself cost about $80-85m to develop and they made about $200m on selling the game itself (not including addon's i believe).

I read that in an article only a few weeks ago but it's buried in my bookmarks and i cant find it so i cant remember the source.
Either way, simply doing 11m x $15 is not going to give you accurate numbers.
 
arknor said:
doubtful they arent serpeate servers ,one server runs multiple versions of the games server side software and they dont need to be very high spec as shown from people who host illegal wow servers on not very good computers
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Seriously, it does cost a lot to maintain and purchase the servers.

Think of 11,000,000 people, most of them probably log in every day.

They probably have multiple servers for every realm, maybe even an entire rack (depending on the population, the power of the computers etc.). There are a lot of different servers that can be played on.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/ - 1, if not more servers per realm, and that's just server costs. Internet connection costs would be pretty expensive as well.

The WoW server emulators don't show the real load that's put on their servers. It is, after all, an emulator and probably nothing like the actual servers.
 
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