f13.net

How Much Money Blizzard is Really Making from 10 Million Subscribers

lifted from some gaming site (http://www.playfuls.com)


There's more in the article. Interesting read, no?

People in China and Korea (the bulk of those subscribers) aren't paying shit. Last I heard at least.

On a sidenote, that MS datacenter is being built in my hometown... I should get a job there methinks. The breakroom is like the foodcourt of an old shopping mall.

No.

Newsflash:  Blizzard/Vivendi makes a shitpile of cash, probably more than anyone else in the MMO industry.  Film at 11.

Do I ever! That was hot hot HOT!

(http://www.helitroop.ee/img/2012610c46f8bb6162be621dfed304b1.jpg)

According to the info put out during the Activision / Vivendi merger, WoW has an annual revenue of $1.1 billion dollars and an operating profit of $520 million.

A separate data source indicates that Chinese players pay 6c an hour to play WoW.

I can't be bothered finding links right now. Regardless: WoW is the most profitable game ever.

520 million profit, as in pure money hat profits?


damn.  :grin:

With that kind of money, I wonder why WoW doesn't have every features ever developed in a mmo : naval battle, mounted combat, HUGE siege system, 12 more class, 10x time more complex economy.  It would cost them what, 30 millions more? 60 millions?  I'd be playing with all this. They have the mean to REALLY be the final game.  That's it.  Game over.

But the next expansion has what, one new class and more raid???

Why mess with success?  Throwing in 18 more huge things could send you into a deathspiral just as easily as it increases your share.  WoW is aging, remember- a few screwups and people will head to the Next Big Thing. 

No it's not. They didn't do even the most basic research.

These money would buy a idiot on an gaming site a educations.

Which is what, exactly?

I can't see anything in the next couple of years as being the Next Big Thing.

Age of Conan? 
Nah.  See TSW.

The Secret World? 
Newp.  Looks cool, but niche-y (nichy?).  And given the current moneysink that is Age of Conan and FunComs slowly declining stock value, I'll be very surprised if this ever sees the light of day.

Stargate Worlds? 
No.  Nichy, sci fi.

The Agency? 
Nyet.  Is it really an MMO?

38 Studios Unnamed MMO that won't be out for 3+ years?
Possibly.  By then, maybe, just because WoW will be 6 or 7 years old.

WAR?
Doubtful.  Why play a cheap imitation when you can play the real thing (WoW)?

Lum's STILL secret MMO?
Who knows?  There's not even a smidgeon of info about what it is or what it's about.

Spacetime Studios Blackstar?
No.  It just got cancelled by NCSoft, killing my inner fanboi hopes and turning me into disgusted MMO cynic.  IF it sees the light of day, it has all the indications of being EvE with ground combat.

PotBS?
No.  Nichy.  Decent launch, EvE with ships. 

Only Next Big Thing I can think of is Blizzards next MMO.   All that will happen is all those millions of WoW subscribers will become Blizzards next MMO subscribers.  Money still goes into the same place.  Bonus points if Blizzard offers some sort of Station pass copy.

The next couple of years have great potential to be really really shitty for MMOs.
I'd love for someone to try and convince me otherwise.

I still think War has a shot.  Not to overtake WoW, but I can see a world where War has 2 or 3 mil and WoW plateaus/loses a couple million. 

World of Warcraft is to videogames in the same way Titanic is to movies.

Shallow, filthy, polished crap for mouthbreathers that made an absolute shit ton of cash.

Hey, Billy Zane was damn good in Titanic.

And supposedly Battlegrounds are good in WoW, but I'm not gonna waste my life getting to them and being able to compete.

RMT to the rescue. It would probably cost you less than all your exploding 360s.

Who told you that vicious lie? (Battle grounds are good).

I see what you did there.

When I have to pay to replace one of my 360s, I'll start playing WoW again.

I'll pick up right where I left off. With a level 70 pally.

I agree with Triforcer. Adding every new feature under the sun could be counter-productive.

In engineering as staff size increases efficiency decreases. They could probably double the staff and only see a net 20-30% increase in productivity, along with more bugs. Adding a whole bunch of new features that take more engineering isn't a good idea.

They could add a lot more content though, that sort of thing tends to scale better.

I thought you sold it. (?)

Nope, still in the pile. Burning Crusade is still sealed. Protip: I never had a level 70 pally. (http://www.gamerdiaries.com/games/pc/)

Either way, Battlegrounds are fun! You should change your moniker from Mr. Fahrenheit to Mr. Curmudgeon.

If I come back to WoW, I'll name my toon Curmudgeon just for you.

But before I do that, I've got to go find a third/fourth run 99cent theater to see Titanic again, just so I can put another dollar into THAT bucket.

People in Korea pay more than you do, actually.

Because Blizzard apparently are smart enough to realize that you can't solve problems just by throwing money at them.

It would be so tempting, like devil at the crossroads tempting, to kitchen sink WoW. But the creeping features would bloat it and sink one of the very things that makes it so successful. It's simplicity and ease of play.

IMHO anywho.

*Edit*

Jesus, Schild. You crusty old fuck.

*Edit for great justice*

So do we have any fucking clue how much Blizzard takes from the asian market? I've heard they pay less, they pay more, they pay in chickens... are there even any questionable numbers to point at?

(http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1127055/000095012306007628/y22210y22210z0014.gif)

WoW had a huge budget, good business model, good game philosophy, plenty of dev power and all the time they required.  Not sure who out there will match that let alone have the Blizzard name and market presence and catch lightning in a bottle like WoW was able to do. 

So yeah they make a shitload of cash. 

They did not have all the time they required.

Meaning what, it was rushed out the door?

And the newb opens with a chart.

Bra. Vo.

That said, Titanic was better than WoW. At least that had Kate Winslet's hooters out for display.

I used to work at AT&T. At EQ1's peak (right before Luclin came out) I looked up Sony Online Entertainment, and their bill was about $60k/month for their data lines. A bunch of Hicap Flex lines. They would get burst charges when a patch came out. So I don't think bandwidth is a signifigant cost to an mmo.

It's gotta be hundreds of thousands in bandwidth per month at least for 10 mil users.  I think just 1 OC48 is a couple hundred thousand  a month.  We have major clients with 4 OC12's split among 2 datacenters for redundancy, they probably run 50k a month each or so.

Anyone know what Bliz or any major MMO uses for bandwidth?




 

But WoW has low resolution elf tits in full 3d.  :drill:

as for spending the income on WoW development: why bother when they're working on next MMOs to take over.

Bit Torrent for patch still makes me mad .

Yup, it had to be released in time for the Holiday shopping season of 2004. From the Open Beta you could tell they were rushing to add things in at the very last minute like the Hunter talents and they didn't bother to fix a number of major bugs.

Yeah, Hunters got raped at release.

Pets were a joke.  They only just got most of the planned Pet Talents in LAST year...

It's barely anything. The bill I was seeing was for ALL of SOE. ALL their games at the time, all their websites. They didn't have anything as big as an OC12. Remember, the client will run on a 56k connection. With the cost of hardware so low these days, that subscription fee is just money in the bank for them.

They don't pay for the bandwidth in the territories were WoW is run by operators (e.g. The9 in China). So that basically leaves NA, Europe and Korea. We'll say that's 5 million subscribers rounding up. For peak concurrent users we'll estimate 800K which is probably a little on the high side but that is the number in China which also has about 5 million active players per month. Let's say the average bandwidth usage is 8 KB/s. When I played I never bother to measure the bandwidth usage but from other MMORPGs that's somewhat on the high-side (EQ was lower than that as was CoH before they broke something a year ago). This is not peak raid bandwidth or what you would get in Lagforge. 8 KB/s * 800K = 48 Gb/s (changing from bytes to bits).

EQ had an order of magnitude fewer players in NA and Europe *and* they didn't have any offical forums back then.

My conversations with the team of OGSi, inc at the Austin Conference leads me to believe that MMO bandwidth hosting, especially if you're not renting your servers is not nearly as much as one would think.

I'd be more specific but...well you know.  :oh_i_see:

Actually they did have official forums... I remember post the exact same figures there when I looked them up. lol

And how many people are playing are playing on OGSi servers?

Name me a better diku-derived MMOG.


As for the money thing and why Blizzard isn't rolling it all back into WoW, let me sugggest a possible explanation: Blizzard are a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivendi. Guess where the money goes?

That wasn't the point, jackass.

Diku is synonymous with bad game design anyway these days.

Smartest kid in the retard class and all that.

Just like Titanic.

I don't remember them having official forums but even if they did all the interesting posts were in the various class-specific forums so they would've gotten a fraction of a fraction of the Web traffic that Blizzard gets with the WoW forums.

No. What?  :grin:

Even if their bandwidth is a million dollars per month, it's chump change to Blizzard.  What are we arguing about again?

IT WAS THE SHIP OF DREAMS, YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD!

(http://www.partyusa.com/images/titanic4.jpg)

Hundreds of thousands at the very least if not millions. They guided me through the decisions to be made, the different hardware options and rental rates, the speeds achievable...etc. Im not an expert on all their clients nor would I hold myself out to be their representative...but if the thrust of your comment is to gauge their credibility...they know what they're talking about.

Titanic was just an excuse for James Cameron to test out his underwater cameras and inspect wreckage. Am I the only one who hasn't seen Titanic yet?

I would disagree with this statement, but then again I wouldn't bother since this is F13 and you're a rhino fucker.  :awesome_for_real:

Probably. It's got Kate Winslet's boobies, and a guy falling into one of the huge propellors as the ship goes down. *tonk!* I call him "propellor guy".

The thing about Titanic that gets to me is that it's apparently the movie where Cameron got all soft and weak in his old age. Terminator... Aliens... Titanic?  :uhrr: Although Abyss was a real hint at his hippy-nougat center.

I disagree with what you said.

Not unless you're stupid. I presume that Blizzard didn't stick their servers in the middle of some Kansas cornfield for a reason.

Interestingly enough, I really prefer when a game DOESN'T have official forums. I rather like community run sites better. When there is an official forum, everyone uses it... and doesn't go elsewhere... then the developer starts stifling speech when their PR isn't doing too well. Trolls are one thing, but if someone posts "Our subscription rates are too high!" it's going to get locked, and that's a legitimate gripe imo. On a community run site, the community can get together and argue about issues like without worry that admins are deleting threads in th middle of the night.

Thats silly.

Official forums keep the people I don't want to talk with in one spot, then I goto all the normal forums I usually read and discuss the game there.

Perspective.  I would wager a large amount that the amount of Bandwidth used by Blizzard in a month is no where near the bandwidth used by say, youtube and youtube probably isn't within an order of magnitude as profitable as WoW.

Whatever WoWs bandwidth bill is it's certainly not breaking their bank.

Not that it matters much, but did we forget some costs of doing business? I'm not sure how the revenue gets spread around, but (of course that article snippet didn't mention it) there are salaries to pay. In addition to those salaries, each employee who has benefits has to have those paid for to some extent by the company, also if they offer retirement matching. Oh, and then there the cost of capital, you know, like computers for the designers and developers to make the fucking game on, and then there would be all the hardware for testing the game for the quality assurance team. And programmers, and then layers of management (project managers are not cheap and I don't care how "mature" a game is, the projects do not cease to be new every time they are started), and the list goes on depending on what kind of perks Blizzard gives to their employees. So that's just a small cut of things. That's not talking about building leases/maintenance, datacenters, bandwidth (which very well may their smallest expense, but we have no hard data to prove that), marketing (those television ads cost money for the airtime and in the time slots I've seen them, that is not "drop in the bucket" time), etc.

So yes, Blizzard is not "hurting" for money, but as the enterprise scales up to support that many customers, so too do the costs associated with doing business. And remember, there is always the point of diminishing returns to worry about. What happens if the subscriber rate pushes past that? Blizzard does not technically have control over how many people can ultimately subscribe to the game at the same time and thereby do not have full control over their revenue stream. At least with a tangible product, the company can control the distribution (for example, see Wii). Yada yada yada.

You're mistaken.  The Blizzard developers who work on WoW do so out of love, waive their salaries and work for free.

I like the success of Titanic just because it was so surprising.  I mean we've got a schmaltzy period romance being directed by the fucking Terminator guy, and the budget balloons to the largest in the history of movies up to that point.  Then it has a pathetic opening weekend gross of like thirty million.  People have to have been getting ready to kill themselves in despair.

A billion weeks of teenage girls buying tickets later, and it's the biggest movie in history.

As to the question of my Blizzard doesn't plow a nice chunk of that $520M operating profit into new features, there are a few reasons:

1) Companies want to grow. If they earn $1 or $100M in one year, they want to earn more the next year.
2) Companies don't want to break a good thing. This tendency is what usually gives competitors a chance.
3) They are re-investing the money - in projects as yet unannounced.

Damn you beat me to it.

Plowing all that money back into WoW wouldn't yield near as much ROI as other projects, and any Blizzard release at this point is as close to a sure thing in the industry sales-wise as you can get.

In other words you (or they) are just making up numbers. It's very odd that they have absolutely no MMO references on their Web site. The only significant game I know they are hosting is HG:L but given the extreme nature of instancing in that game I would expect the bandwidth requirements to be exceptionally low for that game.

WoW Pushes 2007 Vivendi Sales To $1.51 Billion
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17178 (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17178)

You're not alone.

I meant to watch it once but I fell asleep.

The short answer is that Blizzard makes 40% margin on their $1.02bn in sales revenue. That's a straight $540mil. We don't know if that 40% is the same in all territories, so unless we get a full annual report breakdown by territory, all I think we can really say is that due to how they report the numbers, they made half a billion dollars.

Anyone is free to chime in and point out what Blizzard is doing wrong :-)

Primary reason?  Vivendi has share holders and they like money.

The net income figure is a funny number unless you have the divisions breakdown as to what made up that number you can assume, the unmentioned MMO is already accounted as is infrastructure and how every they decided to amortize their development costs.  My guess is WoWs cashflow is probably north of 600M but who really cares besides management at Blizz?  I know I don't I would probably care more if I owned Vivendi stock but then I'd ask them to just cut out their loss leader divisions and pump out some good dividends for me.  That's probably why I don't work at or for Vivendi :)

My google-fu is weak. How much did wow cost to make again? Found it. (http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/13/what-wow-cost/) $50 Mil

Assuming 50 Millions is roughly accurate, Blizz Vivendi could be funding TEN new WOW scale games EVERY year. Crazy.

So one must ask, where IS all that money going?

edit: I suppose the answer is probably the same as with most companies. Shareholders like money and Executives like expensive toys.

To pay for all the crappy games the other divisions of Vivendi Games lose money on?

Didn't watch it...Never knew why I'd want to watch a romance movie. It was marketed as one

To buy a major publisher that actually knows how to make money off single player games?

If it's true, this is the most interesting information in this whole thread.

Not because of the $1.1 billion revenue. But because it implies they're spending $600 million per annum. For far freaking out, that's a lot of money.

Maybe they're using a big chunk of that money to research and develop projects for other facets of media besides games. The WoW movie comes up every now and then. That would be a pretty large syphon for cash.

The Wow Franchise is much much bigger than simply the game.

Can't this thread just be simply answered as "a lot" and put to bed?

Then what would we talk about? The quote button is really shiny. I like pressing it.

CG cut-scenes for Starcraft II.

How niche MMOs are really honestly a success if they can break even, of course.

SWG?

I really should have linked the original text (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16458). I forgot that the figures above are projected calendar 2007 figures. As tasmia points out (side note: that's two good links from two posts, but you are allowed to say something yourself) the final figures are a little higher.

Blizzard / Vivendi is probably spending that profit in a number of different ways, but ultimately what it buys Blizzard is independence. They can turn around to Vivendi (and probably have) and gone, "Our next MMO will cost $110m to develop. At least. It'll be ready when it's ready. Starcraft 2 will get a healthy budget too. And we might want to buy out some companies... we'll let you know." And Vivendi will take it, because Blizzard is paying the executive bonuses.

If you think about it, WoW provided (in 2007) close to a 10x return on the initial investment. It may be the outlier, but figures like that are driving the development of the entire MMO genre.

I love lamp.

Excellent.