How Much Money Blizzard is Really Making from 10 Million Subscribers

[Ironwood]

Yeah, Hunters got raped at release.

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

[CharlieMopps]

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?

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.

[Trippy]

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?

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).

[Trippy]

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?

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.

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

[DarkSign]

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. 

[CharlieMopps]

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?

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.

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

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

[Trippy]

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. 

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

[Simond]

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.

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?

[schild]

Name me a better diku-derived MMOG.

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.

[Trippy]

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

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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

No. What? 

[WindupAtheist]

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

[Ratman_tf]

Name me a better diku-derived MMOG.

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.

IT WAS THE SHIP OF DREAMS, YOU HEARTLESS BASTARD!

[DarkSign]

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. 

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

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.

[stu]

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?

[Draegan]

Name me a better diku-derived MMOG.

Diku is synonymous with bad game design anyway these days.

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

[Ratman_tf]

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?

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?  Although Abyss was a real hint at his hippy-nougat center.

[Simond]

Name me a better diku-derived MMOG.

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 disagree with what you said.

[Righ]

I think just 1 OC48 is a couple hundred thousand  a month.

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

[CharlieMopps]

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

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.

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.

[Draegan]

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.

[Murgos]

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.

[Soukyan]

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.

[DraconianOne]

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.

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

[WindupAtheist]

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.

[shiznitz]

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.

[Montague]

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.

[Trippy]

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. 

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

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.

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.

[tasmia]

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

January 30, 2008

World of Warcraft publisher Vivendi Games has announced that its full year sales rose more than 26.6 percent to €1.02 billion ($1.51b) in 2007 on its 10 million strong WoW subscriber base, as its mobile and Sierra division sales fell due to unfavorable currency exchanges.

Blizzard's sales alone rose 58 percent over 2006 to €814 million ($1.20 billion), offsetting the decline in its Sierra Entertainment, Sierra Online and Vivendi Games Mobile businesses, which fell 29 percent to €204 million ($301 million). WoW's subscriber base rose by 2 million over the year.

[lamaros]

Am I the only one who hasn't seen Titanic yet?

You're not alone.

[Signe]

I meant to watch it once but I fell asleep.

[Venkman]

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

[Archimedian]

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.

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 :)

[Ragnoros]

My google-fu is weak. How much did wow cost to make again? Found it. $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.

[Trouble]

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