[ChuckMcM]

I find these sorts of events fascinating. Blizzard does have quite the money machine with WoW. Even a paltry 10.2M subscribers, assuming the adjusted monthly income per subscriber is $10 that is $102M/month in revenue from that franchise.

The interesting bit is that to make that count they really need a good operational plan with respect to their infrastructure.

I got a peek at their infrastructure early on because the company where I worked (Netapp) was trying to sell them filers for their Oracle instances which were running the game. And the game is essentially a ginormous database being updated constantly based on player actions. What we saw was a very complex (and expensive) infrastructure which was clearly built expediently. I would think that over time they would have been working to refine this to something more manageable (and cost effective).

Ultimately, there is a 'killer' persistent world infrastructure architecture for this sort of traffic. Would be a good research topic for a thesis I suspect.

[malero]

You forgot to include these services: character name changes, character race changes, character transfers, guild transfers, vanity pets and mounts. I'm not proud to say that I have spent money on all of these except the guild transfer service.

[ChuckMcM]

That is true, although as mentioned above the Chinese get their own deal. And Blizzard did get into the 'real gold for virtual goods market' which is quite large. Teasing apart the revenue per subscriber from their reports, talks, and sometimes off hand remarks is very challenging. There is the 'max' rate of $15/month, there are the 'free til level 20' players, there are the 'Yearly Pass' types, and of course there are the pay per hour guys in China and elsewhere in southeast Asia.

So my guesstimate at $10 per was a 'blended' rate. Pessimists seem to put it closer to $7, not sure why though.

[cheald]

It blows my mind that the word "paltry" would be applied to WoW's subscriber base. It dwarfs even its biggest competitors by an order of magnitude!

[jamesaguilar]

He meant it ironically.

[ErikRogneby]

That depends on who you consider their competitors. WoW worldwide is about 50% of the MMORPG market. It will be interesting to see how SWTOR fares in that space. Almost up to 2M subs already,

However if you consider the larger online gaming market I would consider WoW's main competitors the likes of Zynga. Farmville alone has 28.4M monthly active users.

[cheald]

I'm not sure I would consider WoW (a game with a monthly subscription and a 20+ GB client) to be a direct competitor with Farmville (a free-to-play game with a browser-based client). I suspect that they appeal to very different audiences.

[Empedocles99]

You would only be partially correct. See this report we did at Raptr:

http://blog.raptr.com/2011/09/27/zynga-report/

Specifically, ~20% of WOW players also played a Zynga game, and ~30% of XBox players also played a Zynga game.

[DanBC]

About 5 million of those people are in Asia, where they're paying less money.

Also, in China for example, Blizzard licenced WOW to some other company (The9 ?). I'd be interested to know how much money Blizzard gets from WOW china.

Here's a very old (2005) link with some interesting financials.

(http://www.gamingsteve.com/archives/2005/11/with_all_the_ta....)

[emp_]

This is likely why he mentioned $10, the US monthly is $15