Blizzard ($)

[lenardo1]

I actually know a few blizzard employees- played everquest with them -grouped raided etc.

you might have heard of them

Rob Pardo(enoyls )-president of product development
Jeff Kaplan (Tigole)- head producer on wow.


first off 200 server farms? hardly

try ~500- there are over 250 worlds in eu & US each.

their revenue is in excess of 100 million a month- yes

their Expenses are around 60 million a month- IT, salaries, bandwidth etc

and the population is GROWING still- this is the kicker- except for EVE (the small space trading game) no mmo has gone this long without a population DROP.

most mmo's go this route

release- massive sales first month (usually peak subscribers if the mmo is bad)

3 months later- you have the core player base established retaining ~60% of the original purchasers.

1-2 years later-if the game is good, the population PEAKS, then goes for another year or so with the people joining the game and the people leaving the game are about equal proportion, then the game starts declining

wow hasn't done this

wow came out - massive sales- yes,

3 months later- still adding servers

12 months later...still adding servers- albiet alot slower

3 YEARS later...pretty stable player base- BUT the number of subscribers is still rising

my current server- opened with burning crusade, it was a low to medium population server (pve) i chose it for my wife(who plays) to avoid queue's

with the expansion coming to wow next month (lich king) since patch 3.0 my server has not fallen under medium AND has been queued serveral times- for the first time EVER since it opened, the expansion is bringing cancellled subscibers BACK IN DROVES...

i expect that in 2 months we will see another announcment of wow bursting thru 12 million active accounts

for the record i own 3 accounts
mine, my wife's & my son's