Yeah, but blizzrd is in the driver seat, and activision is like the supportive best "yeah yeah" friend.  Blizzard gets the steady profits, and the damge that WOTLK will do htis year will be epic.  so, when you tack on the release of SCII and Diablo 3...YIKES!

Actually the Activision side of the company is bigger than the Blizzard side and the overall CEO is the old CEO of Activision.

Blizzard CEO reports to him but gets free rein...

Blizzard makes huge heaps of profit but is small compared to Activision...

I would like to see a link stating that.

Just a few month ago Activision CEO estimated Blizzard has spent close to 1 Billion on Wow so far, which I believe and that did not include the operation costs which are actually the biggest part of the monthly costs.

Blizzard has a team of over 500 full time customer support people ( their support is actually bigger than their development team), they run close to 200 server clusters ( each server is actually several machines) and must have HUGE network bills...

Besides the revenue Vivendi game was making before the aquisition or the revenue projection for Activision-Blizzard this year doesn't support Wow making a bigger profit/player.

Vivendi games was hauling 400-500 million of profit the year before the merge.

Vivendi games was mostly Blizzard + Sierra.

I don't belive Sierra was loosing 100 millions of dollar a year so if you keep Sierra neutral you have Blizzard hauling 400-500 million a year which is around 40 million a month.

At the time they had less subscribers ( 9-10 millions) so you get around 4$ of profit per subscriber...

If you look at the estimation for Activision-Blizzard profit this year and compare them to what Activision made the year before the aquisition you get roughly the same kind of number ( little bit lower as Blizzard is spending more and more on SC2 and D3 as their release get closer so those development are absorbing a little of WoW profits)...

LoL at the comment asking if any other company made as much profit....

In 2007 Exxon Mobil made 1287$ of profit per second for a total of 40.6 billion $....

They made as much profit as Blizzard makes in a full year in less than 4 days....

I'm pretty sure he meant gaming company, no one is dumb enough to think Blizzard made more money than any other company.

subscribers do not equal paying customers. subscribers are anyone who has a registered account which can be in any state. Active paying, inactive or banned. They all count as subscribers. If WoW had this continued growth and interest they would not need to include bargains and deals to be an incentive to get more players in.

Did you read at all the definition, whic I posted several posts above, of subscribers that they use? It is not that at all. It is active accounts basically. Banned,cancelled, or expired accounts do not count in the total at all. Given that I predict that the actual copies of the game sold may very well be close to 20 million.

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

My wife played with Tigole in LoS for 6 months :)

100 million profit minus 60 millions expense is 40 millions profit a month, about what I said :)

And whichever poster is still arguing that Blizzard 11 million subscriber includes people not playing the game need to work on reading comprehension....

i was in SoS and teamed with LoS to do the first 2 gamewide avatar of war kill(now THAT was a Sweet fight) and the 2nd game wide AOW kill via a player tanking(FOH beat us by ~15-30 minutes), also grouped with LOS -alot-when everyone was doing the key part farming for emperor on luclin-if not for getting married and having kids i probably would have joined los...

Actually it's close.

The year before the merge Activision made 344 million $ of profit, it really isn't the small company compared to Blizzard the way some posters depicted it in this thread...

Both companies were making similar amount of profit before the merge, but Blizzard was a lot smaller.