there are 10 million people who play WoW and it costs $15 a month, so they get 150 million dollars a month(and that's not counting what they get from the software sales). in the end of the year, that is 1.8 billion dollars. i don't care of the costs of the patches, that has to be the most!!!

Not in order:

World of Warcraft
Wii Fit
Rock Band
Mob Wars
Sins of a Solar Empire

Are some really big ones. It's hard to quantify: Are we talking net revenue, or in terms of investment, too? SOASE cost $1m to make and sold 500,000 copies directly from Stardock, so every dime went to the developer....That's mighty impressive. Mob Wars makes $22k/day as of last year, and has only grown...It's a flash based game.

WoW.

The thing y'all have to consider is that an MMO has to build up userbase. It hasn't been at 10 million since the moment it was released. It probably still is the most profitable, but the argument a lot of you are making isn't valid.

Another heavy hitter is Maple Story. It had 50 million players in Asia, and that was a couple of years ago (very popular in China). It's got a humongous userbase in the States as well. While it doesn't have monthly fees, it makes a ton on micro transactions. I believe it made 220 million the FIRST YEAR after its introduction (a very long time ago), and it's grown exponentially in popularity since then. Also, consider how little it took to create. It's a 2D side scrolling, sprite-based, MMORPG. Most of the cost of maintenance is servers, I'm betting.

I dont think anything is close to WoW in generating profits.

^This. Microtransactions aren't as small as the name suggests.

It couldn't be any of the Rockbands, or Guitar Hero's. This is about profitability. While those do extremely well, they have to pay liscensing for each of those songs, and I'm sure that that is a hefty fee.

WoW has so many employees in the world playing to help, people on phone lines for issues, tons of servers, and I'm sure way more than I can even think of. Surely it makes a huge profit, but not record holding.

I'd go with something like Wii Sports, or Tetris. These are games that have sold insane numbers, and cost practically dirt to make.

tough call WOW or Duke Nukem Forever

wow I never knew maple story was that HUGE!

Yeah, I just found an article talking about how they were making $16 million a month in profits in Asia alone in 2005.  Nexon's success is similar to Nintendo's in that they've got 3 great bridge games between casual and hardcore players (Maple Story, Kart Rider, and Combat Arms), and the games print money like the DS and Wii.