World of Warcraft - Circuit City $44.99

[bigwill01]

They had half a mill download the open beta within the first day... I prefer the philosophy of not worrying about CD keys and pirating too much, but charging an appropriate monthly fee. If you want people to keep making good games, you've got to pay the companies for making them. I just wish I had gotten in on the open beta

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: PLaYaHaTeD
I read your article.... and compared to the average anandtech reader, this guy doesn't know sh!t. I am disappointed, and a little offended, that you tried to use this to "inform" us.

Well, this quote makes it seem like he is on the SWG development team or somehow associated with the project:

I don't know when we'll announce the subscription fee for SWG (probably not for a very long time) but I'm sure it'll be reasonable.

Speaking from a personal perspective, from someone that was at one time associated with the dev team of one of the first commercial internet-based 3D MMORPGs, I'd say he's pretty-much spot-on in all of his comments.

I'm not personally a big fan of any of Blizzard's franchises, but I have to say, if they can move the pricing model for MMORPGs up another "notch", then I'm all for it, and more power to them.

The development and ongoing costs for an MMORPG project are rather stunning. When you consider that the initial development costs are often higher than most standalone game releases, and the ongoing bugfix/content-creation/live-administration costs are also rather high (a standalone game has none), then that monthly fee doesn't really go as far as it might seem.

Considering the amount of "entertainment value" that one gets for their monthly fee, it's a darn good deal, compared to such things as going to the movies, purchasing a DVD (how many times can you watch it over and over again - plus, it never changes, unlike a "live" game world), going to the arcade (you can drop $20 in a matter of a few hours there, with an MMORPG you can play all month), etc.

Originally posted by: PLaYaHaTeD
Lets do a little more math. WOW will sell a million copies. That is a million people paying at least 13 dollars a month, or 13 MILLION dollars each month for blizzard. Now, Lets say bliizard pays 50 guys @ $5000/mo to do extra content and fix bugs, 50 @ $5000/mo guys to keep up your network, and $500,000 a month just on servers for WOW.

Guess what, that equals 13 million/mo profits for 1 million/mo of bills. Give that a year and you've made almost 150 million dollars.

That's a little optomistic, but given Blizzard's "following", that could be possible.

The thing that you forget is, the costs of the project, in terms of administration and content-creation (mostly paying salaries for creative and talented people), are mostly fixed. So whether you have 10,000 subscribers or 1,000,000, you still have those $1Mil/mo bills. Uh-oh. Some fixed-infrastructure costs such as bandwidth and server hardware can scale slightly with subscriber count, but those are generally the least of the expenses. Hardware is cheap, good, talented people are not.

Originally posted by: PLaYaHaTeD
You know what the worst part is? My numbers are SAFE. That's right, they dont have 50 freegin monthly content guys, and they dont pay half a million dollars a month for serverst. The profits are outrageous. Now if you'll excuse me i have to go buy some blizzard stock.....are they even traded in the usa?

You have no clue...

PS. If you are complaining that Blizzard is making too much money, then why would you even offer them more, to purchase some of their stock? Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

 

[oogabooga]

To put the money you pay in perspective think of it this way

Cost of two movies = 18.50
Cost of extra value meal at mcdonalds = ~7.00
Cost of a Good Book = 10-50+
Cost of One hour at a Cyber Cafe = 1-5 dollars

cost of unlimited game play in world of warcraft for one month = 12-15,19 dollars
Will i play WoW Enough to justify paying 13 bucks a month for it? you bet. Will they pump out a quality product, that remains to be seen, but i've never been dissapointed by blizzard, and WoW so far has been no exception (open beta). They will have my money come round time to pay.

 

[monkyskunk]

Thanks. I went ahead and got the CE from Buy.Com. I was hoping to find any kind of deal on this and I think this is the best one available at the moment for the Collector's Edition.

 

[Necrolezbeast]

MMORPG's need an online fee to manage the servers; but I think ALL companies, not just blizzard, should lower the price of the actual game. Maybe put the game out for $20, then keep up the $15 a month stuff...but I see no need to charge the same as every other game when you do have to pay an additional monthly fee. I purchased and played L2 for a good 6 months or so, and I plan on purchasing WoW and playing for quite a bit longer, so I have no real problems with the fees or price of the game, just a suggestion. Also, I think that if the game was like $20 and came with a free month, it would give more people a chance to become addicted and spend more time; as a lot of people can't justify both the high price of the game and then the monthly fee....kinda like how the stress/open/closed beta's earned a crap load of customers and lured more people into the game.

 

[JasonK]

Give it 6 Months, price will drop to around 20-30, especially if an expansion comes out. After maybe 2-3 years, the game will be free for download and just require subscription. So if you dont wanna pay now, then wait.

 

[SupaDupaPan]

Originally posted by: PLaYaHaTeD

Originally posted by: SupaDupaPan
I DO find it funny that people complain about monthly fees. If you don't like it, don't play it, so then you don't have to complain. It's just that simple.

http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/busmodels.html

Read that link, it provides more in depth reason to why it's ALRIGHT and not WRONG of companies to charge per month. Guild Wars is like Diablo 2 ... and well ... diablo 2 was free as well but we all know about all the botting, duping, hacks, and cheats people used in that game ... and how long it took for that patch to come out ... 1.10 was it? More than 1 year from when it was promised.

I read your article.... and compared to the average anandtech reader, this guy doesn't know sh!t. I am disappointed, and a little offended, that you tried to use this to "inform" us.

Lets do a little more math. WOW will sell a million copies. That is a million people paying at least 13 dollars a month, or 13 MILLION dollars each month for blizzard. Now, Lets say bliizard pays 50 guys @ $5000/mo to do extra content and fix bugs, 50 @ $5000/mo guys to keep up your network, and $500,000 a month just on servers for WOW.

Guess what, that equals 13 million/mo profits for 1 million/mo of bills. Give that a year and you've made almost 150 million dollars.

You know what the worst part is? My numbers are SAFE. That's right, they dont have 50 freegin monthly content guys, and they dont pay half a million dollars a month for serverst. The profits are outrageous. Now if you'll excuse me i have to go buy some blizzard stock.....are they even traded in the usa?

Offended? Don't pay for it, don't play it. I'm saying that either way they need money to maintain their servers, and like ANY company and EVERY company, they will try to make money, and because there's people who are willing to pay that price every month, they are able to do it. Supply and demand. I just don't understand why people have to complain about subcription fees. If a company is able to do it, why not? You would do it too if you were the head of a multi-million dollar company.

I'm repeating again, my gripe, only is, why would people complain about the price of a game and the subscription fee? If they have a problem with it, simply don't play it and therefore you don't have to pay for it at all.

 

[oogabooga]

playahated i'm not sure your number are right

lets assume this is one of the few succesful games that sells 1 million games +

If each copy makes blizzard 30 dollars (and i'm guessing that is an outrageously high profit margin) thats only 30million dollars (I think the game will sell more than 1mil, but i'm adding numbers to the profit per game to try to balance that)

While yes, it is a good amount of money, Factor in development costs and that 30 million doesn't look as grand.
If blizzard costs are just 500,000 a month for servers (which i'm sure is not right, bnet right now probally costs that much and WoW servers will probally need to match that) and they have 50 guys at 5,000 dollars a month, and they don't have to pay rent on facilities to house servers, or pay people to watch them and maintain them (or if somehow that number is magically included with the 500,000 dollars a month)

What do we end up with if they don't charge the monthly subscription? They'll be losing money every month within a year of the games opening. To develop a game, then to break even, then to start losing money isn't a really smart buisness model.
MMORPG's are the long term investments it seems of a video game company. You invest a lot of money into it, you get a lot of money in intial return, but you gotta keep investing to make sure the game continues to make money. *shrugs* SupaDupaPan got it right, if you don't want to pay, then don't. There are plenty of people who are willing too, and blizzard will be testing just how many there are (willing to pay).

I think the reason they still charge 50 dollars for the game is so they can still have some hopes of breaking even before they start having to pay to update content, and maintain servers (at retail game levels, if they go down in beta they can just say "meh, it's beta, what do you want?", but in retail, it better have a 99+% uptime)

 

[alextn]

I have question. I am buying one cd for my brother and I. But we would like to play on the same server. Is blizzard using their same policy of one cd key per user? I was kinda hoping that I could buy one CD and sign up for 2 accounts. I don't see how it's fair that if I have two people playing... I should be buying two cd's since I have to pay for monthly anyways.

 

[vanionBB]

I have experience with both games and I would suggest WoW over EQ2.

WoW has mail, vocal emotes, seamless zones, very polished product. I had no issues with lag, clipping, etc. The only time you ever go into an instance/zone is when you do a raid or a group area that is closed off to everyone but your group/raid. WoW the destination is the instance.

EQ2 has no mail, no vocal emotes, zoning is a PITA, and you can see joints of texture maps. Even with a good system you cannot turn on everything. Also everything is instanced. The devs at VI got lazy and just copied the same zone over and over instead of building a huge immersive world. EQ2 the journey is the instance.

WoW with everything on looks phenominal. EQ2 with everything on is a choppy buggy piece of crap.

EQ2 was 50 bux when it released, I got it for 39.99 at Frys. The added costs are another killer for me. They charge extra money if you want more than 4 characters. Extra money for website updates of your characters equipment ala magelo. Extra money for extra stuffs. I KNOW they will add a trade cash for plat scheme. Sony is a money grubbing piece of whore crap, another reason to ditch them.

Thats all I got from a week in EQ2 and a month in Open Stress/Beta.

Laters,

Vanion

 

[alextn]

I have question. I am buying one cd for my brother and I. But we would like to play on the same server. Is blizzard using their same policy of one cd key per user? I was kinda hoping that I could buy one CD and sign up for 2 accounts.

ALso I am using an Inspiron 1150 w/ 512 RAM and P4 2.8 CPU. Anyone know if this is good enough?
No clue what my graphics card is though... and i noticed blizzard said a 3d card is required.

 

[JasonK]

1 per account. You need to buy 2 copies. period

 

[JeeMan2002]

I can't wait to get the game....sounds totally better than EQ1, and it sounds like a tossup between EQ2 and WoW. I hear that EQ2 has vocal emotes from NPCs?

 

[alextn]

thanks for helping..
so I guess I will be buying 3 copies... since my other friend wants it too. Sucks.
So can my Inspiron Notebook play this game? I have a shared 64MB video card.
Thanx

 

[KAMAZON]

Originally posted by: SupaDupaPan

Originally posted by: Thoreau
Should be free since you have to pay monthly to play it anyway.

Costs time and money to maintain servers, to buy new hardware to replace stuff, costs money to have people maintain them. Costs money to have programmers and people fix bugs and put out patches. It costs money to balance the classes. It's NOT going to be like Diablo II where a new patch comes out once every 2 years or so, they're going to be fixing it a lot more than that. I don't mind paying the fee at all since I know that that's what the money goes towards. Now if it were a game like D2, I wouldn't pay to play that game Plus it keeps a lot of the kids who don't have credit cards out of the game, and a lot of people who well ... refuse to pay to play a game (those gamers are usually people who play free games, such as CS, SC, WC etc out )

Lets say Vivindi Unversal only gets $20 per game it sells. It has already pre-ordered more than 500,000 but we'll use that as a baseline.

$20 x 500,000: $10,000,000
(Cost to make the game)



Let's say no more people come on, and only 1/2 of the people who bought it, stick to it, and all pay the best rate of $12 per month.

$12 x 250,000: $3,000,000
per month






Give me a break. They only have 40 servers for Gods sake, and bandwith?? You must be kidding me. On this very same forum you can find a link to Verizon offering 15Mb Download and 5Mb upload in the city of Keller Tx. for only $50 a month. We're talking about millions of dollars of pure cash income on a daily basis.

 

[SupaDupaPan]

Originally posted by: KAMAZON

Originally posted by: SupaDupaPan

Originally posted by: Thoreau
Should be free since you have to pay monthly to play it anyway.

Costs time and money to maintain servers, to buy new hardware to replace stuff, costs money to have people maintain them. Costs money to have programmers and people fix bugs and put out patches. It costs money to balance the classes. It's NOT going to be like Diablo II where a new patch comes out once every 2 years or so, they're going to be fixing it a lot more than that. I don't mind paying the fee at all since I know that that's what the money goes towards. Now if it were a game like D2, I wouldn't pay to play that game Plus it keeps a lot of the kids who don't have credit cards out of the game, and a lot of people who well ... refuse to pay to play a game (those gamers are usually people who play free games, such as CS, SC, WC etc out )

Lets say Vivindi Unversal only gets $20 per game it sells. It has already pre-ordered more than 500,000 but we'll use that as a baseline.

$20 x 500,000: $10,000,000
(Cost to make the game)



Let's say no more people come on, and only 1/2 of the people who bought it, stick to it, and all pay the best rate of $12 per month.

$12 x 250,000: $3,000,000
per month






Give me a break. They only have 40 servers for Gods sake, and bandwith?? You must be kidding me. On this very same forum you can find a link to Verizon offering 15Mb Download and 5Mb upload in the city of Keller Tx. for only $50 a month. We're talking about millions of dollars of pure cash income on a daily basis.

I'm going to say this AGAIN since no one seems to be paying attention. They have to pay their employees as well. If you think about it, a programmer, or even an AUDIO INTERGRATOR, makes 50k a year. PER PERSON. So if you figure that on average they're making that much, and think about how many people are working on a game, that's a lot of money. Yes they are STILL making a big profit, but THAT'S why they made the game in the first place, TO MAKE MONEY. That is the end goal in EVERY corporation. If you don't like it, don't play it, therefore you don't have to pay for it.

[edit]

Because they are people willing to pay for it, they're able to get away with it. So everyone's complaining, is NOT going to help, just accept that this is the way it's going to be and just decide to not play it to help with their money making scheme since it bothers you (the people who are complaining and saying stuff about how much money they're making, and how it should be cheaper ... etc etc) so much.

 

[KAMAZON]

Originally posted by: SupaDupaPan

Originally posted by: KAMAZON

Originally posted by: SupaDupaPan

Originally posted by: Thoreau
Should be free since you have to pay monthly to play it anyway.

Costs time and money to maintain servers, to buy new hardware to replace stuff, costs money to have people maintain them. Costs money to have programmers and people fix bugs and put out patches. It costs money to balance the classes. It's NOT going to be like Diablo II where a new patch comes out once every 2 years or so, they're going to be fixing it a lot more than that. I don't mind paying the fee at all since I know that that's what the money goes towards. Now if it were a game like D2, I wouldn't pay to play that game Plus it keeps a lot of the kids who don't have credit cards out of the game, and a lot of people who well ... refuse to pay to play a game (those gamers are usually people who play free games, such as CS, SC, WC etc out )

Lets say Vivindi Unversal only gets $20 per game it sells. It has already pre-ordered more than 500,000 but we'll use that as a baseline.

$20 x 500,000: $10,000,000
(Cost to make the game)



Let's say no more people come on, and only 1/2 of the people who bought it, stick to it, and all pay the best rate of $12 per month.

$12 x 250,000: $3,000,000
per month






Give me a break. They only have 40 servers for Gods sake, and bandwith?? You must be kidding me. On this very same forum you can find a link to Verizon offering 15Mb Download and 5Mb upload in the city of Keller Tx. for only $50 a month. We're talking about millions of dollars of pure cash income on a daily basis.

I'm going to say this AGAIN since no one seems to be paying attention. They have to pay their employees as well. If you think about it, a programmer, or even an AUDIO INTERGRATOR, makes 50k a year. PER PERSON. So if you figure that on average they're making that much, and think about how many people are working on a game, that's a lot of money. Yes they are STILL making a big profit, but THAT'S why they made the game in the first place, TO MAKE MONEY. That is the end goal in EVERY corporation. If you don't like it, don't play it, therefore you don't have to pay for it.

[edit]

Because they are people willing to pay for it, they're able to get away with it. So everyone's complaining, is NOT going to help, just accept that this is the way it's going to be and just decide to not play it to help with their money making scheme since it bothers you (the people who are complaining and saying stuff about how much money they're making, and how it should be cheaper ... etc etc) so much.

My point is still valid. I have debunked any theory of 'having to charge this much to pay for maintenance'. If you include ALL of the maintenance fees and so fourth, you're still not going to come anywhere near as much as this game makes a mnoth.

 

[SupaDupaPan]

So what? What is your point? So they make money is that your point? So what? EVERYONE wants to make money, all companies want to make money, all their employees want them to make money and do well so they're not out of a job.

You think they should get rid of the fees? Once again, they want to make money, end point. They're not going to change it, that's the way it's going to be. Going off of your figures, 36,000,000 a year if they're making 3,000,000 a month from the game. 50k per employee and say there are about 300 employees (because quite honestly, there's a lot of people on 1 team for a game) working on the game would be 15,000,000 a year for all those employees. Then there's server costs, let's say, 1,000,000 a month which would be 12,000,000 a year. So that 1 year they would make a profit of 9,000,000.

I didn't even mention advertising.
Which is crap if you think about how much other companies and corporations are making in profits a year. But like I said, everyone wants to make money. I don't see anything wrong with it, it's not like they're holding a gun to someone's head and saying PAY TO PLAY MY GAME OR ELSE!

 

[EXman]

Originally posted by: alextn
thanks for helping..
so I guess I will be buying 3 copies... since my other friend wants it too. Sucks.
So can my Inspiron Notebook play this game? I have a shared 64MB video card.
Thanx

anything shared is SH!T I doubt it

 

[HemanC]

Deleted

 

[HemanC]

Originally posted by: KevinH

Originally posted by: ReiAyanami
top best selling game, the mere interest earned from the profit sitting in the bank would be enough to provide 3 years of support.

Yeah great idea. Take their profits and use it to finance the support because obviously they're not supposed to make any profit.

If this is true, they probably are still losing money on Diablo, StarCraft, WarCraft because BNet is FREE.

 

[JeeMan2002]

A price is a function of supply and demand. With software, supply is a variable that can be moved up and down easily. But they must have seen the demand out there and determined that with $15/month, they will get the most people for the dollar playing.

Don't blame the company, they are following economic laws. Blame your future fellow WoWers who won't join you in dampening the demand.

 

[jreg]

Originally posted by: PLaYaHaTeD

Originally posted by: SupaDupaPan
I DO find it funny that people complain about monthly fees. If you don't like it, don't play it, so then you don't have to complain. It's just that simple.

http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/busmodels.html

Read that link, it provides more in depth reason to why it's ALRIGHT and not WRONG of companies to charge per month. Guild Wars is like Diablo 2 ... and well ... diablo 2 was free as well but we all know about all the botting, duping, hacks, and cheats people used in that game ... and how long it took for that patch to come out ... 1.10 was it? More than 1 year from when it was promised.

I read your article.... and compared to the average anandtech reader, this guy doesn't know sh!t. I am disappointed, and a little offended, that you tried to use this to "inform" us.

Lets do a little more math. WOW will sell a million copies. That is a million people paying at least 13 dollars a month, or 13 MILLION dollars each month for blizzard. Now, Lets say bliizard pays 50 guys @ $5000/mo to do extra content and fix bugs, 50 @ $5000/mo guys to keep up your network, and $500,000 a month just on servers for WOW.

Guess what, that equals 13 million/mo profits for 1 million/mo of bills. Give that a year and you've made almost 150 million dollars.

You know what the worst part is? My numbers are SAFE. That's right, they dont have 50 freegin monthly content guys, and they dont pay half a million dollars a month for serverst. The profits are outrageous. Now if you'll excuse me i have to go buy some blizzard stock.....are they even traded in the usa?

WoW won't have a million subscribers, or anywhere near that. Also, you should look up who Raph Koster is (the author of the article) before you claim how much he doesn't know.

Anyway, all of this is utterly irrelevant. Blizzard will charge whatever the market deems as fair value. Right now for a MMORPG, that is $12-15 US per month. The cost of upkeep only serves as a baseline for the fee, and above that, they will go as high as they think the market will allow. This is not evil, this is how our economy works. If you think Blizzard charges too much, then don't pay it, that's your say in the issue, and it's actually a pretty powerful vote. Personally? I enjoy the game, and it's worth it to me, so I'll be buying it.

So what if they make money? Good for them. They're a top quality outfit, and making a solid profit means that they can continue to make games, and that's definitely a good thing.

 

[SoldatRU]

Getting back on topic, so far BestBuy is selling it at max retail, basically regular offering price which is disheartening. Buy.com as someone mentioned is cheaper but according to the records, their performance isn't great. Is it possible to pricematch buy.com's price with CircuitCity to get the price dropped?

 

[KevinH]

Originally posted by: oogabooga
playahated i'm not sure your number are right

lets assume this is one of the few succesful games that sells 1 million games +

If each copy makes blizzard 30 dollars (and i'm guessing that is an outrageously high profit margin) thats only 30million dollars (I think the game will sell more than 1mil, but i'm adding numbers to the profit per game to try to balance that)

While yes, it is a good amount of money, Factor in development costs and that 30 million doesn't look as grand.
If blizzard costs are just 500,000 a month for servers (which i'm sure is not right, bnet right now probally costs that much and WoW servers will probally need to match that) and they have 50 guys at 5,000 dollars a month, and they don't have to pay rent on facilities to house servers, or pay people to watch them and maintain them (or if somehow that number is magically included with the 500,000 dollars a month)

What do we end up with if they don't charge the monthly subscription? They'll be losing money every month within a year of the games opening. To develop a game, then to break even, then to start losing money isn't a really smart buisness model.
MMORPG's are the long term investments it seems of a video game company. You invest a lot of money into it, you get a lot of money in intial return, but you gotta keep investing to make sure the game continues to make money. *shrugs* SupaDupaPan got it right, if you don't want to pay, then don't. There are plenty of people who are willing too, and blizzard will be testing just how many there are (willing to pay).

I think the reason they still charge 50 dollars for the game is so they can still have some hopes of breaking even before they start having to pay to update content, and maintain servers (at retail game levels, if they go down in beta they can just say "meh, it's beta, what do you want?", but in retail, it better have a 99+% uptime)

Granted, this is a mmorpg but Blizzard titles since Starcraft have sold several million. They're one of the only non-deer Hunter non-Sims PC titles that sell that many. Half Life 2 won't touch these numbers despite the hype. Several of my best friends are Associate Producers and Producers at Vivendit at theiir office in Marina Del Rey and they concede that the companies future lies with this game. 500K may seem like a ton of subscribers but you fellas are forgetting the fact that Blizzard is a culture in Korea. I could see this breaking a million subscribers in a year with ease.