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?