How many poeple world wide play WoW, how many poeple in America play Wow? How many different servers can you play on? How many poeple on average are on a server? How many poeple on an average server are connected and playing at once?
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/ http://www.blizzard.com/press/050829-wow.shtml 4 million subscribers currently 1.5 million china 1 million north america remaining from europe/asia/others the china servers are seperate from american servers as are the european servers the american servers (mine at least) average about 2-3k people online in the evenings on the alliance side, fewer on the horde side
yeah...i think the only countries that have a solid base of players and do not have their own servers are australia and japan. i have a lot of aussies and japanese peeps in my guild. the ratio of horde to alliance is about 2:1 in favor of alliance on my server, but us horde are a lot more hardcore gamers so tend to be better at the game.
wait a second... that's 52 million dollars.... wait... 52million dollars a month Blizzard brings in from this game? Is my math wrong?
My uncle and I were talking about that today... I seriously think theyre overcharging big time. They could easily run it on $5 a month and earn even more customers and still make tons.
They can choose any server they want because all the American ones are being flooded by chinese. I could select to play on a chinese one, but then my ping would probably double. Why would the chinese want to play on american servers? I think the in game economy is better since its been running for much longer.
They come to american servers to make money. China is home to around 90% of human "botting". Companies pay people to play the game and farm gold to re-sell on ebay or their websites. Its happening ALOT in guild wars at the moment. They farm godly weapons/armor's all day and then sell them "cheap" on american servers for gold, which is then re-sold for real world money. Go join a china server, you can get items for much, much cheaper as far as in game money is concerned.
Yeah. And imagine that the cost of bandwith is now cheaper than it used to be in a dollar/bandwith ratio. And other games used to charge $10 a month. The trend is assbackwards in every sense except a capitalist.
Maybe, maybe not. They've got staff to pay, servers to run, programmers, etc. Sure, they're making a huge bit of change, but if that's what you crazy ass MMORPG players are willing to pay, then that's what they charge. Business, all business.
me and my boss were discussing "costs" of a setup like this last week and he had a few interesting points. Yeah they are making a TON of money each month, but chances are a great deal of that is maintnance and support and right back into the company. When you have to pay 10K or so employees that 52K is used up pretty fast. If say avg base salary was around 50K (when u take into consideration ceo/prog/support i think this is fairly low actually) still only leaves a couple million for server parts, network payments, and storage/building facilities. Monthly bills for electricity, accountants, lawyers, everything just keeps adding up and that ammount of money in no time is eaten up. And then add another round of subscribers, means they have to bring up another server, probobly another 250K to bring up and maintain. So overall initial profit from this game is going to be wayy up there but chances are once the subscribers fall off its going to catch up with them and they will either need to introduce a "expansion" or a new game that you can rollover your subscription into (can you say world of starcraft?). So most any profit they are seeing now is being invested such that it can be used to buy programmers, serverrs, etc for the next game they will be producing. Blizzard is truely a remarkable company in that they can produce games so far apart yet produce them with such quality that it really doesnt matter. The ammount of profit they make from each game lasts them for the years it takes them to produce their next great game.
I've been working on my night elf priest lately, I'm up to lvl 25. My paladin is still at lvl 59, and I am not sure if I'll ever get him to 60 . Edit: I'm on the Azgalor server, you should all switch to it. My character names are 'Gehn' and 'Guirk'. Guirk is in reference to Coach McGuirk on home movies.
60 troll rogue on frostwolf... almost got my full tier 1 epic set, but i've stopped instances to do AB.
