I'm a huge WoW fan, but everybody thinks that just because of a ton of wow subscribers that they are making a ton of money, which isn't exactly true. Blizzard wants you to believe they make a ton of money, because it just gives them more power. In fact at one point, WoW was losing money. If you break down the amount of money on development, WoW has a huge development team, the amount of support personnel for the game which is growing all the time, and the costs to actually run the game around the world vs the actual subscriptions, while in the US and Europe which make up only about 25-35% of the player base pay a flat monthly fee. Most of the rest of the world is on a pay as you go subscription plan.