What It Takes To Keep World of Warcraft Running

[John Funk]

And even after sharing all of those numbers and all of those facts people will continue to find things to complain about. :]

11.5 million subscriptions per month @ £8.99 makes just over 100 million pounds per month

Erroneous math is fallacious.

Like every company reporting numbers on their MMOs, WoW's reported 11.5 million includes canceled/banned accounts. This also includes the thousands that gold sellers make and destroy on a constant basis in order to avoid detection.

So yeah, WoW is undeniably the biggest MMO, but it does not have 11.5 million active (IE: Paying a monthly fee) accounts.

Actually, that figure is active accounts, as far as we know.

 

[Snotnarok]

That's a lot of PCs and servers...that could be doing much more useful things :|+)

 

[toapat]

And even after sharing all of those numbers and all of those facts people will continue to find things to complain about. :]

11.5 million subscriptions per month @ £8.99 makes just over 100 million pounds per month.

The fact that scumbag Koticks getting some of this is enough to complain about before you go into all the rest of it.

Dividing by 4600 people makes roughly a monthly pay of £22,000. Do you really think that's feasible?

you are using the wrong calculations. first on all you have to convert everything to USD as most of the company is american. WoW also has 12.5-13 million subscriptions, not 11.5, that number that was reached in november last year.

Koticks doesnt get that large of a cut of the blizzard pie, after all, the CEO of blizzard can fire him whenever he wants.

 

[Korey Von Doom]

Somehow 70000 spells doesn't seem right, unless they are counting every little effect like boss fights, and every rank, and every race that can be that class then that just doesn't seem right at all to me.

 

[AceDiamond]

I'm pretty sure that Vivendi benefits more on a financial level than Activision in terms of profits from Blizzard.

 

[olee12343]

I do have to say the people that play that game are usually fat and huge nerds

Uh, thanks for your constructive feedback.

OT: All these numbers do seem interesting, especially the number of people actually working on the game. That seems like a lot of work for a game with 11 million subscribers...

 

[cleverlymadeup]

it takes them all that and yet they can't get rid of the gold spammers much like other mmo's can

 

[can't-think]

it takes them all that and yet they can't get rid of the gold spammers much like other mmo's can

The gold sellers would make the most profit off of World Of Warcraft, so there would be a lot more and would be harder to get rid of them.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

I seem to remember WOW players (like me) use the annual power generated by solar energy... every day.

Good, we're playing WOW, we didn't need sunlight anyways

 

[cainx10a]

Think it's worth to start from scratch in WoW? Though that would be at the expense of a quite successful college 'run' so far.

 

[Proteus214]

51 artists handle 1.5 million unique assets in the game

My head asplode.

Juggling a couple dozen assets is hard enough...holy shit.

 

[Jupsto]

people are forgetting the cashcow that is the expansion packs too.

 

[Takoto]

Oh god, I've never even heard of a petabyte... D:

 

[George Palmer]

It takes a lot to develop Warcraft and keep it up and running.

Fortunately for Blizzard a dump truck pulls up to their offices every morning and leaves a humongous pile of cash on their front door step.

 

[Gilgamesh00]

Oh god, I've never even heard of a petabyte... D:

1 000 000 000 000 000 bytes, or 1000 Terrabytes. Yes, that's a lot. Most impressive number on that list, though I admit I'm not into programming and what the artists do.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

1.3 PETAbytes?!?

I am staggered. Is there anything else at all that is even measured in petabytes?

How about YouTube? Now that is another juggernaut!
Google pays one million dollars a day for it's BANDWITH alone.
And it generates almost no income...

 

[Jandau]

Soooo... all that money... all those developers and designers... and Blizz can still barely produce more than a dozen Armor models per expansion, giving reskins of old gear over and over again? Not to mention the recycling of monster models...

There, I nitpicked

 

[The Great JT]

And yet, knowing they need all those people to keep the game running, internet interweb hate machine people will still hate it for existing.

 

[G-Mang]

Not to be too picky, but the fact that they *use* that much storage and maintenance doesn't mean they actually *need* all that storage, as a lot is lost due to inefficiency (I only played WoW very very briefly but the update distribution was atrocious compared to the Guild Wars system I'd grown used to).

 

[LeonLethality]

1.3 PETAbytes?!?

I am staggered. Is there anything else at all that is even measured in petabytes?

the amount of baby heads PETA members eat per day