What It Takes To Keep World of Warcraft Running
- Thread starter Keane Ng
- Start date
Those numbers are impressive, sure, but you'll NEVER settle the debate about WoW Entitlement Syndrome until you actually reveal the direct costs, in cash amount.
I would think of the 5000 people working on WoW, many of them make much more then the average programmer. There is a corporate hierarchy in those 5000 people, and the people at the top of the pyramid (the big shots, like Greg Street, Tom Chilton, and the other Lead Designers and Developers) probably make much more then 22,000 dollars a year, and they deserve it. The Server Maintenance costs for that sort of setup must be ridiculous, even on a monthly basis.
I would say the Profit Margin for WoW is a lot thinner then most people think..
I would think of the 5000 people working on WoW, many of them make much more then the average programmer. There is a corporate hierarchy in those 5000 people, and the people at the top of the pyramid (the big shots, like Greg Street, Tom Chilton, and the other Lead Designers and Developers) probably make much more then 22,000 dollars a year, and they deserve it. The Server Maintenance costs for that sort of setup must be ridiculous, even on a monthly basis.
I would say the Profit Margin for WoW is a lot thinner then most people think..
wait wait what? 75 thousand CPU Cores? As in Processing cores? D: the fanciest mac book out there only has 8 cores, and thats just 2 quad processors.
i think a petabyte is the highest unit of storage currently possible. Its around a thousand Terabytes. (One terabyte= 1000 gigabytes do the math)Takoto said:
History: According to Kevin Kelly of the New York Times, "the entire [written] works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages" would amount to 50 petabytes of data.coldfrog said:
Computer hardware: Teradata Database 12 has a capacity of 50 petabytes of compressed data.
Telecoms: AT&T has about 16 petabytes of data transferred through their networks each day.
Archives: The Internet Archive contains about 3 petabytes of data, and is growing at the rate of about 100 terabytes per month as of March, 2009.
Internet: Google processes about 20 petabytes of data per day.
Physics: The 4 experiments in the Large Hadron Collider will produce about 15 petabytes of data per year, which will be distributed over the LHC Computing Grid.
Social networks: Facebook has just over 1.5 petabytes of users' photos stored, translating into roughly 10 billion photos.
P2P networks: Isohunt has about 2.4 petabytes of files contained in torrents indexed globally.
Online storage: RapidShare stated in April 2008 that it had 5.4 petabytes of storage for users.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte
It has to make moneyKenjitsuka said:How about YouTube? Now that is another juggernaut!coldfrog said:
Google pays one million dollars a day for it's BANDWITH alone.
And it generates almost no income...
Otherise that company would fall to shit in a matter of hours.
I think you'll find it does, they do it by a 2 month lapse(so you dont catch the 30 free day players in there), so they only count paying for their account and those that have logged onto their account in that amount of time unlike most other MMOs, I cant remember where the PR was for said info, but I assure you it does. Obviously the numbers wont be exact given they round them and you are going to get the occasional quitter in that lapse, but millions or thousands of people generally dont leave in big blocks. Even if wow did count banned inactive accounts you said it yourself it's the biggest, so ask yourself, why would they need to add inactive and banned accounts to that number, they're winning anyway.WhiteTigerShiro said:
Actually this post is kind of deceptive in a lot of ways. The artists, spell creators, etc... are not really involved in keeping the game running. They might be in the WoW division of Blizzard, but honestly they are probably sitting around working on the next expansion pack (like Cataclysm, or whatever comes next after that).
Right now what it takes to keep WoW running is admittedly a ton of computers, the number of which is directly proportional to the player base. Then you've probably got a skeleton crew of maitnence workers to keep that hardware running, and a few code monkeys who are the ones responsible for the actual patches if the "boys upstairs" decide to change something, the changes of course being patched into all of the systems rather than hand-written into each mirror or something.
In general they do not change the artwork or whatever.
Truthfully the only time this kind of a "staff" keeping the game running in any sense could be justified would is during the free expansions for holiday events and the like when they actually create content. An example would be the pilgrim's harvest thing (can't remember the exact name) that they recently added.
This is simply my opinion/observations.
As far as the Q&A team goes, generally speaking if they employ 200+ people who exist to give do nothing answers on forums and such, and then if ever pinned down to give a straight answer respond with such witty retorts when it doesn't happen like "we make games, not promises", that's their money to spend. Truthfully Blizzard's Q&A department seems like one of the most useless things I've ever seen to begin with, it's not like their whining means much to me. Heck, I'd love someone to pass me a check just to sit around and basically annoy fanboys.
Now granted, I'd imagine after these years 200+ people are running out of ways to basically respond to queries while saying nothing (we didn't hire presidential speech writers after all), but truthfully as a long time WoW player my general respect for the blizzard Q&A department is pretty much lacking. Sometimes I've even considered it akin to professionally trolling their own forums. One of the reasons I rarely bother to call the WoW forums anymore, if I have a serious quesiton the odds of getting a meaningful, and accurate answer, that isn't likely to change a few months down the road are minimal.
Now granted, a lot of this is on the company (Q&A giving the answers they are supposed to) but frankly I just can't see this as a strictly nessicary expense for what it does. Blizz's Q&A staff don't seem to result in any lesser degree of frustration than companies who don't even go through the pretensions.
Right now what it takes to keep WoW running is admittedly a ton of computers, the number of which is directly proportional to the player base. Then you've probably got a skeleton crew of maitnence workers to keep that hardware running, and a few code monkeys who are the ones responsible for the actual patches if the "boys upstairs" decide to change something, the changes of course being patched into all of the systems rather than hand-written into each mirror or something.
In general they do not change the artwork or whatever.
Truthfully the only time this kind of a "staff" keeping the game running in any sense could be justified would is during the free expansions for holiday events and the like when they actually create content. An example would be the pilgrim's harvest thing (can't remember the exact name) that they recently added.
This is simply my opinion/observations.
As far as the Q&A team goes, generally speaking if they employ 200+ people who exist to give do nothing answers on forums and such, and then if ever pinned down to give a straight answer respond with such witty retorts when it doesn't happen like "we make games, not promises", that's their money to spend. Truthfully Blizzard's Q&A department seems like one of the most useless things I've ever seen to begin with, it's not like their whining means much to me. Heck, I'd love someone to pass me a check just to sit around and basically annoy fanboys.
Now granted, I'd imagine after these years 200+ people are running out of ways to basically respond to queries while saying nothing (we didn't hire presidential speech writers after all), but truthfully as a long time WoW player my general respect for the blizzard Q&A department is pretty much lacking. Sometimes I've even considered it akin to professionally trolling their own forums. One of the reasons I rarely bother to call the WoW forums anymore, if I have a serious quesiton the odds of getting a meaningful, and accurate answer, that isn't likely to change a few months down the road are minimal.
Now granted, a lot of this is on the company (Q&A giving the answers they are supposed to) but frankly I just can't see this as a strictly nessicary expense for what it does. Blizz's Q&A staff don't seem to result in any lesser degree of frustration than companies who don't even go through the pretensions.
They do add all that, I think it's every rank of every actual spell and ability and every effect that is not already a different spell or melee strike that other monsters use, PLUS the buffs you can get from friendly characters and whatever.KoreyGM said:
"Despite of Youtube's 41% share in video market, it will only accumulate $240 million profit compare to a $711 million operating costs this year, according to Credit Suisse."Altorin said:It has to make moneyKenjitsuka said:How about YouTube? Now that is another juggernaut!coldfrog said:
Google pays one million dollars a day for it's BANDWITH alone.
And it generates almost no income...
Otherise that company would fall to shit in a matter of hours.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20090413/alleged-470-million-youtube-loss-will-be-cleared-week.htm