post it then. Until you can actually produce that as fact it's pointless to state it. I mean I heard a long time ago that it cost Blizzard $100,000 per month per server to keep things going, and that was during BC, and costs have probably gone up and add that they have added new territories now and as thus new servers. Because really, at this point, my post is as valid as yours.
I've also been told that the majority of the products cost catagory in expenses is about maintaining WoW and it's servers.
example:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/art...a_monthly.html
So, you've probably heard about or played World of Warcraft. If you don't play, did you know it costs 15 dollars each month? 15 dollars to pay for something you already bought. Sure, it's an MMORPG, so they're updating it, they're paying to run servers, they've got pay their employees, etc. There are 10 million subscribers. That means, even if 1/10 are paying every month, they are making 15 million dollars each month. That's 1.8 billion dollars a year. Do they really need that? Let's find out.
They have to pay for their server maintenance, support, and ongoing content creation. Every year, they're spending around 120 million dollars a year. Server maintenance costs around 100 million, and support and content creation cost about 20 million. You've also got to take in to account the amount of money it took them to make the game in the first place. Most PC games today cost around 10 million dollars to make. That really isn't all that much. So, after their anual fees, they're still making a good 1.68 billion dollars a year. There is no reason they still need to charge you 15 dollars a month.
Now, it is the top MMORPG ever created. Why? Because it is one awesome game. The people that play have no problem with paying 15 dollars a month. They obviously wouldn't if they didn't feel it was necessary. There's all sorts of quests to do, different races to be, different classes to bem and a huge map to explore. The game has a very addicting quality about it that helps with its sales. Give it a try, you'll see what I mean.
example #2:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a...s-75000-cores/
It takes a lot of resources to host the world’s largest online games. One of the largest players in this niche is Blizzard, which operates World of Warcraft and the Battle.net gaming service for its Starcraft and Diablo titles. World of Warcraft (WoW) is played by more than 11.5 million users across three continents, requiring both scale and geographic scope.
Blizzard hosts its gaming infrastructure with AT&T, which provides data center space, network monitoring and management. AT&T, which has been supporting Blizzard for nine years, doesn’t provide a lot of details on Blizzard’s infrastructure. But Blizzard’s Allen Brack and Frank Pearce provided some details at the recent Game Developer’s Conference in Austin. Here are some data points:
Blizzard Online Network Services run in 10 data centers around the world, including facilities in Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
Blizzard uses 20,000 systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage to power its gaming operations.
WoW’s infrastructure includes 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
The Blizzard network is managed by a staff of 68 people.
The company’s gaming infrastructure is monitored from a global network operating center (GNOC), which like many NOCs, features televisions tuned to the weather stations to track potential uptime threats across its data center footprint.
So somehow with all that tech, I find it hard to believe that the cost of bandwidth, server maintenence, upgrades, etc... is cheap