Your argument might make sense given any other MMO with less than 500k subs. WoW has seen over 10 million for about 6 years just as a rough estimate. 15*10 million plus additional revenues from the store, purchased expansion packs, in game services and mop subs? You're probably looking at the very least 200 million dollars in profit. Most games are lucky if they can sell a few hundred thousand copies at 60 dollars a box-- maybe one one-hundredth to at best ten one-hundredths the profit blizzard has made. The bottom line is that Blizzard is so obscenely rich from WoW and has given absolutely nothing back to its community and instead shamelessly panhandles for even more cash flow through its online store. As a business, does it make sense to do this? Well yes. Even if they manage to piss off 90% of their customer base, they have enough money to develop thousands of games, and the 10% remaining is more than enough people to maintain. Should principles count? Yes absolutely they should. Is Blizzard doing the right thing? No. Not as long as people are feeling exploited. Not only that, if Blizz actually did give back, that only instills better confidence in an already over-sized consumer base. Back in the days when Blizzard was legendary quality in terms of a company people were very positive and on their side so to speak. After almost a decade of being used, I sense a lot of players are essentially waiting for what's coming to them. Imo I wish Blizzard would get back to running their PR train and grow the company even more. I want to see more people enjoying their games, and would love to see Blizz take a lead in growing not just the community of their games but also a role in esports, perhaps even getting air time in the US. With the resources they have, there's a lot they could and should already be doing for gaming, rather than reaping the cash from their supporters without a second thought.