Pandaren Monk raises $1.1M, WoW TCG, Blue posts

[Ceridith]

1 million in profit? Your thinking skills need more work.

First off; they had to pay the designers who came up with the idea.
Then; they had to pay the modelers who created the models.
The artists who created the skins.
The coders who scripted the animations.
The coders who created the Blizzard store.
The upkeep on servers used by the store.
The bandwidth used by people accessing the store.
The support staff who now have to keep that running along side the rest of their web presence.

There are expenses associated with every single step of the process of doing anything in the corporate world.

You're severely overestimating the overhead for the virtual pets. The individual pets themselves likely took no longer than 200 manhours to produce from conception of idea to completion, considering all involved, and that is likely a gross overestimate. The development of the virtual petstore I would not consider overhead for this specific virtual product as it was not made exclusively for it. So 200 man hours, even at $100 an hour (again, a gross overestimate), is $20,000. So it cost Blizzard $20,000 to create that one non-combat pet.

The upkeep of the servers and bandwidth as well are also negligible. The cost to host a moderately popular online store (say the blizzard pet store) is far less than $1000 a month. Even if you throw in the maintenance cost of hiring people to look after said store, I would highly doubt it would even take more than a couple of employees' full work effort to maintain such a store. And again, this store is not exclusively for the pandaren pet, so the overhead costs are divvied. So, let's assume a $100,000 yearly overhead cost (which again, gross overestimate).

So even if you used the ridiculous overestimate of $120,000 in overhead to create and sell the pet, that's still almost a million dollars in profit. Even if you went as far as to say that it cost half a million dollars to create this one virtual pet, and offset the cost of the hosting fees and development fees of the site, that's still half a million in profit, which again, is still a large profit for an arguably useless virtual pet.

And if you think 100% of all donations go straight to the people being serviced by the charities; you're delusional.

The charities themselves have a huge amount of overhead, simply by the pure fact that they're organizations of people who need to be compensated for their time and effort, and wear-and-tear of equipment and services.

Quick check of the Make-A-Wish webpage shows roughly 76% of the money they take in going towards their charitable activities; are they now 'sleazy' because they don't put 100% into it? Because if they did; they would be out of business within weeks.

I never said they didn't have overhead. Those overhead costs are required to operate, the rest goes to charity. Most of Blizzard's profit on the other hand is either grabbed up by Vivendi, or given out to the big fat multi-million dollar bonuses given out to Acti-Blizzard's execs.. Of the 50% Blizzard kept, likely far less than 20% of that went to expenses. Not bad you don't care about who you're taking money from.

[Arcus4884]

woaaaaaaaaaaaaw... just waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaowwwww
How blind & ignorant (narrow sighted) some people can be...

You guys just can't accept things the way they are.
They are always wrong or they always have to be better...
You need to realize that this is not how it works.
It seems like complaining seems more important to you guys than the huge amount of money that went to MaW.
If it went your way MaW would have gotten NOTHING.
Cause Blizz is not allowed to do that.
And if you come up again with they could have done more than 50%. like all of it.
It's a company / business. They would have never done it.

Never worked in a company before haven't you?
Blizzard is NOT a charity organization.

[Stings]

2m.2$ worth of pandaren monks sold?
2.200.000$ divide by 15$ per monk.

Means over 146667 total pandaren monks sold. o_o Crazy talk.

I only thought it was a few thousands that would be sold..

[Sm0k3d]

1 million in profit? Your thinking skills need more work.

First off; they had to pay the designers who came up with the idea.
Then; they had to pay the modelers who created the models.
The artists who created the skins.
The coders who scripted the animations.
The coders who created the Blizzard store.
The upkeep on servers used by the store.
The bandwidth used by people accessing the store.
The support staff who now have to keep that running along side the rest of their web presence.

There are expenses associated with every single step of the process of doing anything in the corporate world.

And if you think 100% of all donations go straight to the people being serviced by the charities; you're delusional.

The charities themselves have a huge amount of overhead, simply by the pure fact that they're organizations of people who need to be compensated for their time and effort, and wear-and-tear of equipment and services.

Quick check of the Make-A-Wish webpage shows roughly 76% of the money they take in going towards their charitable activities; are they now 'sleazy' because they don't put 100% into it? Because if they did; they would be out of business within weeks.

You still miss the point of charity dude, when ppl do charity they donate their work and manhours to, in this case, children who needs a hand, so when they advertise it as charity, it should mean that they do it from free will and want to donate all money earned from this specific product to the charity in case.

Its not like the ppl who call them greedy want them to donate all the money they earn, they just make so much money from other things, so still sitting on half the money from some sold pixels is just greedy, no mather how you look at it...

[Adrena]

You still miss the point of charity dude, when ppl do charity they donate their work and manhours to, in this case, children who needs a hand, so when they advertise it as charity, it should mean that they do it from free will and want to donate all money earned from this specific product to the charity in case.

Its not like the ppl who call them greedy want them to donate all the money they earn, they just make so much money from other things, so still sitting on half the money from some sold pixels is just greedy, no mather how you look at it...

I would love to live in your world, I really would.

Face facts. It's a capitalist world. Nothing is free no matter what way is cut. No doubt if they did give the profits(all of them) to charity then you would call them on the fact that they are getting free publicity. So they would have to do it completely anon.

What then, Corperations and business no longer run promotions, offer services, or do anything for the good of a charity. Charities go bust, no good causes get done.

Of course they did it with the intention of profit and publicity. It's the nature of the world that we live in. At the same time they did a great service to a very deserving charity. I really couldn't care less if they pocketed 1.1m for themselves because there are far worse company's doing much worse in the name of charity.

[Arthas]

damn.....