Tobold's Blog: 50 Million Euro per month

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Friday, July 28, 2006

50 Million Euro per month

According to GameSpot, Vivendi Games, the business division of Vivendi to which all the World of Warcraft money goes, made nearly 300 million Euro ($375 million) of revenue (that's not profit) in the first half of 2006. That is a solid 50 million Euro per month. And not all of that revenue comes from World of Warcraft, or even Blizzard. But it is safe to assume that the majority of the cash is coming from there, as the other "solid performer" quoted in the article was Ice Age 2 : The game, and I don't see that one raking in many millions.

So why we still don't know how much money, and especially profit, World of Warcraft is making, we know it is "less than 50 million Euro per month". I already mentioned that people simply calculating 7 million subscribers times $15 tend to forget that the over 4 million Chinese subscribers pay a lot less than the Americans and Europeans. But Vivendi Games is not only making money from monthly fees, World of Warcraft has been in the top 10 PC games sales charts since it came out nearly every week, so even at the reduced price nowadays the box sales add a good bit to the income.

What always surprises me is how relatively little of that money is invested back into the game. It seems obvious to me that Blizzard could easily sell one expansion set per year, SOE has been doing that for years with much less successful games. WoW's first expansion coming out only 2 years after the release is horribly slow by industry standards. And even the free content isn't added any faster than games like Everquest 2 add content. A lot of the unhappyness of the casual players could be mitigated if Blizzard was adding *both* raid content and casual player content, instead of concentrating on the former. With 50 million Euro per month it should be possible to hire a bunch of programmers and do more.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:10 AM Permanent Link

Comments:

Also, I don't know, how a company can waste so much money into developing a game. We're developing websites in our agency, and we also can't understand, how companys can pay millions for a website (+ infrastructure). We're buildung and administrating high capability websites in a month, and they won't cost more than 10.000 euros.

# posted by

Anonymous : 28/7/06 09:47

Back in the old Warcraft/Starcraft RTS days Blizzard were famous for taking their time with new releases. It was often seen as a strength because they used long beta tests to hone the game to perfection. Perhaps some of that culture has carried over to the MMORPG team.

Thanks for releasing the comments by the way!

# posted by

Anonymous : 28/7/06 11:18

Tobold, are you familiar with the book "The Mythical Man-Month"? The premise is that for a project of sufficient complexity, adding more programmers actually makes the project take longer. Maybe Blizzard is limited in the number of resources it can throw at WoW, in the interest of quality control.

# posted by

changed : 28/7/06 14:28

Maybe Blizzard is limited in the number of resources it can throw at WoW, in the interest of quality control.

For sure. Lets be honest here, a typical SOE expansion did not contain content of the complexity and amount, Blizzard has to deliver. Art department alone is special. SOE´s cut´n´paste method works for them, but it does not work for Blizzard, where every single ingame tree needs its own QA loop, i guess. So for sure in scale and detail, WoW is not comparable to other games. Combine this with the fact, that they needed to hire huge amounts of new people, wich need at least a year inhouse experience, to perform on a level wich is good enough for this kind of game. You know, content designers do not fall of the sky, especially for games with such a dominance and a quality to live up for.

SOE has years of experience in MMORPG production. Blizzard has not, they will be more efficient but this team still needs way more time. And then there is this debt record of the publisher, wich needs to get erased...

# posted by

Anonymous : 28/7/06 15:30

I wonder if the decision to hire more programmers and designers for World of Warcraft rests with Vivendi or Blizzard? I get the feeling Blizzard would love to hire more staff but is being restricted either my the mythical man month problem or Vivendi's greed.

I've heard on the forums that Tigole is planning on future expansions only taking one year to develop.

relmstein.blogspot.com

# posted by

Relmstein : 28/7/06 15:47

Also, let's not forget the goal of a company is to make money. They have 7 million subscribers - I don't think making the game better at the expense of profits is what they need to concentrate on right now. Of course they need to keep the game fresh, but continuous expansions are not necessary at this point.

Also, I think there is an intimidation factor associated with continual expansions that actually discourages people from trying or coming back to the game. I know that EQ reached a point where I just didn't think I could come back - it had changed so much and there was so much to learn that it just seemed exhausting.

Sammy

# posted by

Anonymous : 28/7/06 15:47

The biggest thing I've noticed with WoW is that the majority of the problems they have are with in-house software. The source of a lot of lag issues actually comes from their software, not so much from the hardware (although the hardware is important too).

The problem is, they can't just go out and buy new software, or buy new content to put in a patch, or buy a new expansion. It takes time, lots of time, to develop and code new content. Especially when you consider that at release, less than half of the WoW team was original members of the project.

# posted by

Anonymous : 28/7/06 15:54

SoE's plan for the past 3 years is every 6 months an expansion goes out...OR ELSE! This has taken a toll even on their devs, as you can see them burning out.

I'd love to see WoW's dev team split into two - the "casual/soloer" group, and the raid content. You need something for both groups. The raiders are the ones that give you the free press, so give them some cookies, but you need to give those people who pay the bills some candy too.

# posted by

Anonymous : 28/7/06 17:17

I would sort of like to play EQ2. I don't however want to pay for 2 expansion and 2 mini expansion along with the main game box just to have all the content. My feeling is expansions might help retain existing customers and might bring some old ones back but it does the opposite for bringing in new customers. Old customers that fall behind a few expansions will also be lot less interested in catching up. I feel one of the reasons Blizzard continues to sell so many boxes per month is because they have not done expansions every 6 months.

I might be one of the few active WoW players who is not looking forward to WoW's expansion. I will have to go back to worrying about leveling up to stay up with guildmates. I know my server is going to be overloaded with log in queues.

# posted by

Anonymous : 28/7/06 18:40

Why shouldn't it be possible to develop things in small subtasks? For example having a bunch of programmers develop a dungeon. Sure, you need to make sure that there is a connection to the rest of the game, maybe a few quests, and that the reward level fits, but otherwise the development of the dungeon shouldn't affect the development of the rest of the game much.

Of course there is something like too much added content, but I don't think anybody is thinking that of WoW. Investment in added content is good, because it keeps people playing longer, and it makes them buy expansion sets. So even a business man should be able to see that investing in WoW is a good idea.

# posted by

Tobold : 28/7/06 19:02