FA+
Shop
Some numbers about World of Warcraft....
14 years ago
A comment by 
furrywolf999 prompted this on Facebook :P Copypasta for the win!
...
World of Warcraft went live late 2004 (7 years... I'll use that number soon).
According to Blizzard, more than 12 million people to date have bought WoW and it's expansions. By the time of it's initial worldwide release, it had more than 2.5 million players.
9.5 million people over 7 years. The growth averages out to 1.35 million people a year (again, I'll use that number later).
I'm estimating, for the sake of argument, that minimally half of those people bought them all new ($50), and the other half bought them all at half price ($25). I personally think that's a pretty conservative estimate, but that's beside the point.
In other words, with my estimates, the initial sale was $93.75 million, and the profit from each year after another $50.625M for 6 years. The total comes to about $397.5M in sales from one piece of the now 4-part game.
Of course, not all of those 12M people are active players. Let's say about 9M are still active (active defined as having accounts paid for, not necessarily people who log on every day) and have all 4 parts. Each expansion lost 1M people or so. That's a fairly liberal estimate to go with the conservative one I made earlier. Again, most of this is estimation for the sake of argument.
So the sales of the first expansion would have come out to be about $364.375M, the second expansion would have been $331.25M, and the last expansion would be $298.125M. The total by those numbers is $1.39125 billion. BILLION. IN SALES OF THE GAME ALONE.
Now, monthly game subscriptions... (Don't worry, this section is shorter).
The cheapest you can get WoW is $13 a month if you buy 6 months at a time, or $156 a year. We need to quickly recalculate the growth to account for the fewer than 12M active players before we work out the profit from subscriptions.
6.5M active players over 7 years is about 930K a year. See? Quick and easy. Assuming the minimum amount, of course (with bonus free months and people paying different amounts, it's just easier to assume the minimum amount, and it grants Blizzard some leniency).
The first year, the game would have taken in $390M and another $145.08M extra over and above the first year's value each year after that. That comes out to be approximately $5.77668 billion.
And now the total.
Adding subscriptions to the sales, that's $7,167,930,000 over the course of WoW's life.
.... I'm pretty sure that qualifies as greedy. I can pretty much guarantee that it doesn't cost Blizzard even half that much in upkeep and employee salary to keep their servers running.
furrywolf999 prompted this on Facebook :P Copypasta for the win!...
World of Warcraft went live late 2004 (7 years... I'll use that number soon).
According to Blizzard, more than 12 million people to date have bought WoW and it's expansions. By the time of it's initial worldwide release, it had more than 2.5 million players.
9.5 million people over 7 years. The growth averages out to 1.35 million people a year (again, I'll use that number later).
I'm estimating, for the sake of argument, that minimally half of those people bought them all new ($50), and the other half bought them all at half price ($25). I personally think that's a pretty conservative estimate, but that's beside the point.
In other words, with my estimates, the initial sale was $93.75 million, and the profit from each year after another $50.625M for 6 years. The total comes to about $397.5M in sales from one piece of the now 4-part game.
Of course, not all of those 12M people are active players. Let's say about 9M are still active (active defined as having accounts paid for, not necessarily people who log on every day) and have all 4 parts. Each expansion lost 1M people or so. That's a fairly liberal estimate to go with the conservative one I made earlier. Again, most of this is estimation for the sake of argument.
So the sales of the first expansion would have come out to be about $364.375M, the second expansion would have been $331.25M, and the last expansion would be $298.125M. The total by those numbers is $1.39125 billion. BILLION. IN SALES OF THE GAME ALONE.
Now, monthly game subscriptions... (Don't worry, this section is shorter).
The cheapest you can get WoW is $13 a month if you buy 6 months at a time, or $156 a year. We need to quickly recalculate the growth to account for the fewer than 12M active players before we work out the profit from subscriptions.
6.5M active players over 7 years is about 930K a year. See? Quick and easy. Assuming the minimum amount, of course (with bonus free months and people paying different amounts, it's just easier to assume the minimum amount, and it grants Blizzard some leniency).
The first year, the game would have taken in $390M and another $145.08M extra over and above the first year's value each year after that. That comes out to be approximately $5.77668 billion.
And now the total.
Adding subscriptions to the sales, that's $7,167,930,000 over the course of WoW's life.
.... I'm pretty sure that qualifies as greedy. I can pretty much guarantee that it doesn't cost Blizzard even half that much in upkeep and employee salary to keep their servers running.
