WoW success news

Vivendi Universal quoted the "exceptional success" of World of Warcraft in explaining why they went from a $242 million loss in 2004 to a $49 million profit in 2005. Unfortunately no number is given of how much exactly from this nearly $300 million difference is World of Warcraft profit.

In other WoW success news, World of Warcraft now has 6 million subscribers, which is insofar surprising that the announcement of 5.5 million subscribers was only 6 weeks ago. That is quite a decent growth rate for a game that is over a year old. Although one has to point out that at about 1 million Americans, 1 million Europeans, and 4 million Asians, the majority of WoW players pays a lot less than $15 per month, so WoW does *not* generate an income of 6 million times 12 times $15 = $1 billion per year. Still, income probably is around half that, and even if the profit is just 20%, it still leaves Vivendi Universal with a cool $100 million profit per year. And that's just the monthly (or hourly) fees, the box sales alone must have easily paid for the $20 million development cost of WoW.

The good news in that is that even after giving a large bundle of cash to the parent company, Blizzard still has money to spare for things like upgrading the hardware, or developing new content. And at least on the hardware side it shows. Everybody has horror stories of lag and waiting queues, but if you are objective, you have to admit that things are improving, and Blizzard visibly spent a lot of money on hardware during the last year. I would *not* want to be the hardware manager at Blizzard, who probably had been told to buy hardware for 500,000 players before the game was launched, and then he found out that this estimate was wrong by one order of magnitude. On the development side, Blizzard is doing less well. Given that selling an expansion set for a successful MMORPG is a no-brainer, you have to ask yourself why it takes Blizzard nearly 2 years to get one out. Well, as 2 years was the usual development time for a Diablo patch, at least they stay true to form.

Blizzard also announced to bring out a Spanish language version of WoW, which is not a bad idea given that there are 400 million people world-wide speaking Spanish.