Originally posted by Ashamn
Imagine this way, GuildWars is sell at 50? and over 1 milion of people all around the world buy the game, thats equal to 50,000,000?. I dont know what do you think but its a huge amout of money and i think that with this money 30 people could feed theyr families for much time. But I know, must of this money doesnt go to the employes, it goes to the company that produces the game but i\'m sure the employes are well (and dont forgot the expansions that are released every 6 months!).
In games like WoW the same thing happen but only with a diference, u pay more 12? per month..
In my opinion the p2p is only justified in games were u can download the game free from internet but to play u need to pay.
Let\'s just take a game like World of Warcraft, which we all know. It\'s made by a company called Blizzard, which we all know. Now, World of Warcraft had a retail price of ?47 here in europe, which means the stores charge ?47 for a copy of WoW. Now, what we all know is that stores always charge much more than the production cost (CD machine slapping the game into a disc and packing it up - factory work... Not development costs). Now, these packs of 4 CD\'s are sent out to European shops in about 1,000,000 copies, that\'s approximately an income of.. Well, let\'s just be nice to Blizzard and say that they make ?50,000,000 like you said. That\'s a nice bit of money, but then again, let\'s take a look at the costs for making WoW.
200 developers - graphic artists, programmers, yadda yadda. Let\'s be generous and say that all these top of the line developers make ?10,000 per month, and we all know WoW took around 4 years to make, that already gives us a development cost of an amazing ?96,000,000 and all Blizzard has made on selling their one million copies is now reduced to... Well. Not much. Now, they also have to set up servers in their newly bought server parks, they have to maintain a group of probably around 50 developers to keep releasing patches for all you greedy people. That gives them even more costs, but this is where the monthly payments come in handy, because 900,000 (one million minus the 100,000 who think the game stinks and won\'t play it after the free month is up) that pay ?10 per month gives Blizzard ?9,000,000 per month to work with. After they pay for servers (~150 clusters at ~?10,000 each = ?1,500,000) and the developers (50 guys getting ?10,000 per month = ?500,000), they only just started making money. But as you can see, it is the monthly payments that make these kind of games profitable, compared to other games. But unlike other games, online games require much more service and it needs to be taken care of constantly... It\'s very, very hard work, and the companies don\'t always make as much money as you think. And again, if the game flops, then uh oh?
Please do remember that these numbers are fictive. They aren\'t the exact numbers that Blizzard gets, but they should be pretty close to the real ones.
