I did a search, but didn't find any references to a slideshow Vivendi submitted to the SEC. Thought the number crunchers and theorycrafters among you might enjoy some different, hard numbers to look through. Pages 10-18 are on Blizzard/WoW and pages 33 to the end have information on Vivendi's financial predictions which illustrates some expectations of WoW's performance.

Page 8 suggests that WoW cost somewhere north of 50 million euros to make. That is about $64 million US dollars by today's conversion rates.

Page 12 has hard numbers on WoW's subscribers as of Q1 2006 with a breakout by Western markets and Eastern markets. Assuming that Europe takes about half of the "Western" market, North American servers have about 1.8m, maybe 2m?*

Page 14 has numbers on what individuals are charged in various countries and under different plans.

*Before anyone starts splitting hairs on exactly what a customer is, here's a link to one of their press releases that contains their definition of a customer:

I love corporate turds:

"High consumer switching costs - the player has to leave their characters and friends!"

What is interesting to me is Blizzard's subscription base is still growing.

In 1Q06 they had 6.5 mil, in Aug 06 they had 7 mil, with that growth occuring almost two years after initial release. I am sure TBC will increase that number yet again.

The projection of 7.1 billion euros in 2010 for PC online games looks like it may become true, and it is good for companies that are developing new MMOs.

I saw on the retention slide that more in-game events are being rolled out in 6/07, those are interesting, and they want to expand to more markets, like Spanish, Japanese, Thai, Portuguese, and Russian. I am sure the investors liked seeing that (and the big numbers of course).

Their corporate overlords are counting on TBC revenue to hit their numbers. It ships before Christmas, ready or not.

Also, the 50 million euro figure looks like it is for future development. Notice how it is compared to a next gen console, which is future development. Either that or it included the inital purchase of servers and hosting space. It's a lot higher then the other numbers I've seen, usually in the 10-15 million range.

Pg 19 is highly interesting...potential future mmorpg Diablo and Starcraft.

I'd be curious as to how many new games were purchased by longtime WoW players when they announced the ability to transfer players off one account to another of the same register name - and of course, how that fits into those numbers.

50 million euros isn't at all surprising for state of the art game development these days. Considering that WoW had a longer lead time than most games due to the breadth of the game, and the sheer amount of art assets that had to go in at retail. 50 million is supporting a development team of 100-200 people for 3 years, which is a very reasonable sized team for a venture of this size and scope.

The incredible statistic is that they are earning back twice their initial investment in revenues every month. I'm surprised they aren't showing a better profit margin than they are.

They've got to pay for more than just the initial investment - there's maitenance, new server hardware, GM staff, patch development - that's just what's visible to me as an uneducated customer. God only knows what hidden costs they're paying.

South America as a potential market. I really hope they do expand here sometime, although i am very skeptical. I could really take a break from 500+ ms latency. Problem is if they do, i doubt a lot of people are going to move from US servers to SA ones.

It's a little old, but Raph Koster walks through the development and ongoing costs of a MMORPG here. He wrote it back in the day as a SWG forum post in response to a lot of people asking why they'd have to pay a monthly subscription fee for SWG.

Expand with some REAL oceanic server's.

TT, you cry about 500ping.

i cry about Naxxing with 800ping... on a good day...

/cry

Blackrock is predominantly Oceanic.
Proudmoore as well.

Then you have all the actually NAMED Oceanic servers. (3-4? maybe even more)

However, I don't have actual numbers, and yer obviously, that could be the reason why the haven't brought any server's out here.

Another reason why they haven't, might be because no other company has done it before, and so they can't guarantee a long life cycle in the Oceanic market.

Either way it get's me angry playing on such a high ping.

Pulling numbers out of my ass here, but I'd imagine you'd be able to make around 9-10 oceanic servers all up. Make blackrock and proudmoore 2 servers as while they're over populated I imagine that would change with the non-oceanic players gone. Then you have the 5 (I think, ALL the oceanic servers are down for 36 hours weee) oceanic servers that are up currently. Then from my experience and what I've heard from others there tends to be around around 20-30 known oceanic region players on most US servers and some even have enough to make guilds. As to whether that's enough to make it a viable venture to put up the oceanic servers is anybody's guess. Then again those players are obviously willing to play with 400-800 pings so it might not be worth any money to make such a server anyway.

Also, UO has an oceanic server and has for many years. My memory is quite cloudly but I'm pretty sure I had very decent ping to it so it's likely located in the oceanic reagion.

A while ago, when the Oceanic servers were experiencing daily crashing and major downtime, Vivendi made the timely announcement that over 100,000 copies of WOW have been sold in Australia. Infer from that what you will.

http://ausgamers.com/?commentsid=2413857

Australian players petitioned pretty hard to get a locally hosted server, which they received in 2000.

/End derail.

Final Oceanic derail: Even servers in Malaysia or Singapore would be better than what we have currently, and would also be able to service the market in and around those countries.

Igni.... do you even play anymore? Or do you just make lots of forum posts? I haven't seen you on in like, forever, and you've never answered any of my mail.

You mean Starcraft Galaxies?