An article on playfuls.com speculates how much money Blizzard has left over at the end of the year, based on its recently announced subscription base of 10 million players.
First off, 10 million monthly subscribers at around $15 a pop means $150 million a month income for Blizz, that’s just under $1.8 billion a year. The article’s author estimates that server costs and maintenance comes to around $100 million a year, customer service and content creation probably cost around $20 million a year, so that leaves Blizz with roughly $1.68 billion a year.
Now obviously there are taxes to be taken into account, but still, that’s a whacking profit. From a personal point of view, I find it reassuring to know that the company who run the game I invest so much time and effort in, are financially comfortable, and are very unlikely to pull the plug any time soon. It also means that there will probably be a lot on money spent on WoW and future games by Blizzard, which is certainly good news for gaming fans, whichever way you look at it.
All the money in the world doesn’t make bugs in code disappear and thats part of the reason for the PTR. Microsoft is a perfect example of that. Even then some bugs cannot be fixed before the deadline for the release of the patch and so the ‘lesser’ bugs get put on hold over the larger ones till later patches when they can be addressed.