Where is our money going?

Community General Discussion
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Everything prior to the TL:DR is discussing how I arrived at my estimates. Feel free to just read the TL:DR for the actual discussion.
Like a lot of players in this game, I have a sub. I generally pay per the 6 months, particularly for the first few patches of an expansion, because I’ve felt like the pace of content has traditionally been worth keeping my sub during those times.

We are now faced with the longest initial patch of an expansion in wow’s history and it has highlighted some of the gaping holes in WoW that I think all of us have known about for some time now, but haven’t really had the time to truly reflect upon until now. I don’t need to list them all out here as they are all being discussed at length on (Insert WoW Streamer Name Here)'s Channel.

So my question is, where is our money going? Because we know how underpaid some devs at Blizzard are and it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s being put back into the game.

If we look at the numbers, even if we lowball it and say 2-4 million subscribers right now. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll say this includes subscribers that only play TBCC. Let’s take that number and we’ll find the lowest low and the highest high for this range using the base $14.99 and the discounted $12.99. That comes out to $26-60 million…A MONTH.

Now let’s factor in server maintenance costs. This is a shot in the dark because they have not released this data, but most estimates point to $4 million a month. I will add a generous margin of error and say that server maintenance is closer to $10 million a month with their current server technology.

Then you gotta pay people and this is probably the only money that goes into the development of the game. The average salary of a blizzard employee is $95k a year. but people have bosses that get paid too much so we’ll bump up that average to $100k. Past reports state that Blizzard teams have ~300 individuals per game. I will use this figure even though we know that there have been a number of individuals exiting Blizzard both willfully and unwillfully. So Blizzard pays out (100000/12)*300 = $2.5 million a month to the WoW team. But those pesky bosses and their boss’s bossess probably get a generous bonus for reporting good numbers at board meetings while signing those mass layoff orders so we’ll add in another margin value and just say this is $3 million.

What does that leave us? $26-60 million coming in a month, $10 million going to server maintenance, $3 million going to the Devs and bosses. A lot of you have already been keeping up with the math but let me spell it out anyway.
$26 million - $10 million - $3 million = $13 million
$60 million - $10 million - $3 million = $47 million

TL:DR
Our estimated monthly revenue for WoW is $13-47 million. That is $156-564 million a year.

I know what you’re thinking. What about Kotick? Well, in 2020 Kotick made ~$154 million. Would this dent WoW’s bottom line? Worst case scenario? Yes. However, assuming WoW has been even remotely above the bottom of these estimates There should be a good bit of money to pour back into WoW that is not already being paid to current Devs.

I think we can tell by both the state of the game, the stubbornness of the Lead Devs, and the potential money that is available to be poured back into the game, that something is breaking down.

If our money is not going to be used by putting it directly back into the game, then we need to at least be given the opportunity to have a voice in the content we want to see in the game.

What would prevent the WoW team from having an open discussion or even a massive community think tank on what we think we’d like to see in the game? At the very least we could prevent some of these absurd systems from clogging up the game and consuming so many hours in dev time. Azerite Armor, Corruptions, Conduits, and player power being tied to covenants, would have never been an issue if the devs would have an open discussion about some of these things prior to starting development on them.

The sunken cost fallacy goes both ways. Players with our years of time spent with this game and Devs when you start working on a system that is received poorly in the alpha.

We’re reaching a crossroads. With the lack of content and poorly received implementation of unbalanceable systems, a number of players are already breaking free of their sunken cost bindings and going elsewhere. My hope is that the Devs with leadership roles can do the same and realise that the path to success is going to be working together with us and not by working in spite of us.

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Blizzard got you rent free in your head obsessed about a video game. What are you doing?

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Blizzard has a lot of employees. Underpaid employees, sure. But there’s a lot of salaries being paid. People don’t just get paid when a patch comes out.

But, man, if you’re not paying classic and you’re not having fun, just stop playing. So what? You spent money on a 6 month sub, that doesn’t mean you need to hang around. That’s like $14 a month, man.

Money goes into resources, money goes into expenses, a lot of money just gets stored and unspent. IDK where it all goes, truthfully. I’m not an accountant at Blizzard Entertainment or anything.

But next time don’t do a 6 month sub unless you think the mount is worth it. In the meantime, something tells me you’ve probably wasted more money on bigger regrets. We all have. Go play FFXIV while you wait for 9.1, it’s free until level 60. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Your money is going to Bobby.

How do people not know this by now…

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Our money is going to bottles and models for Bobby

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You guys are talking about potential stock bonuses as if they were cash payouts.

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Just a note about the server cost - they’re using AWS so they don’t need to pay their own labor for maintaining physical infrastructure.

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Wrong. Some international regions use AWS to host game servers. In North America Blizzard provides their own data centers.

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They’re really using AWS? That seems strange for a company like Biz.

I worked at Activision a few years ago and we only used AWS for CoD scoreboards and whatnot. Basically whatever required Elasticsearch or Lambda.

Definitely never used it to host any core gameplay.

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Not in North America.

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Potentially diluting the investment pool to create piles of delicious delicious money.

I’m about to Scrooge McDuck myself just thinking about it.

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Dude your TLDR is just as long as the first part…tf

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You are discussing Kotick’s pay without mentioning that Blizzard is the least productive of the 3 companies under the Acti-Blizz umbrella.

Both Activision and King are killing it into their respective markets…while WoW isn’t even releasing a new game this year and is debatablely even holding on to their market share

Really, Acti-Blizz has very little incentive to invest a lot of money back into WoW.

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Too high, $5-$7 million/month is more than reasonable given the cheapo hardware they’re doubtless running on and the relatively low throughput demands plus the fact they now run in only two locations. Costs for running the network/hosted portion of this game have dropped dramatically since launch when it was an exotic thing to do. That and the proliferation of low latency demanding content and services has dropped costs on those requirements.

You do know that average probably includes the support GMs who make like 50k a year right (which is pretty much poverty wages in Irvine btw)? The devs are likely pulling in 120-160k a year each (not including senior and lead personnel), they get paid less than industry average but not a huge amount less. Leadership probably makes around 200k annual. Sure the server jockeys and other technical personnel probably get only 80-90k a year but the developers are the stars, they get paid close to industry average.

All of this is unsourced, pulled from behind your back type guesstimating though, you don’t provide any sources and my figures are also guesses but I’m not willing to take them into any calculations like you.

Could more money poured into WoW’s development help it? Yes. Markedly so? Probably if it’s enough to add another dozen or more people in the right positions. Is it the thing most ailing WoW? Hard to say. What we can say for certain is the devs have been making bad decisions, they have been allocating resources unwisely, have poor time management and have built problems for themselves that bog them down. Let’s be clear here, the Shadowlands systems are not necessary or essential to WoW, they were a choice and a bad one that has dogged this team and crippled its development ability. With mismanagement like you see on the WoW team no amount of time and money is likely to suffice. You give them more of both, they’ll just find ways to waste both and still cause delays and give the players an inferior product.

There may be a little of this with devs but honestly it’s mostly arrogance. They are incredibly arrogant people who just think themselves the most gifted minds around in game dev. Not all of them but enough and especially likely leadership that once they have a course set they won’t stop even with early alpha feedback that points out glaring flaws not because they’ve sunk a lot in at that point but because of pride and arrogance that they know best and their ideas are the best ideas and if it’s not working its the fault of the players or just needs tweaking because it is in their minds a good idea.

They definitely don’t use AWS in NA, their IPs are AT&T IP ranges and they’ve been with them as a provider since I think day 1. As to who exactly owns the physical DC locations and administers to them I don’t know.

And this is the crux of things. It’s not about absolute dollars profits being high but relative profits and profit margins compared to other parts of the company being low. Execs doubtless see WoW as a dinosaur, a relic of another era, it makes enough to keep it alive but not enough to justify injecting a lot more money into it instead of sucking more out.

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You should look up what this means, because you ain’t doing it right.

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The hell did you just say?

Did you just take a youtube academy finance 101 course or something? Everything you’ve just said is completely wrong on all accounts.

I don’t even know where to start on the correction so I’m not even going to bother.

Source: I’m actually in finance.

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Your money is going towards making WoW a seasonal game for raid loggers.

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Kotick was only mentioned as a joke.

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Great point, this was meant as a loose discussion point with an understood, and probably large, margin of error.

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Look. Those KSM seasonal mounts aren’t going to recolor themselves, you know.

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