The Gamer Lounge

I found THIS ARTICLE to be interesting indeed.  The juicy part of this article is that Blizzard announced that over the last five years it has only cost them $200 million in upkeep.  Now at first glance this looks like a lot, but let’s put things into perspective.  5 years is 60 months.  World of Warcraft currently has something like 10 million subscribers (I think it’s actually about 12 mil now) paying about $15 a month.  (They can pay $1 or $2 less if they pay for multiple months at a time)

So this is about $150 million they are making a month.  150*60=9000.  So they’ve made $9 billion dollars from monthly fees alone.  So in other words, only about 1% goes to upkeep.  Interesting.

Update: Let’s look at something else, shall we?  How many subscribers, paying $15 a month, would they need to break even after five years?  Well, $200 million divided by the 60 months is about $3, 333, 333.33.  Not divide this by $15 (for the monthly fee), and you get 222,222.22 which would round to 222,223 subscribers.  They currently have more than 10 million.  I’d say they did Ok.

Now let’s look at one final thing.  What if they took a method like Guild Wars did and only charged for the main game and expansions.  Well, $50*$10 million gives you $500 million.  Then you can pretty much double that considering the Burning Crusade expansion pack.  Again, looks like they would be Ok.  Hmmm…it does seem like the subscription model isn’t necessary.

Arrh maities! In this episode we talk about pirating, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on the iPod touch/iPhone, Tropic Thunder, Dr. Horrible, Firefly, DVD release dates, and, as always, so much more!  Unfortunately it was cut short because I had a family reunion I had to head off to, and I had run out of hard drive space.  Both at the same time no less!

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It’s episode #10, and, as promised, we were broadcasting live with a chatroom! The cool thing? The people in the chatroom got to listen to the show almost a full day before anyone else. Cool, huh?

But anyway, in this episode we talk about the new Mummy movie, X-Files, Hot Fuzz, Fallout 3, DC Universe Online, Champions Online, Team Fortress 2, a five grand computer, annoying checkpoint saves, and so much more!

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Now make yourselves useful and email us! You can do that here, gamerloungepodcast@gmail.com

In this episode Larry and I talk about Wall-E, Journey to the Center of the Earth, iPhone/iPod applications, and tons of stuff from E3!

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First off, I’ve got to inform you that either though this is in The Gamer Lounge feed, it is not a Gamer Lounge Episode. Instead it’s my review of Free Comic Book Day, the comics I picked up, digital distribution, as well as a few other topics.

The links I promised!

-Read the online Hero by Night comic!

-See the covers as well as the first few pages of every comic book I mention! (Click the click for preview button )

-Wowio free back issue downloads

By the way, the official recording date for The Gamer Lounge has been set for Tuesday nights!

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